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Simulated Shelves: Browse September’s New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published, and soon to be published, September titles from our core subjects of Conflict Studies, Film Studies, Gender Studies, Genocide Studies, History and Religious Studies along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

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FOOD IN ZONES OF CONFLICT
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Paul Collinson and Helen Macbeth
Foreword by Hugo Slim

Volume 8, Anthropology of Food & Nutrition

 

The availability of food is an especially significant issue in zones of conflict because conflict nearly always impinges on the production and the distribution of food, and causes increased competition for food, land and resources Controlling the production of and access to food can also be used as a weapon by protagonists in conflict. The logistics of supply of food to military personnel operating in conflict zones is another important issue. These themes unite this collection, the chapters of which span different geographic areas. This volume will appeal to scholars in a number of different disciplines, including anthropology, nutrition, political science, development studies and international relations, as well as practitioners working in the private and public sectors, who are currently concerned with food-related issues in the field.

 

 

THE EMERGENCE OF FILM CULTURE
Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945
Malte Hagener

Volume 16, Film Europa

 

Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.

 

 

 

WOMEN AND THE CITY, WOMEN IN THE CITY
A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History
Edited by Nazan Maksudyan

 

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

 

 

 

 

JEWISH HISTORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
New Transnational Approaches
Edited by Norman J. W. Goda

Volume 19, Making Sense of History

 

For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.

 

 

 

JEWISH MEDICAL RESISTANCE IN THE HOLOCAUST
Edited by Michael A. Grodin

 

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

 

 

 

 

 

SOUNDS OF MODERN HISTORY
Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe
Edited by Daniel Morat

 

Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.

 

 

 

 

THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION
Economy and Politics in Germany, 1860-1914
Cornelius Torp

 

In the mid nineteenth century a process began that appears, from a present-day perspective, to have been the first wave of economic globalization. Within a few decades global economic integration reached a level that equaled, and in some respects surpassed, that of the present day. This book describes the interpenetration of the German economy with an emerging global economy before the First World War, while also demonstrating the huge challenge posed by globalization to the society and politics of the German Empire. The stakes for both the winners and losers of the intensifying world market played a major role in dividing German society into camps with conflicting socio-economic priorities. As foreign trade policy moved into the center stage of political debates, the German government found it increasingly difficult to pursue a successful policy that avoided harming German exports and consumer interests while also seeking to placate a growing protectionist movement.

 

 

 

A WORLD OF POPULATIONS
Transnational Perspectives on Demography in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Heinrich Hartmann and Corinna R. Unger

 

Demographic study and the idea of a “population” was developed and modified over the course of the twentieth century, mirroring the political, social, and cultural situations and aspirations of different societies. This growing field adapted itself to specific policy concerns and was therefore never apolitical, despite the protestations of practitioners that demography was “natural.” Demographics were transformed into public policies that shaped family planning, population growth, medical practice, and environmental conservation. While covering a variety of regions and time periods, the essays in this book share an interest in the transnational dynamics of emerging demographic discourses and practices. Together, they present a global picture of the history of demographic knowledge.

 

 

 

 

BELONGING IN OCEANIA
Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications
Edited by Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf and Toon van Meijl

Volume 3, Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists

 

Ethnographic case studies explore what it means to “belong” in Oceania, as contributors consider ongoing formations of place, self and community in connection with travelling, internal and international migration. The chapters apply the multi-dimensional concepts of movement, place-making and cultural identifications to explain contemporary life in Oceanic societies. The volume closes by suggesting that constructions of multiple belongings—and, with these, the relevant forms of mobility, place-making and identifications—are being recontextualized and modified by emerging discourses of climate change and sea-level rise.

 

 

 

THE POLYNESIAN ICONOCLASM
Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power
Jeffrey Sissons

Volume 5, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology

 

Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches — one the size of two football fields — were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative “practice history” that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

 

 

 

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New in Paperback: 

DIFFERENTIATING DEVELOPMENT
Beyond an Anthropology of Critique
Edited by Soumhya Venkatesan and Thomas Yarrow

“The themes and styles are refreshingly diverse but all the contributors remind us that what many development scholars and policy-makers downgrade as ‘context’ – history, ways of making meaning, political disputes – are often central to explaining development practice…[This book] not only implies the need for a classificatory rethink, which has been widely recognized for decades, but also gives us the ethnographic material to see how fruitful a more concerted anthropology of development in Europe could be.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

 

 

 

LEARNING FROM THE CHILDREN
Childhood, Culture and Identity in a Changing World
Edited by Jacqueline Waldren and Ignacy-Marek Kaminski

Volume 35, New Directions in Anthropology

“This volume is an important contribution to the literature on children, their life worlds and child-parent interaction in multicultural settings. It is not entirely new that children have agency. The merit of the authors of this volume is that they are starting to address which strategies children may use both to strengthen and utilize this agency, and not the least point at limitations of agency.” · Harald Beyer Broch, University of Oslo

 

 

 

CULTURE IN DARK TIMES
Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile
Jost Hermand
Translated from the German by Victoria W. Hill

“What makes this volume particularly valuable is the book’s comprehensiveness. Its encyclopedic range will enable students to get a real sense of the complexity of the arts under German fascism…n sum this well-written volume by a master in his field will be an extremely useful guide to interwar German culture…Essential.” · Choice

 

 

 

TURKISH GERMAN CINEMA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Sites, Sounds, and Screens
Edited by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel

Volume 13, Film Europa

“[This book] …breaks new ground in film-theoretical approaches to the field and points the way to future avenues of investigation. Particularly refreshing are chapters that take account of how Turkish German film intersects with new forms of spectatorship…in its attention to a variety of media and genres, theoretical frameworks, institutional contexts, and its rare inclusion of perspectives from outside Germany…The volume pushes the boundaries of existing scholarship. More than just a survey, it offers productive models for future studies in the field.” · German Quarterly

 

 

VOYAGE THROUGH THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
A Historian’s Recollections and Reflections
Klemens von Klemperer

“An intriguing view of a historian’s journey through the last century… a pleasure to read. With this memoir, von Klemperer joins the ranks of other historian memoirists such as Peter Gay, Felix Gilbert, and Werner Angress. It is a thoughtful and interesting account of what it was like to be a conservative historian of Germany in the decades after 1945.” · Catherine Epstein, Associate Professor of History, Amherst College

 

 

 

 

HITLER’S PLANS FOR GLOBAL DOMINATION
Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims
Jochen Thies
Translated by Ian Cooke and Mary-Beth Friedrich
Foreword by Volker R. Berghahn

“Jochen Thies’s classic [1967] book on Hitler’s plans for world domination is available for the first time in English translation. Despite the huge and burgeoning literature on the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, there is relatively little written on Hitler’s ultimate goals or about the counterfactual: What would have happened if the Wehrmacht had won the campaign against the Soviet Union in the early fall of 1941?…[This] and other questions regarding Hitler’s plans cannot be answered definitely by Thies’s book, but he has given historians a very sound place to start.” · The Historian

 

SOCIALITY
New Directions
Edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore

Volume 1, WYSE Series in Social Anthropology

“An ambitious book that aims to put both the concept and changing empirical status of sociality at the center of the agenda of anthropology and the social sciences more broadly… The contributions are all at a high level.” · Webb Keane, University of Michigan