Berghahn Books Logo

berghahn New York · Oxford

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Instagram

SIMULATED SHELVES

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Archaeology, Film, and History along with our new-in-paperback titles and new Berghahn journal issues released in October.

Anthropology

DISASTER UPON DISASTER
Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice

Edited by Susanna M. Hoffman and Roberto E. Barrios
Vol. 2, Catastrophes in Context

A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Although a great deal of knowledge has been acquired regarding many aspects of disasters, such as driving factors, risk construction, complexity of resettlement, and importance of peoples’ culture, very little has become protocol and procedure. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field, goes on to detail contingencies, predicaments, old and new plights, and finally advances solutions toward greatly improved outcomes.

Read Introduction

CLAIMING HOMES
Confronting Domicide in Rural China
Charlotte Bruckermann

Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.

Read Introduction

INWARD LOOKING
The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective

Aleksandar G. Marinov
Vol. 2, Romani Studies

At present, Roma are an integral part of Europe, though they face structural and social inequalities and different forms of exclusion and discrimination. Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ through the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. It also seeks to understand the relationships between the Romani groups in Europe, due to their increased travel and convergence, and predict the effects of migration on (new) Romani consciousness. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from three towns in Bulgaria.

Read Introduction

REGIMES OF RESPONSIBILITY IN AFRICA
Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts

Edited by Benjamin Rubbers and Alessandro Jedlowski

Regimes of Responsibility in Africa analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. By doing so, this collection develops a stronger grasp of the specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, the work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, adding to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

Read Introduction

SOMETIME KIN
Layers of Memory, Boundaries of Ethnography

Sandra Wallman

In Sometime Kin, Sandra Wallman paints the portrait of an Alpine settlement – its history, economy and culture, and its unusual resistance to outsiders and modernization. Against this, her journal shows the villagers embracing her four small children and acting as participant observers in the two-way process of research. This project happened more than forty years ago and involved a uniquely large fieldwork family, but its insights have wider significance. The book argues that the intrusion of observation inevitably distorts the ordinary life observed, that the challenges of multi-vocality and “truth” are always with us, and that memory is the bedrock of every ethnographic enterprise.

Read Introduction

Archaeology

EXPERIENCING ARCHAEOLOGY
A Laboratory Manual of Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Minilabs for Introductory Archaeology

Lara Homsey-Messer, Tracy Michaud, Angela Lockard Reed, and Victoria Bobo

Today, many general-education archaeology courses are large, lecture-style class formats that present a challenge to providing students, particularly non-majors, with opportunities to learn experientially. This laboratory-style manual compiles a wide variety of uniquely designed, hands-on classroom activities to acquaint advanced high school and introductory college students to the field of archaeology. Ranging in length from five to thirty minutes, activities created by archaeologists are designed to break up traditional classroom lectures, engage students of all learning styles, and easily integrate into large classes and/or short class periods that do not easily accommodate traditional laboratory work.

Read Introduction
See accompanying Instructor Edition

PLAYING WITH THE PAST
Exploring Values in Heritage Practice

Kate Clark

Heritage is all around us, not just in monuments and museums, but in places that matter, in the countryside and in collections and stories. It touches all of us. How do we decide what to preserve? How do we make the case for heritage when there are so many other priorities?­ Playing with the Past is the first ever action-learning book about heritage. Over eighty creative activities and games encompass the basics of heritage practice, from management and decision-making to community engagement and leadership. Although designed to ‘train the trainers’, the activities in the book are relevant to anyone involved in caring for heritage.

Read Preface

Film

CINEMA OF COLLABORATION
DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe

Mariana Ivanova
Vol. 21, Film Europa

From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that the Cold War created for collaboration, DEFA sought international prestige through various initiatives. These ranged from film exchange in occupied Germany to partnerships with Western producers, and from coproductions with Eastern European studios to strategies for film co-authorship. Uniquely positioned between East and West, DEFA proved a crucial mediator among European cinemas during a period of profound political division.

Read Introduction

History

THE WORLD OF CHILDREN
Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment

Edited by Simone Lässig and Andreas Weiß
Vol. 24, Studies in German History

In an era of rapidly increasing technological advances and international exchange, how did young people come to understand the world beyond their doorsteps? Focusing on Germany through the lens of the history of knowledge, this collection explores various media for children—from textbooks, adventure stories, and other literature to board games, museums, and cultural events—to probe what they aimed to teach young people about different cultures and world regions. These multifaceted contributions from specialists in historical, literary, and cultural studies delve into the ways that children absorbed, combined, and adapted notions of the world.

Read Introduction

Open Access!
GERMANY ON THEIR MINDS
German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988
Anne C. Schenderlein
Vol. 25, Studies in German History

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

Read Full Text

New in Paperback

SEARCHING FOR A BETTER LIFE
Growing Up in the Slums of Bangkok

Sorcha Mahony

“…an engaging but highly readable ethnography of youth in Thailand’s capital… As searching for a better life is currently a dominant concept on the global level, this book is a welcome contribution to scholarly and public debates on inequality and struggles for change.” • Public Anthropologist

Life in Bangkok for young people is marked by profound, interlocking changes and transitions. This book offers an ethnographic account of growing up in the city’s slums, struggling to get by in a rapidly developing and globalizing economy and trying to fulfill one’s dreams. At the same time, it reflects on the issue of agency, exploring its negative potential when exercised by young people living under severe structural constraint. It offers an antidote to neoliberal ideas around personal responsibility, and the assumed potential for individuals to break through structures of constraint in any sustained way.

Read Introduction

NAZISM, THE HOLOCAUST, AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Arab and Turkish Responses

Edited by Francis R. Nicosia and Boğaç A. Ergene
Vol. 7, Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region’s political, cultural, and religious complexities.

Read Introduction

BETWEEN EMPIRE AND CONTINENT
British Foreign Policy before the First World War

Andreas Rose
Translated from the German by Rona Johnston
Foreword by Sir Christopher Clark, author of
Sleepwalkers

Between Empire and Continent takes this reviewer’s understanding of events to an entirely different level and will no doubt become a key text. This is a book that offers much… It is a highly sophisticated piece of writing, and another close read of this fascinating study will no doubt produce many more important insights.” • American Historical Review

Prior to World War I, Britain was at the center of global relations, utilizing tactics of diplomacy as it broke through the old alliances of European states. Historians have regularly interpreted these efforts as a reaction to the aggressive foreign policy of the German Empire. However, as Between Empire and Continent demonstrates, British foreign policy was in fact driven by a nexus of intra-British, continental and imperial motivations. Recreating the often heated public sphere of London at the turn of the twentieth century, this groundbreaking study carefully tracks the alliances, conflicts, and political maneuvering from which British foreign and security policy were born.

Read Introduction

EVIDENCE AND MEANING
A Theory of Historical Studies

Jörn Rüsen
Translated from the German by Diane Kerns and Katie Digan
Vol. 28, Making Sense of History

“The English translation of Jörn Rüsen’s Historik is a major event in the global community of practitioners of the philosophy, methodology, logic or, broadly speaking, theory of history. Now ideas of universal value speak the universal koine…it is hard to find in all of academia a more suitable book for introducing in an orderly manner the metatheoretical results of 150 years of debates on the nature of history.” • Journal of the Philosophy of History

As one of the premier historical thinkers of his generation, Jörn Rüsen has made enormous contributions to the methods and theoretical framework of history as it is practiced today. In Evidence and Meaning, Rüsen surveys the seismic changes that have shaped the historical profession over the last half-century, while offering a clear, economical account of his theory of history. To traditional historiography Rüsen brings theoretical insights from philosophy, narrative theory, cultural studies, and the social sciences, developing an intricate but robust model of “historical thinking” as both a cognitive discipline and a cultural practice—one that is susceptible neither to naïve empiricism nor radical relativism.

Read Introduction

THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Impacts and Outcomes
Edited by Kristina Schulz
Vol. 22, Protest, Culture & Society

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

Read Introduction

CONCEPTUAL HISTORY IN THE EUROPEAN SPACE
Edited by Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier Fernández-Sebastián
Vol. 1, European Conceptual History

“It seems, judging by the arguments, strategies, and agenda presented in this book, that we will see a most welcome new wave of theoretical debate within and about conceptual history, which will continue to bring invaluable debates and previously unthematized phenomena into our attention.” • Contributions to the History of Concepts

The result of extensive collaboration among leading scholars from across Europe, Conceptual History in the European Space represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. It brings together ambitious thematic studies that combine the pioneering methods of historian Reinhart Koselleck with contemporary insights and debates, each one illuminating a key feature of the European conceptual landscape. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides indispensable contextualization for an era of widespread disenchantment with and misunderstanding of the European project.

Read Introduction

Berghahn Journals

Berghahn Open Anthro

Berghahn is excited to introduce Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open pilot launched in partnership with Libraria and Knowledge Unlatched to convert 13 core anthropology journals to open access in 2020!

Interested in supporting the BOA-S2O pilot for 2020? Please recommend one journal or the entire collection to your library!

ANTHROPOLOGY IN ACTION
Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice

Editor: Christine McCourt, City, University of London 
Just a reminder, Anthropology in Action is Open Access through Knowledge Unlatched.
Volume 26, Issue 2

Anthropology of the Middle East is a part of the Berghahn Open Anthro Collection!


ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Editor in Chief: Soheila Shahshahani, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran
Visual Anthropology in the Middle East (Volume 14, Issue 1)

ASPASIA
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History

Senior Editor: Sharon Kowalsky, Texas A&M University-Commerce 
Editor and Book Review Editor: Krassimira Daskalova St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia 
Volume 13 – OPEN ACCESS!

Berghahn is delighted to announce that Aspasia is now Open Access through the Knowledge Unlatched Select initiative.

BOYHOOD STUDIES
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Editor: Michael R.M. Ward, Swansea University
Managing Editor: Diederik F. Janssen, Independent Scholar
Volume 12, Issue 1

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF CONCEPTS
Editors: Jani Marjanen, University of Helsinki; Jan Ifversen, University of Aarhus; Margrit Pernau, Max Planck Institute for Development
Volume 14, Issue 2

CRITICAL SURVEY
Editors: Graham Holderness (University of Hertfordshire) and Bryan Loughrey
Volume 31, Issue 3

GERMAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Editor: Jeffrey J. Anderson, Georgetown University
Volume 37, Issue 2

HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/RÉFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES
Editor: Elizabeth C. Macknight, University of Aberdeen  
Co-Editor: W. Brian Newsome, Elizabethtown College   
Volume 45, Issue 1