Berghahn Books

Adolph Cluss, architect; from Germany to America.

Published in conjunction with a 2005-2006 exhibition at the Charles Sumner School Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Stadtarchiv Heilbronn in Germany, this volume discusses the life and work of Cluss (1825-1905), a German-born architect, civil engineer, and urban planner. His buildings stand in Washington DC, and the impact of his ideas continues. Essays discussing his life, his buildings (including the National Museum Building), his ideas about schools and public market reform, and his lost buildings accompany photo essays of his family as well as of Washington DC as it looked when he arrived there and when he died. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Aesthetics in performance; formations of symbolic construction and experience.

Anthropologists from a number of countries address aesthetic forms and dynamics with particular reference to performance. Among their topics are the buzz of God and the click of delight, the Hindu temple and the aesthetics of the imaginary, trance dancing in West Africa, the Brazilian Carnival, and misperceptions among circus audiences in Britain during the 1970s. The 10 essays are from an April 2001 workshop at the Cross Cultural Centre Ascona, on the Swiss-Italian border. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Bodies of evidence; burial, memory, and the recovery of missing persons in Cyprus.

In 1998 two Greek Cypriot women took cell phones and pickaxes to a military cemetery, in search of their husbands who disappeared in the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. With the pickaxes they broke through the cemetery's marble slabs, and with the cell phones they alerted the media. Sant Cassia (anthropology, U. of Durham) examines how the disappearance and presumed deaths of 2,000 people in Cyprus figure as a part of a political plan to control collective memory by the conquerors and a political act in the case of those seeking to correct perceptions of the past by defiance. In this ethnography Sant Cassia shows how the political acts in the form of grassroots movements and projects, such as "The Church of the Missing" and works of art, serve to keep memory alive at a pragmatic and symbolic level. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The day of the dead; when two worlds meet in Oaxaca.

Anthropologist and archaeologist Haley and writer and artist Fukuda had both been researching the annual holiday in the Oaxaca region of Mexico for some years, and combine their efforts. They consider Oaxaca and its people, funerals and death, the Day of the Dead markets, preparation, private ceremonies and public celebrations, the religious and symbolic roots of the holiday, and its future. Many of the black-and-white photographs have not been well reproduced. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Images of power; iconography, culture and the state in Latin America.

"To suggest that images have a privileged purchase on power," begin the editors, "is hardly an original proposition." Yet there is a dearth of scholarship on the political dimension of visual culture in Latin America. Andermann (Latin American Studies, U. of London) and Rowe (poetics, U. of London) compile 13 essays by many renown cultural, historical, and visual scholars which explore and critique the complex and inconstant relationships among images, cultures, and the nation-state in Latin America. Subjects of inquiry span the formation of a public sphere; avant-garde visual politics; mass society's influence on political images; and territory as a key icon of the state. Myriad b&w images (drawings, photos, paintings) included. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Science, magic, and religion; the ritual process of museum magic.

Social anthropologists and museum scholars from Europe, Africa, and the US explore how museums are transformed into ritual sites: how scientific and technological relics, monuments to rationality and Enlightenment thinking, can be infected by the strong enchantment of magical and ritual procedures. Among their topics are Egyptian mummies in museum rhetoric, the ritual life of two Congolese masterpieces at the Royal Museum for Central Africa from 1884 to 2001, and visiting an exhibit in Wiemar. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)