World Food Day

  October 16th is World Food Day, a day of action against hunger. This day is an opportunity to come together and put an end to hunger by learning and educating about food, farming and nutrition. Join the global movement to end hunger! For more information on events, themes, or how you can make a different please visit Food […]

Berghahn Journals: New Issues Published in September

      Online First Articles Online first articles are final articles posted ahead of issue publication. The text is fully edited and finalized, but the pagination is subject to change once the issue for which the article is earmarked is complete. At that point, the article’s pagination will be updated, and it will be moved […]

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day

  Monday, October 8th is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States. As a counter-celebration to Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a holiday that celebrates Indigenous peoples across various localities in the United States.   With the hopes of promoting understanding of Indigenous communities around the world, we present a selection of titles below which highlight […]

German Unity Day

Two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 28 November 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a 10-point program calling for the two Germanys to expand their cooperation with the view toward eventual reunification. On 18 May 1990, the two German states signed a treaty agreeing on monetary, economic and social union. On October […]

Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era

by James G. Carrier For those interested in the economy, by which I mean business, government economic policies, people’s work and their material well-being, the past few decades have been interesting times. Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era is the result of trying to make sense of things. Those times began with the Great […]

Tribute to Roy Wagner

  Anthropology mourns one of its greatest practitioners, Roy Wagner, who died on 10 September 2018. To honour Wagner and his intellectually inexhaustible work, we are re-issuing for free access a Special Issue of Social Analysis that was first published in 2002. The eponymous “Reinventing The Invention of Culture”, edited by David Murray and Joel Robbins, sought to […]

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The Book of Stones, a central alchemical text, contained formulae with the power to create living tissue from ordinary matter, supposedly.

(via How to Create a Human Being | JSTOR Daily) The Book of Stones, a central alchemical text, contained formulae with the power to create living tissue from ordinary matter, supposedly. Further reading from Berg ... Continue reading on Tumblr →

New in Paperback

Hierarchy and Value

Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order

Edited by Jason Hickel and Naomi Haynes

Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States...

New in Paperback

Mirrors of Passing

Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time

Edited by Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

“Ambitious and engaging, the essays in this volume demonstrate how diverse conceptions of time, in relation to death, are present across history, geography, and media. Beginning with the first chapter’s enchanting examination of a James Joyce story, and continuing through the various ethnographies, the contributors have provided us with new ways of engaging with some familiar themes.” • Barbara Graham, author of Death, Materiality, and Mediation: An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland

New in Paperback

Different Germans, Many Germanies

New Transatlantic Perspectives

Edited by Konrad H. Jarausch, Harald Wenzel, and Karin Goihl

“Although the book is not intended as a history of modern Germany, advanced students will discover many tantalizing perspectives in what outsiders see as German as well as the German response. With this publication, Berghahn Books remains the strongest source for quality academic publications addressing all aspects of German studies… Highly Recommended.” • Choice

Featured Title

The Revolt of the Provinces

Anti-Gypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary

Kristóf Szombati

“[This book] is an excellent study of the shifting economy, the rise of a far-right political movement, anti-Gypsy racism, and the dominance of a right-wing governing party. It offers a nuanced, innovative and holistic approach to this topic by engaging space, scale, history, racism/race formation, and class… The author’s command of literature and arguments is impressive.” • Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstra University

Featured Title

Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space

Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland

Edited by Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek

“A very welcome and timely contribution… This is a book that manages to be both detailed and insightful in its elaboration of fascinating empirical data whilst also being very strong in its conceptual and methodological contribution.” • Katy Hayward, Queen's University Belfast

Featured Title

An Australian Indigenous Diaspora

Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition

Paul Burke

“This is a remarkable empirical study of the Warlpiri diaspora. It concerns a fascinating and as yet untold story of those ‘exceptional’ Indigenous people from remote communities who successfully make lives in towns and cities… [It] is a delight to read and tremendously engaging.” • Emma Kowal, Deakin University

Featured Series

Series:

Romani Studies

Exploring contemporary debates and developments in Roma-related research and forms of activism, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in these fields, and advocates a necessary renewal of research sites, methods, and epistemologies. The contributors gathered here – whose professional trajectories often lie at the confluence between activism, academia, and policy or development interventions – are exceptionally well placed to reflect on mainstream practices in all these fields, and, from their particular positions, envision a reimagining of these practices.

Stories Make the World

Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary

Stephen Most

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author's decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

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Ritual Retellings

Luangan Healing Performances through Practice

Isabell Herrmans

Belian is an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do — socially, politically, and existentially — for particular people in particular circumstances...

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