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Visit Berghahn Books at the SFAA Annual Meeting 2016

We are delighted to inform you that we will be present at The Society for Applied Anthropology 76th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 29 – April 2, 2016. Please stop by our table to browse the latest selection of books at discounted prices & 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 SfAA16. 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.

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

 

REFLECTING ON REFLEXIVITY
The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise
Edited by T. M. S. Evens, Don Handelman and Christopher Roberts

 

Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other—anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume’s Preface, Introduction, and Postscript—it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes—definitively, albeit relatively—the being and becoming of the human.

Read Introduction: Reflexivity and Selfhood

 

 

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

 

 

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak
Afterword by Robert J. Foster

Volume 18, Dislocations

 

The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating and addressing key issues such as the introduction of new forms of management, control, and discipline through ethical and environmental governance or the extent to which corporate responsibility challenges existing patterns of inequality rather than generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

Read Introduction: Towards an Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility

 

 

ENDURING UNCERTAINTY
Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life
Ines Hasselberg

Volume 17, Dislocations

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Series

The value of anthropology to public policy, business and third sector initiatives is increasingly recognized, not least due to significant innovations in the discipline. The books published in this series offer important insight into these developments by examining the expanding role of anthropologists practicing their discipline outside academia as well as exploring the ethnographic, methodological and theoretical contribution of anthropology, within and outside academia, to issues of public concern.

 

Volume 10, Forthcoming!

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

 

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.

 

 

Volume 9

MEDIA, ANTHROPOLOGY AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Edited by Sarah Pink and Simone Abram

 

Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

Read Introduction: Mediating Publics and Anthropology: An Introduction

 

 

Volume 8

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN A BORDERLESS WORLD
Edited by Sam Beck and Carl A. Maida

 

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

Read Introduction

 

 

Volume 7, New in Paperback

UP, DOWN, AND SIDEWAYS
Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power
Edited by Rachael Stryker and Roberto González
Foreword by Laura Nader

 

“The case studies demonstrate that anthropology has much to offer to the study of power and that the study of power has much to offer to our grasp of contemporary society and culture. The selections range over a wide territory of countries and institutional settings, interestingly not dwelling on anthropology’s customary ‘traditional’ societies but rather focusing on modern state and trans-state systems. It has much to offer the discipline and should inspire much more valuable research and theory.” · Anthropology Review Database

The contributors scrutinize modern institutions in a variety of regions—from Russia and Mexico to South Korea and the U.S. Up, Down, and Sideways is an ethnographic examination of such phenomena as debtculture, global financial crises, food insecurity, indigenous land and resource appropriation, the mismanagement of health care, andcorporate surrogacy within family life. With a preface by Laura Nader, this isessential reading for anyone seeking solid theories and concrete methods to inform activist scholarship.

Read Introduction: On Studying Up, Down, and Sideways: What’s at Stake?

 

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New in Paperback

 

Paperback Original

TIME AND THE FIELD
Edited by Steffen Dalsgaard and Morten Nielsen
Afterword by George Marcus

 

In recent years, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to analytical scrutiny in anthropology. Ethnography remains anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized by distances in space. With updates on the discussion of contemporary requirements to ethnographic research practice, Time and the Field rethinks the notion of the field in terms of time rather than space. Such an approach not only implies a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time, but furthermore destabilitizes the relationship between fieldworker and fieldsite, allowing it to emerge as a dynamic and ever-shifting constellation.

Read Introduction: Time and the Field

 

 

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

 

RECONSTRUCTING OBESITY
The Meaning of Measures and the Measure of Meanings
Edited by Megan McCullough and Jessica Hardin
Afterword by Stephen T. McGarvey

Volume 2, Food, Nutrition, and Culture

 

“This is not a book that seeks to discredit health research and leave others to do the work of finding a better way to conduct it; rather, it aims to improve health research by providing useful avenues for critique and suggestions for ways forward. In this sense, it works as a very practical guide for those working in the health professions, whether as researchers or healthcare providers, to better understand “obesity” and “overweight” and, importantly, fat people in social and environmental context… it makes a welcome and necessary intervention into the business of health research, provision, and discourse, as well as its public reception.” · Fat Studies Journal

This volume addresses the lacuna by drawing on ethnographic methods and analytical emic explorations in order to consider the impact of cultural difference, embodiment, and local knowledge on understanding obesity. It is through this reconstruction of how obesity and fatness are studied and understood that a new discussion will be introduced and a new set of analytical explorations about obesity research and the effectiveness of obesity interventions will be established.

 

A POLICY TRAVELOGUE
Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada
Catherine Kingfisher

 

“Kingfisher’s book is a theoretically productive account of how welfare reform policies develop and travel…from the world of policy elites to the daily lives of poor single mothers… An important strength of Kingfisher’s book is the range of data she uses from locations that are less discussed in the literature on policy and especially in the literature on welfare reform.” · PoLAR

Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy—translation and assemblage—Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such, A Policy Travelogue provides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.

Read Introduction:  Tracing policy: translation and assemblage

 

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Berghahn Journals
Anthropology in Action
Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice

 

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. The journal provides a forum for debate and analysis for anthropologists working both inside and outside academia and aims to promote communication amongst practitioners, academics and students of anthropology in order to advance the cross-fertilisation of expertise and ideas.

 

 

 

 

Conflict and Society
Advances in Research

 

Publishing peer-reviewed articles by international scholars, Conflict and Society expands the field of conflict studies by using ethnographic inquiry to establish new fields of research and interdisciplinary collaboration. An opening special section presents general articles devoted to a topic or region followed by a section featuring conceptual debates on key problems in the study of organized violence. Review articles and topical overviews offer navigational assistance across the vast and varied terrain of conflict research, and comprehensive reviews of new books round out each volume. With special attention paid to ongoing debates on the politics and ethics of conflict studies research, including military-academic cooperation, Conflict and Society will be an essential forum for scholars, researchers, and policy makers in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political science, and development studies.

 

 

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. Articles also survey the literature regionally and thematically and reflect the work of anthropologists, geographers, environmental scientists, and human ecologists from all parts of the world in order to internationalize the conversations within environmental anthropology, environmental geography, and other environmentally oriented social sciences. The publication will appeal to academic, research, and policy-making audiences alike.

See Also: EnviroSociety, a multimedia site that provides insights into contemporary socio-ecological issues with posts from top scholars in the social sciences that engage readers interested in current environmental topics.
 

 

Museum Worlds
Advances in Research

 

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological, and topical themes and debates, and to encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer-reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal both challenges and develops the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions. Articles are of exceptional quality and general interest from around the world.

See Also: Museum Worlds: Companion Site, a site that aims to complement the journal by bringing current museum themes, practices, and developments to the forefront of global discussions in the field of Museum Studies.

 

 

Religion and Society
Advances in Research

 

Religion and Society: Advances in Research responds to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in the expanding sub-discipline of the anthropology of religion. In addition, this important, peer-reviewed annual aims to provide a dynamic snapshot of developments in the study of religion as a whole and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives.

Each volume contains a Portrait section that profiles a senior scholar of religion, with invited essays on the scholar’s work by authorities in their respective subfields. In the Articles section, contributions provide overviews of a given topic with critical, “positioned” views of the subject and of relevant research. In the Debate section, scholars of religion reflect on a high-profile issue or event, and the Author Meets Critics section invites discussants to comment on a recently published volume, followed by a response from the author. Other sections cover teaching, news, and—vitally—reviews of new books and ethnographic films.

 

 

Nature and Culture

 

Nature and Culture is a forum for the international community of scholars and practitioners to present, discuss, and evaluate critical issues and themes related to the historical and contemporary relationships that societies, civilizations, empires, regions, nation-states have with Nature. The journal contains a serious interpolation of theory, methodology, criticism, and concrete observation forming the basis of this discussion.
The mission of the journal is to move beyond specialized disciplinary enclaves and mind-sets toward broader syntheses that encompass time, space and structures in understanding the Nature-Culture relationship. The Journal furthermore provides an outlet for the identification of knowledge gaps in our understanding of this relationship.
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Regions and Cohesion

 

Due to the dramatic changes in global affairs related to regional integration, studies can no longer be limited to the analysis of economic competitiveness and political power in global geopolitics. Regions and Cohesion is a needed platform for academics and practitioners alike to disseminate both empirical research and normative analysis of topics related to human and environmental security, social cohesion, and governance. It covers themes, such as the management of strategic resources, environment and society, social risk and marginalization, disasters and policy responses, violence, war and urban security, the quality of democracy, development, public health, immigration, human rights, organized crime, and cross-border human security.