Bøker utgitt av Berghahn Books

In the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.

This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and as specific critical historical conjunctures in which new elites attempt to redefine social reality.

Older adults want to exercise a sense of control over their relationships, structures and surroundings as they navigate the later life course. Through detailed ethnographic case studies, this book examines the dynamic lifeworlds of a hundred and seven community-dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the importance of agency, the frictions between self-perceptions of age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenising category. These insights challenge simple narratives of older persons as social burdens by highlighting the complex roles they fill in family, neighbourhood and communities.

The lives of migrant Muslim women in divided, post-conflict Northern Ireland, both before and after the pandemic, are full of diverse stories and experiences of belonging. This book explores how women strive to belong and create a home despite pervasive hatred, sexism and racism. Under these circumstances, women employ various strategies to connect with people and places around them. Using personal stories, this book considers the relationships migrant Muslim women develop, the places they spend time and the activities they engage with. These stories are used to demonstrate the interconnectedness of gender, visibility, movement and placemaking as analytical concepts.

Of all the human behaviors anthropologists consider, perhaps the most conceptually challenging are those that cannot by directly observed. This volume draws from rich ethnographic data to offer theoretical and methodological tools for mapping the intersections between two such behaviors: dreaming and imagination. Although Western perspectives tend to cast these as personal experiences contained within individual minds, each contributor explores diverse cultural and historical contexts to demonstrate how these behaviours are always in some sense cultural and influenced by social others. The cross-cultural approach suggests theoretical flexibility and expands the study of imagination across multiple disciplines.

People who are "on the move" often occupy a state of betwixt and between, in which moral and economic value is subject to change. This enlightening and geographically wide-ranging reassessment of migrant moral economies, Transnationalities of Migrant Moral Economies in a Transforming World delineates migrants' reciprocity, responsibility and dignity, as they respond to and contest unequal political and economic power. In doing so, this volume examines the transformative potential of transnational mobility to create social networks and to sustain reciprocity capable of resisting contemporary authoritarian efforts to sacralize borders and dehumanize migrants.

The Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), or the Compulsory Work Service, program remains one of the most unsettling features of France's history in World War II. Established by the Vichy government in 1943, this initiative saw young men provide forced labor, primarily within France or Germany, in support of the Third Reich's war effort. In this illuminating translation of the journal of Jean Louis Mary Pasquiers, a former teacher and forced laborer from Paris, Passing Misery documents Pasquiers' life within war-torn Europe, in unwilling service to the Nazi regime. By exploring Pasquiers' personal story, this book offers an unrivalled insight into the complexities of war-time collaboration, resistance, and moral culpability, shedding light on one of the darkest chapters in European history.

Assessing the role Jews played in Germany's political and legal history remains a subject of debate. Traditional scholarship's focus on Jews as objects of state-orchestrated violence and antisemitic discrimination often only risks disempowering them further. Political and Legal History of German Jews offers an insightful and comprehensive reassessment, shifting the focus to consider the political and legal agency Jews gained through German's democratic development. Through an examination of the strategies German Jews used to interact with, and influence, policies, as well as the development of distinct Jewish political and legal frameworks, this book resituates German Jews as active and engaged political agents.

Historical consensus views the Euromissile Crisis of the early 1980s as "the last battle of the Cold War." In this illuminating re-examination of this multifaceted campaign, Beyond the Euromissile Crisis broadens our understanding of anti-nuclear activism, highlighting how it remains a truly global phenomenon. Investigating the motivations, forms of action, and accomplishments of activists from South Africa, Polynesia, Brazil and elsewhere, this volume offers new ways of conceptualizing the chronology of anti-nuclear protest.

In the historiography of modern Germany, the nineteenth century's innovations marks a period of seismic change. From accelerating demographic growth to growing secularization and the rise of nationalism, it was a century which laid the foundations for both a civil society and the dictatorships of the twentieth century. In this comprehensive history of Germany from 1780 to 1918, Jürgen Kocka re-examines the transformative interactions that took place between society, economy, culture, and politics. Innovatively resituating these developments within a wider context of conflict and transformation in Europe, this book illuminates new ways to understand the emergence of classical modernity within the nineteenth century.

There are diverse and complex problems faced by women in Israel. This book explores women's roles in teachers' labor conflicts, threatened motherhood within the welfare system, bureaucratic encounters faced by Ethiopian immigrant women, the lack of political representation amongst women, feminist activism against the sex industry, and gender power dynamics in gyms. It is a comprehensive feminist examination of women's diverse experiences in Israeli society over four decades and analyzes society during this time. As an ethnography, the book emphasizes a commitment to social justice and equality, and challenges prevailing social and gender research approaches.

Esther Newcomb Goody had an extensive academic career. She particularly revisited intellectual themes of kinship and relationships. This collection draws on ethnography across Africa, Europe, Oceania and the Americas, and uses Goody's ideas to expand their understanding of the nature of relationships, communication, intimacy, resistance and resilience with a particular focus on rich ethnographies of childhood and learning. It discusses a wide range of subjects in personhood and parenthood, fosterage, apprenticeship and modes of learning; kinship in historical perspective; power, politics and speech; the effects of late-modern capitalism on households and the complex relations between persons and things.

People employed at sites of precarious work such as call centres or retail warehouses often live precarious lives. Drawing on ethnographic research in a London hostel for precarious workers, the book explores the political, analytical and practical limitations of using traditional methods of trying to make sense of life in these settings. Traditional methods are rooted in practices that emerge from privileged social positions and their enactment is deeply entangled with the processes that create these conditions in the first place. This book responds to this by experimenting with 'precarious methods' to enable greater agency to those placed in these precarious situations.

N.J. ('Nick') Allen had an extensive academic career, which for the most part was spent in Oxford. He passed away in 2020. This edited volume brings together a selection of his anthropological papers. They cover two major fields and a supplementary one: Indo-European mythical comparison and his own notion of tetradic kinship, supplemented by a long-term interest in the work of Marcel Mauss and his uncle Émile Durkheim.It follows key areas of his research in which his contributions were novel, innovative, stimulating and plausible.

"Across Africa and South-East Asia, the impulse to protect nature often dovetails with the domination of local people. From mass displacement to severe restrictions on land use and daily acts of violence, conservation work risks reproducing Eurocentric modes of colonialism and worsening the effects of the climate crisis. In this insightful and wide-ranging study of the colonial history of conservation, Tropical Nature seeks to provide a much-needed history of the Global South from its own perspective. Comparing case studies ranging from Ali Bongo's Gabon, to the postcolonial African itinerary of the agronomist Arthur Bunting, this volume advances a "small-scale global history" that deciphers the relations binding human societies to the non-human world"--

Ruins, rubble and decaying material can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present. Conjuring environmental humanities, the anthropology of history, memory and archaeology, this book delves into the complex influence of the past on the present and the future and urges scholars to consider ruins as things to think with.

The mining industry is an expanding socio-ecological and political problem worldwide, not least in Atacameño-Likanantay (Indigenous) territories in the hyper-arid Salar de Atacama, Chile. Groundwater Politics addresses the social, technical and political conditions it calls 'advanced extractivism' to reveal how groundwater extraction sustains both ecological damage and mining economies. It richly describes the area's copper and lithium industries as historically linked with Indigenous communities and their ecological and economic futures. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, the book casts community strategies to control water and territory as 'slow resistance', the structural and multifaceted practices that generate a material future amid potential resource exhaustion.

"Director Ingmar Bergman occupies a central place in the history of modern cinema. Credited with igniting a cinematic revolution, his ability to produce work which resonated with audiences globally has brought scholarly attention to the impact of Bergman's Swedish background on his oeuvre. Ingmar Bergman Out of Focus revises this question of Bergman's "familiarity" to produce a more expansive understanding of Bergman's cultural heritage. Considering the impact of Bergman's films on film festival organizers, critics, academics, and audiences all over the world, this volume illuminates how Bergman's film aesthetics simultaneously shaped modern culture and were themselves reshaped by the debates and concerns that preoccupied his viewers"--

"Historical consensus increasingly views the Cold War period as a multifaceted conflict which extended beyond the borders of the USSR and USA, encompassing both cultural and diplomatic history. Debate remains, however, about how best to balance the Cold War as a cultural event with the existence of Cold War culture. Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War provides a fresh reassessment of this period, highlighting how the convergence of geopolitical interests, cultural production and exchange, and technological and media history shaped a unique epoch. Consequently, this volume seeks to diagnose the role cinema played in expanding the ideological outlook of artists, audiences, and policymakers"--

Global history has come of age but has had little impact on the historiography of early modern Germany. This volume seeks to bring a global perspective to the history of Central Europe by addressing understudied global and colonial entanglements. Exploring the impact of these interactions on court life and home towns, labor migration, material culture, and religious communities, the microhistories presented here reveal the myriad ways in which connections and disconnections underpinned early modern Germany. The authors engage with contemporary debates about global history in general, taking its lacunae as a cue for substantial methodological revisions.

Against a background marked by endless ordinary crises, widespread precarity, and disrupting critical events, Queer and Trans Life charts queer investments for the future. It examines the challenges and pleasures in marginal everyday experiences of gender and sexual dissidence and the labours of care and endurance which sustain a sense of sociality and community, often against all odds. It presents queer and trans anthropological research from emerging European contexts. Though occasionally posited as non-belonging, the volume demonstrates that queer anthropology in Europe continues to thrive by providing textured ethnographic analysis and timely interventions in anthropological theory.

Management is everywhere. Schools teach it and professional organisations counsel about it. Books and articles are written for managers and about them. Management is usually understood in terms of styles of management, management policies and successful management but few tend to think about management in an abstract sense. This book addresses this gap and provokes us to think seriously about this assumed entity. It does so in various ways, by treating management as an institution, as an object of study, as engaged with culture in different ways and as laden with conflicts.

The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in the aftermath of World War I marked a foundational shift in the histories of Austria and Hungary. Previously part of the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire, this event stripped the two new states of a long-established territorial order, triggering a controversial redrawing of their borders. Whilst scholarship often focuses on the role played by state actors in Vienna and Budapest, The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border refreshingly re-examines this event through investigating how processes of state and nation-building manifested within the contested region of Western Hungary and Burgenland. In doing so, this book innovatively resituates this border region within the larger context of post-Habsburg historical development taking place across Central Europe.

For the Aegean island of Syros, the Greek Revolution (1821-1832) marked a significant turning point. Known as "the island of the Pope", due to its Catholic majority, Syros transformed into a major commercial hub, seemingly triggering the withdrawal of its indigenous Latin community. Juxtaposing the view from the Archipelago with that from Istanbul, the Peloponnese, Rome, Paris and Vienna, this volume revisits the island's history. From early encounters between native inhabitants and groups from across the Ottoman Levant, to how the Latin community navigated conflict and change during the Greek War of Independence, this book offers new insights into the political, cultural and social history of the region.

"An illuminating investigation into the 'professionalization' of classical Indian dance forms in Britain, Towards a British Natyam critically analyzes the cultural, social, and political frameworks that make a 'profession' within the arts possible, highlighting the transformational power of classical Indian dance within society to decenter white supremacy and recenter pluriversality"--

In the established historiography of trade in Asia, the emergence of Western trading empires invariably triggered the decline and dispersal of old trading networks. In this transregional ethnographic history of the Manangi, a Buddhist trading community from northern Nepal, Prista Ratanapruck provides counter evidence, elucidating how kinship, social, and religious institutions have facilitated the expansion of Manangi trade across South and Southeast Asia. Expounding on how social and moral values shape capital production, accumulation, and redistribution, Market and Monastery examines the entwining relationship between trade and the Manangi's pursuit of social and spiritual aspirations, ultimately illuminating an intriguing form of capitalism.

The rise of illiberal democracies across Central and Eastern Europe represents an ongoing challenge to the democratic and liberal principles of post-Enlightenment societies. However, considerable debate remains about how to disentangle the complex factors that have contributed to this phenomenon and gain a clearer understanding of the issues shaping the political landscape. In this incisive analysis of the populist phenomenon, Populism in Central and Eastern Europe re-examines the roots of the current political situation, tracing the historical evolution of Central and Eastern European populism. From late nineteenth-century Imperial Russia to Viktor Orbán's Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczyński's Poland, this book offers an innovative approach to addressing these enduring political issues.

Mobile pastoralist activities occur at different scales across the landscape, including local, regional, and supra-regional scales. Most archaeological studies of mobile pastoralist social organization have focused on the latter two scales via the extant monumental and herding landscapes. Household levels of analysis figure much less in these studies. This volume brings together the work of archaeologists currently engaged in mobile pastoralist household research in different regions of the world to highlight the importance of household studies and the utility of both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches in understanding mobile pastoralist household formation, continuity, and adaptation to environmental, social, economic, and political change.

"The maritime legal framework, of General Average (GA), remains an enigmatic and overlooked process within the history of seaborne trade. An ancient rule that predates Roman Law, it continues to be operational today, in a largely unchanged state, mandating the redistribution of unexpected costs that arise during a maritime expedition amongst shipowners and merchants. In this detailed examination of Average procedures within the Italian maritime republic of, Genoa, between the years 1590 and 1700, Through the Water and the Storm demonstrates how this rich data can be used to examine the dynamics of Mediterranean seaborne trade. Drawing on quantitative, socio-economic and legal methodologies, this book highlights how Average procedures reshape our understanding of connectivity and interdependence"--

Nighttime for many new parents in the United States is fraught with the intense challenges of learning to breastfeed and helping their babies sleep so they can get rest themselves. Through careful ethnographic study of the dilemmas raised by nighttime breastfeeding, and their examination in the context of anthropological, historical, and feminist studies, this volume unravels the cultural tensions that underlie these difficulties. As parents negotiate these dilemmas, they not only confront conflicting medical guidelines about breastfeeding and solitary infant sleep, but also larger questions about cultural and moral expectations for children and parents, and their relationship with one another.