Berghahn Books
After the "socialist spring"; collectivisation and economic transformation in the GDR.
This volume analyzes the role of low-level political and economic functionaries in the organization and management of the collective farms of East Germany and in the implementation and development of agricultural policy from the agitation campaigns of the "Socialist Spring" in 1960 to the development of industrial-scale agriculture during the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the district of Erfurt. It concentrates on the grass-roots relations between the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), the state, and farming collectives and shows how economic, political, and administrative structures of the regime at the lower levels both controlled and shaped the boundaries in which farmers lived and worked and were shaped themselves by the integration and participation of people as farmers and agriculture functionaries into the system of rule. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Against machismo; young adult voices in Mexico City.
Ramirez (U. of Massachusetts Dartmouth) explores gender relations reflected in the words macho and machismo, based on fieldwork he conducted with middle-class university students at the national university in Mexico City. He notes that attitudes are changing, as these students consider the terms unfavorable and part of the cultural past. He also describes the practice of harassing women outside the engineering school, and considers the notion of gender suffering, the alternate concept of a traditional mother figure, and the role of divorce. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Alarming reports; communicating conflict in the daily news.
Arno (anthropology, U. of Hawai'i) analyzes the daily news media as a social process, arguing that it is a form a control communication drawing its narrative energy from conflict discourse systems. He examines how news is circulated through news "communities" (or news consumers), suggesting that it only really becomes news when it is received through the varied social concerns of these communities. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
An anthropology of war; views from the front line.
Editor Waterston (anthropology, John Jay College of Criminology, CUNY) has collected these essays on the anthropological and ethnographic work being done in war zones, with expert contributors providing commentaries from such troubled locations as Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Haiti. Written for general audiences as well as scholars in anthropology, this book examines themes of death, destruction and dehumanization by detailing the effects of the collapse of physical and social infrastructures. The majority of these essays call for an end to war, with one particular essay focusing on mankind's accountability from the fictional perspective of an archaeologist in the year 2109. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Banned in Berlin; literary censorship in imperial Germany, 1871-1918.
In constructing his history of state censorship of literature in Imperial Germany from 1871 to 1918, Stark (history, Grand Valley State U.) adopts a fairly conventional approach but seeks to avoid a Manichean reading and instead produce a nuanced examination of the motives, practices, limits, and consequences of state censorship of literature in Germany that takes seriously the complexity of censors' motives and situation and the frequent gap between the intent and the effect of literary censorship. Separate chapters are provided on censorship in defense of the political order, the social order, the religious order, and the moral order and the volume concludes with a chapter on authors' responses to censorship. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Boundless worlds; an anthropological approach to movement.
While studies of migration, transnational flows of culture, and the like show attention within anthropology to forms of movement as objects of analysis, Kirby (anthropology, Oxford Brooks U.) finds other elements of mobility and flux worthy of anthropological study to be relatively neglected, particularly because of a problematic construction of the notion of "space/place." In response, he presents nine essays that "as a whole comprise a concerted and coherent attempt to interrogate (largely `Western') occupations and manipulations of space against the backdrop of how people actually move through, exist in, conceive of, and represent these spaces in their everyday lives in varied social contexts." Topics addressed include spatiality, power, and state making in the organization of territory in colonial South Asia; Israeli soldier narratives of space in the Palestinian Occupied Territories; space and social exclusion in contemporary Japan; modern Tibetan visions of world peace; changing notions of space and geographical identity in Vanuatu, Oceania; organizing a Japanese multinational corporation in France; and constructing space in the contemporary Finnish economy. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Crisis of the state; war and social upheaval.
Kapferer (anthropology, U. of Bergen, Norway) and Bertelsen (a PhD student in social anthropology, U. of Bergen) present 12 essays exploring shifts in the organization of state power and the emergence of new forms of sovereignty during situations of civil strife, violent resistance, and war. The first set of papers addresses relations between the corporate or corporatizing state and situations of war and violence and include discussions of processes of militarization and the US military-industrial complex, the war in Chechnya and post-Soviet Russia in transition, and the relationship between market forces and violent conflict in Nigeria. The next group focuses on the concrete experiences of people living through conflict and includes case studies of experiences of state and guerilla violence in Uganda and the impact of introducing firearms into Ugandan pastoralist communities. The remaining papers examine shifts in the organization of state sovereignty in the contexts of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, paramilitary violence in Colombia, civil war in Mozambique, guerilla violence by the Algerian guerilla FLN movement, and Israel's so-called "separation barrier." (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Crime stories; criminalistic fantasy and the culture of crisis in Weimar Germany.
Herzog (German studies, U. of Cincinnati) explores the discourse of criminality in Weimar Germany, arguing that both German criminology and the German modernist crime novel were grappling with a crisis of evidence that questioned the very status of evidence and the borders between criminal and noncriminal. Moreover, this crisis was central to the culture of crisis that helped define how the Weimar Republic imagined itself. He traces these developments through modernist crime fictions and the criminalistic fantasy of the broader public and their loss of faith in the use of visual evidence to track criminals. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Europe at the seaside; the economic history of mass tourism in the Mediterranean.
Segreto (economic history and the history of economic relations, U. of Florence), Manera (director of research, Spanish Ministry of Science and Education) and Pohl (founder and chairman, International Centre for Corporate Culture and History) have edited these articles on the economic history of tourism in the Mediterranean that investigate the contributions of such independent actors as hotel entrepreneurs, resort networks, travel agencies and charter companies. Experts provide case studies such as the growth of British air package tours and mass tourism patterns on the French Riviera to chart the expansion of economic and social networks throughout the region. Statistical data on tourism revenue, labor markets and economic growth are included so that students and researchers can review the importance of tourism to resident populations. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
European kinship in the age of biotechnology.
The concept of kinship has always been malleable but, with recent scientific technologies enabling different biological methods of reproduction and expanded social ideas of what constitutes a family, the definition is becoming harder to fix. Edwards (social anthropology, Manchester University) and Salazar (social anthropology, University or Lleida) have selected papers of studies from several European countries that illustrate current kinship debates. They cover the sense of identity in adopted children, same-sex parents, fostering and "blood" connections as well as the uncertainties about sperm and egg donations to surrogate mothers with no biological relation to the child they carry. The question of genetically altered food is taken up, as well, both as an analogy and a symbol of a fear of unknown consequences. In all of the articles there is a core belief that kinship, for most people, involves emotional as well as genetic attachment. The problem is in reconciling the two. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The frightful stage; political censorship of the theater in nineteenth-century Europe.
In the wake of the French Revolution and in recognition of the greater access to the theater by the lower classes than to print, state authorities in 19th-century Europe expended considerable effort monitoring and censoring political messages in the theater. In response, dramatists and theater audiences developed common techniques of evasion and resistance. In this volume, Goldstein (emeritus, political science, Oakland U.) presents country case studies of these processes of censorship, evasion, and resistance in theater in Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, and the Hapsburg Monarchy. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Islam and new kinship; reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon.
Clarke (social anthropology, U. of Cambridge, UK) explores how Islamic legal scholars in Lebanon, both Sunni and Shiite, have navigated the complex issues of new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, as well as (though to a lesser extent) how medical professionals have reacted to these religious responses. Even though they are not the most common procedures, the focus is on procedures involving the use of donor sperm and donor eggs and those involving surrogacy arrangements, as these procedures are the subject of the most vigorous debate. In tracing these debates, Clarke explores whether they point to new forms of Islamic kinship. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Kinship and beyond; the genealogical model reconsidered.
With the publication in 1910 of W.H.R. Rivers's essay The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry, genealogical modeling became a standardized implement in the anthropological toolkit, bringing along with it the implicit assumptions that are inherent in the model, premises that were criticized to great acclaim by D. Schneider's A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), albeit to apparently little effect. This collection of ten papers, edited by Leach (anthropology, U. of Aberdeen, UK), explores how the concept of genealogy has framed orthodox anthropological understandings of kinship as well as how it has influenced Euro-American understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman species. Specific topics addressed by the papers include the relationship between the development of models of human pedigree and the development of models of animal pedigree, genealogical thinking and social differentiation in colonial Kenya, the intersection of traditional understandings of pedigree and of financial capital in the biotechnological commercialization of Icelandic genealogical history, the political implications of exporting the genealogical framework to non-Western societies through such initiatives as the mapping of the human genome and the manufacture and sale of genetically modified organisms, the ways new reproductive technologies are shaping understandings of pedigree, genealogical assumptions and their relations to assumptions about the process of acquiring knowledge, and a typology of kinship modeling that can be grouped on the basis of sharing or rejecting various elements of the genealogical paradigm. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Landscape, process and power; re-evaluating traditional environmental knowledge.
The majority of the 11 chapters presented here by Heckler (Durham U., UK) come from a panel on "Traditional Environmental Knowledge and Change" at the June 2004 International Congress of Ethnobiology at the U. of Kent, UK. They represent a range of current disciplinary approaches to traditional environmental knowledge research but are characterized by a convergence on the interrelated themes of landscape, power, and process. Topics include a genealogy of scientific representations of indigenous knowledge; cultural and economic globalization of traditional environmental knowledge systems; competing and coexisting with cormorants in European wetlands; identity, landscape, and industry in Papua New Guinea; traditional resource management, disturbance, and biodiversity conservation in Papua New Guinea; wild plants as agricultural indicators and the linking of ethnobotany with traditional ecological knowledge; the impact of migration on the ethnobotanical knowledge and social organization in a West Papuan village; and past and present management of the Gabra Oromo Commons of Kenya. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Made in Sheffield; an ethnography of industrial work and politics.
Mollona (social anthropology, Goldsmiths College, UK) presents an ethnographic study of contemporary steelworkers from Sheffield, England, combining anthropology, class analysis, and a critical engagement with current economic and management theories. Examining experiences of labor, family, and politics of workers of a small machine shop who see themselves as "craftsmen" and "artisans" and the labor, family, and politics of a workers at a large steel factory who see themselves as "proletarians," he argues that "proletarian" and "artisan" are concurrent forms of class relations which reflect the uneven form of capitalist development and that technology is central to the way workers draw distinctions among themselves and experience their class position. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Michael Haneke's cinema; the ethic of the image.
Finding the viewing of the films of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke to be an unsettling experience, Wheatley (U. of Southampton, UK) finds his reaction to be shaped by the way Haneke engages his audiences in issues of moral reflexivity. Haneke, according to this analysis, places formal filmic techniques of aesthetic reflexivity in new frameworks that allow him to co-opt the spectator in a uniquely moral relationship to the film, leading to the questioning of the spectator's complicity with the cinematic apparatus and acceptance or denial of this complicity. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The mirage of China; anti-humanism, narcissism, and corporeality of the contemporary world.
Liu (anthropology, U. of California at Berkeley) argues that China has experienced an epistemological rift in both the mentality of governance and the sentimentality of life between the Maoist and contemporary eras in which categories of statistical reasoning came to characterize how China conceptualized itself. He describes the rise of statistical thinking in government and argues that the quantitative mode of self- objectification replaced the old Soviet model of social sciences. He then shows how probabilistic theories of large numbers came to assume a greater function as the logic for social science, providing explanation for China's rapid economic growth and large social disparity. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Mobility and migration in indigenous Amazonia; contemporary ethnoecological perspectives.
Anthropologists from the US, Britain, Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela explore how mobility and migration are related to relations between humans and the environment among indigenous and traditional peoples in the region of South America's Amazon river. Among the topics are multi-sited households, mobility, and resource management in the Amazon flood plain; the domestication of peach palm; the historical ecology of the Lecos of Apolo in Bolivia; Ese Eja history, migration, and medicinal plants; and African diaspora ethnobotany in lowlands South America. Most of the 12 papers are revised from presentations to a June 2004 conference in Canterbury, England. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Political violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933; battle for the streets and fears of civil war.
Focusing on the province of Saxony, Schumann (history, Georg-August U., Germany) explores organized political violence in Weimar Germany. He argues that the circumscribed civil war of 1919-1921 was followed in the period 1921-1933 by political violence that was less characterized by attempts to kill opponents and civil-war like fighting and that it instead was a struggle — between right-wing Combat Leagues and the Social Democrat and Communist groups mobilized in response to the Combat Leagues — over public terrain and symbols, a struggle which often assumed ritualistic features and was characterized by the use of limited methods and instruments. He argues that the violence could have been stopped with significant political will and blames the anti-Republican authoritarianism of large segments of the bourgeoisie for the failure to do so. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Power and society in the GDR, 1961-1979; the "normalisation of rule"?.
British and German historians describe the mechanisms by which the brutal communist regime that was impressed on the defeated German people was made to seem normal a decade and a half later. Their topics include economic politics and company cultures, sport for the masses and popular music, learning the rules, a normal country in the center of Europe, producing the socialist personality, and East German perspectives on their own lives. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The power of law in a transnational world; anthropological enquiries.
Editors Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann (head of the Project Group Legal Pluralism, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) have teamed with Griffiths (anthropology of law, U. of Edinburgh School of Law, UK) to present these essays on how the law is "constituted and reconfigured through social processes" in order to control people and territories. Written for students and scholars who are interested in the intersection of law and anthropology, this volume discusses such topics as legal claims to legitimacy and higher moral purpose, human rights and legal pluralism and religion as a resource in legal pluralism. This volume is designed as a follow-up to Mobile People, Mobile Law" Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, which was culled from the same series of conferences held at the U. of Edinburgh. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
