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Visit Berghahn Books at The Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG): the heart of geographyWe are delighted to inform you that we will be attending The Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in London, from Wednesday 30 August to Friday 1 September 2017. Please stop by our table to browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices and pick up 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 Geography Titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code RGS17.

Visit our website for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.


 

Below is a preview of some of our newest releases on display:

 

EUROPEAN REGIONS AND BOUNDARIES
A Conceptual History
Edited by Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi

Volume 3, European Conceptual History

 

It is difficult to speak about Europe today without reference to its constitutive regions—supra-national geographical designations such as “Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” and “the Balkans.” Such formulations are so ubiquitous that they are frequently treated as empirical realities rather than a series of shifting, overlapping, and historically constructed concepts. This volume is the first to provide a synthetic account of these concepts and the historical and intellectual contexts in which they emerged. Bringing together prominent international scholars from across multiple disciplines, it systematically and comprehensively explores how such “meso-regions” have been conceptualized throughout modern European history.

Read Introduction

 

New in Paperback

WATERWORLDS
Anthropology in Fluid Environments
Edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup

Volume 3, Ethnography, Theory, Experiment

 

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Read Introduction: Waterworlds at Large

 

FOOTPRINTS IN PARADISE
Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa
Andrea E. Murray

Volume 40, New Directions in Anthropology

 

The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

Read Introduction: “We Want Them to Know Nature

 

HAIRY HIPPIES AND BLOODY BUTCHERS
The Greenpeace Anti-Whaling Campaign in Norway
Juliane Riese

Volume 21, Protest, Culture & Society

 

In the popular imagination, no issue has been more closely linked with the environmental group Greenpeace than whaling. Opposition to commercial whaling has inspired many of the organization’s most dramatic and high-profile “direct actions”—as well as some of its most notable failures. This book provides an inside look at one such instance: Greenpeace’s decades-long campaign against the Norwegian whaling industry. Combining historical narrative with systems-theory analysis, author Juliane Riese shows how the organization’s self-presentation as a David pitted against whale-butchering Goliaths was turned on its head. She recounts how opponents successfully discredited the campaign while Greenpeace struggled with internal disagreements and other organizational challenges, providing valuable lessons for other protest movements.

Read Introduction: Observing Greenpeace through the Systems-theoretic Lens

 

THE GOOD HOLIDAY
Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique
João Afonso Baptista

Volume 30, EASA Series

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, which is host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, The Good Holiday explores the confluence of two powerful industries: tourism and development, and explains when, how and why tourism becomes development and development, tourism. The volume further explores the social and material consequences of this merging, presenting the confluence of tourism and development as a major vehicle for the exercise of ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.

Read Introduction

 

WOLF CONFLICTS
A Sociological Study
Ketil Skogen, Olve Krange, and Helene Figari

NEW SERIES: Volume 1, Interspecies Encounters

 

Wolf populations have recently made a comeback in Northern Europe and North America. These large carnivores can cause predictable conflicts by preying on livestock, and competing with hunters for game. But their arrivals often become deeply embedded in more general societal tensions, which arise alongside processes of social change that put considerable pressure on rural communities and on the rural working class in particular. Based on research and case studies conducted in Norway, Wolf Conflicts discusses various aspects of this complex picture, including conflicts over land use and conservation, and more general patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.

Read Introduction

 

Paperback

WHEN THINGS BECOME PROPERTY
Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia
Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To

Volume 3, Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy

 

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

Read Introduction: Turning things into property

 

UNDERSTANDING CONFLICTS ABOUT WILDLIFE
A Biosocial Approach
Edited by Catherine M. Hill, Amanda D. Webber and Nancy E. C. Priston

Volume 9, Studies of the Biosocial Society

 

Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed and understood as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, a greater depth of analysis reveals that many instances of human-wildlife conflict are often better understood as people-people conflict, wherein there is a clash of values between different human groups. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academics and practitioners from across the globe to develop a holistic view of these interactions. It considers the political and social dimensions of ‘human-wildlife conflicts’ alongside effective methodological approaches, and will be of value to academics, conservationists and policy makers.

Read Introduction: Complex Problems: Using a Biosocial Approach to Understanding Human-Wildlife Interactions

 

THE FOREST PEOPLE WITHOUT A FOREST
Development Paradoxes, Belonging and Participation of the Baka in East Cameroon
Glory M. Lueong

 

Development interventions often generate contradictions around questions of who benefits from development and which communities are targeted for intervention. This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as ‘forest people’, the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as ‘civilize’, assimilate and integrate the Baka into ‘full citizenship’, conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.

Read Introduction

 

SUSTAINING RUSSIA’S ARCTIC CITIES
Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change
Edited by Robert Orttung

NEW SERIES: Volume 2, Studies in the Circumpolar North

 

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. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.

Read Chapter 1. Russia’s Arctic Cities: Recent Evolution and Drivers of Change


Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Series


Interest in environmental anthropology and ethnobiological knowledge has grown steadily in recent years, reflecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. `Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology’ is an international series based at the University of Kent at Canterbury. It is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places or peoples which focus on the interrelationship between society, culture and the environment.

 

 

Volume 22

INDIGENEITY AND THE SACRED
Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas
Edited by Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner

 

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Read Introduction

 

Volume 21 Paperback

TREES, KNOTS, AND OUTRIGGERS
Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring
Frederick H. Damon

 

Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.

Related Link: This book is accompanied by a large online repository of images:
https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/Trees_Knots__Outriggers/

Read Introduction

 

Volume 20 Paperback

BEYOND THE LENS OF CONSERVATION
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Eva Keller

 

“This book will make a great addition to undergraduate courses on Anthropology of the Environment and/or Development or Political Ecology. Keller’s highly readable style, in turn, will satisfy both those new to the subject and scholars already familiar with the topics of conservation practice in Madagascar. It could even become an important resource for those conservation experts who are trying – and (as the study shows) failing – to establish connections between distant places and people.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit.

Read Introduction

 

Volume 19 Paperback

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
An Appraisal from the Gulf Region
Edited by Paul Sillitoe

 

With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century. This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world’s insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates. Sustainable Development has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America — including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners — to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography.

Read Introduction: Sustainable Development in the Gulf: Some Introductory Remarks


BERGHAHN JOURNALS

 

Environment and Society

Environment and Society
Advances in Research

 

Environment and Society publishes critical reviews of the latest research literature on environmental studies, including subjects of theoretical, methodological, substantive, and applied significance.

 

Nature and Culture

Nature and Culture

 

Nature and Culture is a forum to present, discuss, and evaluate critical issues and themes related to the historical and contemporary relationships that societies, civilizations, empires, regions, and nation-states have with nature.

 

 

Transfers

Transfers
Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

 

Transfers is a peer-reviewed journal publishing cutting-edge research on the processes, structures, and consequences of the movement of people, resources, and commodities.

 

Regions and CohesionRegions and Cohesion
Regiones y Cohesión / Régions et Cohésion

 

The journal promotes the comparative examination of the human and environmental impacts of various aspects of regional integration across geographic areas, time periods, and policy arenas.

 

FocaalFocaal
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology

 

The journal strives for the resurrection of an “anthropology at large” that can accommodate issues of the global south, postsocialism, mobility, metropolitan experience, capitalist power, and popular resistance into integrated perspectives.