Canada Day is the national day of Canada, a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the British North America Act which united separate colonies into a “kingdom in its own right” within the British Empire named the Dominion of Canada.
As Canada celebrates its important national milestone, Berghahn is delighted to highlight some of our Canadian authors and editors and those currently based in Canada.
GENOCIDE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923
Edited by George N. Shirinian
The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic ones for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of citizens in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide in pursuit of political ends while largely escaping accountability. While this brutal history is most widely known in the case of the Armenian genocide, few appreciate the extent to which the Empire’s Assyrian and Greek subjects suffered and died under similar policies. This comprehensive volume is the first to broadly examine the genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in comparative fashion, analyzing the similarities and differences among them and giving crucial context to present-day calls for recognition.
George N. Shirinian is Executive Director of the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, a division of the Zoryan Institute. His publications include Studies in Comparative Genocide and The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1913–1923.
THE DANCE OF NURTURE
Negotiating Infant Feeding
Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor
Volume 6, Food, Nutrition, and Culture
Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.
FROM VIRTUE TO VICE
Negotiating Anorexia
Richard A. O’ Connor and Penny van Esterik
Volume 4, Food, Nutrition, and Culture
The recovered possess the key to overcoming anorexia. Although individual sufferers do not know how the affliction takes hold, piecing their stories together reveals two accidental afflictions. One is that activity disorders—dieting, exercising, healthy eating—start as virtuous practices, but become addictive obsessions. The other affliction is a developmental disorder, which also starts with the virtuous—those eager for challenge and change. But these overachievers who seek self-improvement get a distorted life instead. Knowing anorexia from inside, the recovered offer two watchwords on helping those who suffer. One is “negotiate,” to encourage compromise, which can aid recovery where coercion fails. The other is “balance,” for the ill to pursue mind-with-body activities to defuse mind-over-body battles.
Penny Van Esterik is a Canadian anthropologist who has trained at University of Toronto and received her PhD from University of Illinois. She has taught nutritional and feminist anthropology at York University, Toronto and has a long history of advocacy work on breastfeeding and child health. Her geographical focus is Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Lao PDR.
XENOCRACY
State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815-1864
Sakis Gekas
Of the many European territorial reconfigurations that followed the wars of the early nineteenth century, the Ionian State remains among the least understood. Xenocracy offers a much-needed account of the region during its half-century as a Protectorate of Great Britain—a period that embodied all of the contradictions of British colonialism. A middle class of merchants, lawyers and state officials embraced and promoted a liberal modernization project. Yet despite the improvements experienced by many Ionians, the deterioration of state finances led to divisions along class lines and presented a significant threat to social stability. As author Sakis Gekas shows, the ordeal engendered dependency upon and ambivalence toward Western Europe, anticipating the “neocolonial” condition with which the Greek nation struggles even today.
Sakis Gekas is an Associate Professor and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in Modern Greek History at York University, Toronto. He has written on the Ionian Islands under British rule, on merchants and ports in the Mediterranean, and the economic history of nineteenth-century Greece.
MIGRATION BY BOAT
Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival
Edited by Lynda Mannik
At a time when thousands of refugees risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean, this multidisciplinary volume could not be more pertinent. It offers various contemporary case studies of boat migrations undertaken by asylum seekers and refugees around the globe and shows that boats not only move people and cultural capital between places, but also fuel cultural fantasies, dreams of adventure and hope, along with fears of invasion and terrorism. The ambiguous nature of memories, media representations and popular culture productions are highlighted throughout in order to address negative stereotypes and conversely, humanize the individuals involved.
Lynda Mannik is a Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at York University. She is the author of Photography, Memory and Refugee Identity: the voyage of the S.S. Walnut, 1948 (UBC Press 2012); Reclaiming Canadian Bodies: Representation and Visual Media (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2015); and Canadian Indian Cowboys: Rodeo, Representation and the RCMP at the Royal Easter Show, 1939 (University of Calgary Press, 2006).
New in Paperback
SILENCE, SCREEN, AND SPECTACLE
Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information
Edited by Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell
Volume 14, Remapping Cultural History
In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now “spectacle” can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time.
Lindsey A. Freeman is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia and a co-editor of The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures from Poe to Punk.
Paperback Original
AMERICA OBSERVED
On an International Anthropology of the United States
Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin
There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Jasmin Habib is Associate Professor teaching in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and the Global Governance Program at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is the editor-in-chief of Anthropologica (the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society) and editor of the Cultural Spaces book series with the University of Toronto Press.
LOBBYING HITLER
Industrial Associations between Democracy and Dictatorship
Matt Bera
From 1933 onward, Nazi Germany undertook massive and unprecedented industrial integration, submitting an entire economic sector to direct state oversight. This innovative study explores how German professionals navigated this complex landscape through the divergent careers of business managers in two of the era’s most important trade organizations. While Jakob Reichert of the iron and steel industry unexpectedly resisted state control and was eventually driven to suicide, Karl Lange of the machine builders’ association achieved security for himself and his industry by submitting to the Nazi regime. Both men’s stories illuminate the options available to industrialists under the Third Reich, as well as the real priorities set by the industries they served.
Matt Bera lives in Toronto and teaches in the History and German Studies Departments at York University, as well as a number of other institutions in the region. He is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies.
THE TOTAL WORK OF ART
Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations
Edited by David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Anthony J. Steinhoff
Volume 12, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association
For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
Anthony J. Steinhoff is Associate Professor of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. A specialist in modern German and French cultural and social history, he is the author of The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870-1914 (Brill, 2008) and the translator of Rita Kuczynski’s Mauerblume: Ein Leben auf der Grenze (Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border; University of Toronto Press, 2015). He is currently writing a cultural history of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and operatic culture in German-speaking Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In Paperback
A POLICY TRAVELOGUE
Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada
Catherine Kingfisher
An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. 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.
Catherine Kingfisher is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She is editor of Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty (2002) and author of Women in the American Welfare Trap (1996). Her research focuses on policy, governance, personhood, gender, and, most recently, happiness and well-being.
In Paperback!
INTELLECTUALS AND (COUNTER-) POLITICS
Essays in Historical Realism
Gavin Smith
Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
Gavin Smith is the author of Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (1989); Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999); and, with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain (2006). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
In Paperback!
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF WATER
Edited by John Richard Wagner
Everywhere in the world communities and nations organize themselves in relation to water. We divert water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to our homes, workplaces, irrigation canals, and hydro-generating stations. We use it for bathing, swimming, recreation, and it functions as a symbol of purity in ritual performances. In order to facilitate and manage our relationship with water, we develop institutions, technologies, and cultural practices entirely devoted to its appropriation and distribution, and through these institutions we construct relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Relying on first-hand ethnographic research, the contributors to this volume examine the social life of water in diverse settings and explore the impacts of commodification, urbanization, and technology on the availability and quality of water supplies. Each case study speaks to a local set of issues, but the overall perspective is global, with representation from all continents.
John R. Wagner is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He conducts research in Canada, the United States and Papua New Guinea and has published several journal articles on water governance in the Okanagan Valley. In 2007 he was lead guest editor ofCustoms, Commons, Property and Ecology, a special edition of Human Organization devoted to an analysis of Pacific Island customary property rights systems. Recent publications include “Water and the Commons Imaginary” in the Public Anthropology Forum of Current Anthropology (2012).
In Paperback!
MATTERS OF TESTIMONY
Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation and After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint, and the co-editor, with Dominic Williams, of Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony.
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.
Claudia Mitchell is a James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She has written extensively in the area of girlhood studies and is the co-founder and editor-in-chief for the award-winning Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Carrie Rentschler is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and Associate Member and former Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University. She is the author ofSecond Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2011).
In Paperback
HUNTERS, PREDATORS AND PREY
Inuit Perceptions of Animals
Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten†
Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered ‘prey par excellence’: the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as ‘inua’ (owner) and ‘tarniq’ (shade) over European concepts such as ‘spirit ‘and ‘soul’, the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.
Frédéric Laugrand is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Université Laval and Director of the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés. He is the author of Mourir et Renaître. La Réception du Christianisme par les Inuit de l’Arctique de l’Est Canadien (PUL, 2002) and co-author with Jarich Oosten of Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformations in the XXth Century (MQUP, 2009), The Ethnographical Recordings of Inuit Oral Traditions by Father Guy. Mary-Rousselière (2010), Between Heaven and Earth. The Recollections of Felix Kupak (2012).
EXTREME HERITAGE MANAGEMENT
The Practices and Policies of Densely Populated Islands
Edited by Godfrey Baldacchino
Foreword by Mark B. Lapping, University of Southern Maine
Published in association with Island Studies Press, Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Conflicting and competing claims over the actual and imagined use of land and seascapes are exacerbated on islands with high population density. The management of culture and heritage is particularly tested in island environments where space is finite and the population struggles to preserve cultural and natural assets in the face of the demands of the construction industry, immigration, high tourism and capital investment. Drawn from extreme island scenarios, the ten case studies in this volume review practices and policies for effective heritage management and offer rich descriptive and analytic material about land-use conflict. In addition, they point to interesting, new directions in which research, public policy and heritage management intersect.
Godfrey Baldacchino is Canada Research Chair (Island Studies) at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada; visiting professor of sociology at the University of Malta; and the Executive Editor of Island Studies Journal.
WEARY WARRIORS
Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers
Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince
As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.
Pamela Moss is a Professor in Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Michael J. Prince is Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
THE FRENCH RIGHT BETWEEN THE WARS
Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism
Edited by Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy
During the interwar years France experienced severe political polarization. At the time many observers, particularly on the left, feared that the French right had embraced fascism, generating a fierce debate that has engaged scholars for decades, but has also obscured critical changes in French society and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of essays shifts the focus away from long-standing controversies in order to examine various elements of the French right, from writers to politicians, social workers to street fighters, in their broader social, cultural, and political contexts.
Samuel Kalman is Associate Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada
Sean Kennedy is Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick, Canada.
YOUNG MEN IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
Edited by Vered Amit and Noel Dyck
Anthropology is particularly well suited to explore the contemporary predicament in the coming of age of young men. Its grounded and comparative empiricism provides the opportunity to move beyond statistics, moral panics, or gender stereotypes in order to explore specific aspects of life course transitions, as well as the similar or divergent barriers or opportunities that young men in different parts of the world face. Yet, effective contextualization and comparison cannot be achieved by looking at male youths in isolation. This volume undertakes to contextualize male youths’ circumstances and to learn about their lives, perspectives, and actions, and in turn illuminates the larger structures and processes that mediate the experiences entailed in becoming young men. The situation of male youths provides an important vantage point from which to consider broader social transformations and continuities. By paying careful attention to these contexts, we achieve a better understanding of the current influences encountered and acted upon by young people.
Vered Amit is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Quebec, Canada
Noel Dyck is Professor of Social Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
THE NEW MEDIA NATION
Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication
Valerie Alia
Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.
Valerie Alia is an award-winning independent scholar, writer, and Professor Emerita, based in Toronto, Canada.
JOURNALS
Focaal
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology
Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 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.”
Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Girlhood Studiesl is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines.
Religion and Society
Advances in Research
Religion and Society 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.