Berghahn Open Access Titles

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In addition to offering gold open access options that uphold publication mandates instituted by our authors' funding partners, we also participate in initiatives, such as Knowledge Unlatched, which provide collective funding opportunities for selected titles.

If Open Access status is required for your publication, please contact your Berghahn editor.

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  After the 'Socialist Spring'

  Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR

  Last, G.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

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  After the Pink Tide

  Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America

  Gold, M. & Zagato, A. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

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  Basic and Applied Research

  The Language of Science Policy in the Twentieth Century

  Kaldewey, D. & Schauz, D. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bonn.

  The distinction between basic and applied research was central to twentieth-century science and policymaking, and if this framework has been contested in recent years, it nonetheless remains ubiquitous in both scientific and public discourse. Employing a transnational, diachronic perspective informed by historical semantics, this volume traces the conceptual history of the basic–applied distinction from the nineteenth century to today, taking stock of European developments alongside comparative case studies from the United States and China. It shows how an older dichotomy of pure and applied science was reconceived in response to rapid scientific progress and then further transformed by the geopolitical circumstances of the postwar era.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Bondage

  Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

  Stanziani, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with the support of Knowledge Unlatched.

  For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.

  Subject: History (General)

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  Borders across Healthcare

  Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe

  Sahraoui, N. (ed)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the European Commission Horizon 2020 - ERC Starting Grant N. 638259 EU Border Care [2015-2021].

  Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Mobility Studies Sociology

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  Coming of Age

  Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973

  Kalb, M.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Comrades in Arms

  Military Masculinities in East German Culture

  Smith, T.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Without question, the East German National People’s Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts’ powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers’ lives and the military institution itself.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present

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  Contextualizing Disaster

  Button, G. V. & Schuller, M. (eds)

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

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  Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany

  Wetzell, R. F. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Cyborg Mind

  What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

  MacKellar, C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  With the development of new direct interfaces between the human brain and computer systems, the time has come for an in-depth ethical examination of the way these neuronal interfaces may support an interaction between the mind and cyberspace.

  In so doing, this book does not hesitate to blend disciplines including neurobiology, philosophy, anthropology and politics. It also invites society, as a whole, to seek a path in the use of these interfaces enabling humanity to prosper while avoiding the relevant risks. As such, the volume is the first extensive study in cyberneuroethics, a subject matter which is certain to have a significant impact in the 21st century and beyond.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Deadly Contradictions

  The New American Empire and Global Warring

  Reyna, S. P.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.
   

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Designing Worlds

  National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization

  Fallan, K. & Lees-Maffei, G. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. with the support of the University of Oslo and the University of Hertfordshire.

  From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies

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  Diamonds and War

  State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine

  De Vries, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The mining of diamonds, their trading mechanisms, their financial institutions, and, not least, their cultural expressions as luxury items have engaged the work of historians, economists, social scientists, and international relations experts. Based on previously unexamined historical documents found in archives in Belgium, England, Israel, the Netherlands, and the United States, this book is the first in English to tell the story of the formation of one of the world’s main strongholds of diamond production and trade in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. The history of the diamond-cutting industry, characterized by a long-standing Jewish presence, is discussed as a social history embedded in the international political economy of its times; the genesis of the industry in Palestine is placed on a broad continuum within the geographic and economic dislocations of Dutch, Belgian, and German diamond-cutting centers. In providing a micro-historical and interdisciplinary perspective, the story of the diamond industry in Mandate Palestine proposes a more nuanced picture of the uncritical approach to the strict boundaries of ethnic-based occupational communities. This book unravels the Middle-eastern pattern of state intervention in the empowerment of private capital and recasts this craft culture’s inseparability from international politics during a period of war and transformation of empire.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

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  Difficult Folk?

  A Political History of Social Anthropology

  Mills, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with the support of Knowledge Unlatched. 

  How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds.

  Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Driving Modernity

  Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922-1943

  Moraglio, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Mobility Studies Transport Studies

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  Enduring Uncertainty

  Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

  Hasselberg, I.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC

  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.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Entangled Entertainers

  Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

  Hödl, K.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched

  Viennese popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century was the product of the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike. While these two communities interacted in a variety of ways to their mutual benefit, Jewish culture was also inevitably shaped by the city’s persistent bouts of antisemitism. This fascinating study explores how Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios reacted to prejudice, showing how they articulated identity through performative engagement rather than anchoring it in origin and descent. In this way, they attempted to transcend a racialized identity even as they indelibly inscribed their Jewish existence into the cultural history of the era.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

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  Ethnographies of Power

  A Political Anthropology of Energy

  Loloum, T., Abram, S., & Ortar, N. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

  Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

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  Europeanization in Sweden

  Opportunities and Challenges for Civil Society Organizations

  Meeuwisse, A. & Scaramuzzino, R. (eds)

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Lund.

  Notwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the impending departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. Europeanization in Sweden assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent’s wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the “Swedish model” can guide European integration.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Footprints in Paradise

  Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

  Murray, A. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General)

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  A Foreign Affair

  Billy Wilder's American Films

  Gemünden, G.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

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  From Clans to Co-ops

  Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily

  Rakopoulos, T.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Food & Nutrition

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  From Self-fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest

  Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present

  Mazierska, E.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DušanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

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  Germany On Their Minds

  German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988

  Schenderlein, A. C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  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.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present

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  Girlhood and the Politics of Place

  Mitchell, C. & Rentschler, C. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from 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.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

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  Going to Pentecost

  An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

  Eriksen, A. Blanes, R. L., MacCarthy, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

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  Identity Politics and the New Genetics

  Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging

  Schramm, K., Skinner, D., & Rottenburg, R. (eds)

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Impotent Warriors

  Perspectives on Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity

  Kilshaw, S.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

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  Judging 'Privileged' Jews

  Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the 'Grey Zone'

  Brown, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

  Subjects: Genocide History History (General) Jewish Studies

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  Lessons in Perception

  The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist

  Taberham, P.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Sociology

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  Making Bodies Kosher

  The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

  Kasstan, B.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Wellcome Trust.

  For Haredi Jews, reproduction is entangled with issues of health, bodily governance and identity. This is an analysis of the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services using theoretical perspectives in political philosophy. It is the first archival and ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in the UK and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and Jewish studies. It will allow readers to understand how reproductive care issues affect this growing minority population.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology of Religion

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  Optimizing the German Workforce

  Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle

  Meskill, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country’s human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author’s account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry’s evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany’s domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.

  Subject: History (General)

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  Parenthood between Generations

  Transforming Reproductive Cultures

  Pooley, S. & Qureshi, K. (eds)

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Recent literature has identified modern “parenting” as an expert-led practice—one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make—and break—relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Patrons of Women

  Literacy Projects and Gender Development in Rural Nepal

  Hertzog, E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

  Subject: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

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  Peripheries at the Centre

  Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe

  Venken, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg.

  Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies

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  Post-Ottoman Coexistence

  Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict

  Bryant, R. (ed)

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  In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the “peaceful coexistence” of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Contributors discuss both historical and contemporary practices of coexistence within the context of ethno-national conflict and its aftermath.
   

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

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  Postcoloniality

  The French Dimension

  Majumdar, M. A.

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  “Postcolonial theory” has become one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which have become rather sterile and are characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. Gradually, a gulf has emerged between Anglophone and Francophone thinking in this area. The author investigates the causes for the apparent stagnation that has overtaken much of the current debate and explores the particular characteristics of French global strategy and cultural policy, as well as the divergent responses to current debates on globalization. Outlining in particular the contribution of thinkers such as Césaire, Senghor, Memmi, Sartre and Fanon to the worldwide development of anti-imperialist ideas, she offers a critical perspective on the ongoing difficulties of France’s relationship with its colonial and postcolonial Others and suggests new lines of thought that are currently emerging in the Francophone world, which may have the capacity to take these debates.

  Subject: Colonial History

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  Remapping Knowledge

  Intercultural Studies for a Global Age

  Spariosu, Mihai I.

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  The growing interdependence of the local and the global demand innovative approaches to human development. Such approaches, the author argues, ought to be based on the emerging ethics of global intelligence, defined as the ability to understand, respond to, and work toward what will benefit all human beings and will support and enrich all life on this planet. As no national or supranational authority can predefine or predetermine it, global intelligence involves long-term, collective learning processes and can emerge only from continuing intercultural research, dialogue, and cooperation. In this book, the author elaborates the basic principles of a new field of intercultural studies, oriented toward global intelligence. He proposes concrete research and educational programs that would help create intercultural learning environments designed to stimulate sustainable human development throughout the world.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

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  Selling the Economic Miracle

  Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957

  Spicka, M. E.

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  Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

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  Settling for Less

  The Planned Resettlement of Israel's Negev Bedouin

  Dinero, S. C.

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  The resettlement of the Negev Bedouin (Israel) has been wrought with controversy since its inception in the 1960s. Presenting evidence from a two-decade period, the author addresses how the changes that took place over the past sixty to seventy years have served the needs and interests of the State rather than those of Bedouin community at large. While town living fostered improvements in social and economic development, numerous unintended consequences jeopardized the success of this planning initiative. As a result, the Bedouin community endured excessive hardship and rapid change, abandoning its nomadic lifestyle and traditions in response to the economic, political, and social pressure from the State—and received very little in return.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General)

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  A State of Peace in Europe

  West Germany and the CSCE, 1966-1975

  Hakkarainen, P.

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  From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East–West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of détente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European détente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

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  Submerged on the Surface

  The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945

  Lutjens Jr., R. N.

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  Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

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  The Surplus Woman

  Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

  Dollard, C. L.

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  The first German women’s movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

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  The Train Journey

  Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust

  Gigliotti, S.

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  Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

  Subjects: Genocide History Memory Studies Transport Studies

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  Transactions with the World

  Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood

  O'Brien, A.

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  In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the “New Hollywood” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly “grounded” cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Environmental Studies (General)

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  The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective

  Knörr, J. & Kohl, C. (eds)

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  For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange, and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics, and various other social phenomena that have resulted. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) History (General) Colonial History

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  Violent Becomings

  State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

  Bertelsen, B. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Colonial History

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  Weary Warriors

  Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers

  Moss, P. & Prince, M. J.

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  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.

  Subjects: Sociology History (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

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  What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity

  Banton, M.

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  Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish “race” as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to “race,” “racism,” and “ethnicity” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

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  Who’s Cashing In?

  Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness

  Sen, A., Lindquist, J., & Kolling, M. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Copenhagen.

  Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

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  The Witness as Object

  Video Testimony in Memorial Museums

  Jong, S. de

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  In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of "museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance are now integral to the collections and research activities of museums. They have also become important components in narrative and exhibition design strategies. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time the new global phenomenon of the "musealization" of the witness to history, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

  Subjects: Museum Studies History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Memory Studies

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  Writing the Great War

  The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present

  Cornelissen, C. & Weinrich, A. (eds)

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  From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present