Berghahn Books
Blood and oranges; European markets and immigrant labor in rural Greece.
Like so many countries in the European Union and elsewhere, Greece has found it cannot compete in the marketplace without the cheap labor of migrant workers. Working from his experience working in Greece, Lawrence (College of Staten Island) analyzes the resulting marginalization of the workers and the racism directed against them by an increasingly prosperous native Greek contingent. He describes how globalization has changed rural Greece, the history of conflict and accommodation in the subject villages, the role of agricultural production in household economics, the conditions for immigrant labor, elements of social transformation, perceptions of citizenship and identity, the politics of resistance on both sides, and the influence of nationalism in a globalizing economy. All of his observations are sharp and compelling, but some are heartbreaking. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Bodies of evidence; burial, memory, and the recovery of missing persons in Cyprus. (reprint, 2005)
Cassia (anthropology, U. of Durham, UK) presents an ethnographic reflection on the disappearance of 2,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots between 1963 and 1974 — the list of whom includes people discovered to be alive, to be buried between clearly marked graves, or to have been killed by members of their own ethnic group. Chapters examine the public memories of the conflict, institutional uses and misuses of the dead, and implications on peoples of the lack of closure that surrounds this and similar events in history. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cultural history of modern India.
Menon (modern Indian history, U. of Delhi, India) conceived this reader to serve as a text for a new B.A. concurrent course in history at the U. of Delhi for honors students in social sciences and humanities, but also aims the volume at a general readership interested in recent research on issues of culture in modern India. It contains six papers discussing such topics as the relationship between cricket and caste in the case of the Palwankar brothers, the first autobiography written by a Bengali women, Indian national identity and the realist aesthetic, dilemmas of nationhood in Indian calendar art, issues of memory and ancestry, and nationalist discourse about South Indian classical music. Distributed in the US by Berghahn Books. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Delhi; ancient history.
Singh (ancient Indian history, U. of Delhi, India) presents 20 papers that explore various facets of the ancient and early medieval history of India's National Capital Region, which includes the National Capital Territory of Delhi, as well as neighboring areas in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Archaeological evidence of prehistoric settlements is presented and, in some cases, related to India's epic traditions such as the Mahabharata. Also discussed are the Ashokan rock edict at Shrinivaspuri/Bahapur, the Mehrauli iron pillar inscription of Chandra, and excavations at Lal Kot and Anangpur Fort. Distributed in the US by Berghahn Books. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Empire and after; Englishness in postcolonial perspective.
Nine papers presented by MacPhee (English, West Chester U. of Pennsylvania, US) and Poddar (English, Aarhus U., Denmark) provide varied takes on issues of British and English identities as situated within the context of the United Kingdom's imperial history and its legacies. Papers include examinations of formulations of British identity in Ireland and South Africa, contradictions between nationalism and imperialism as evidenced in the controversies over the issuance of British passports to imperial subjects of India following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, contemporary British identity and emergent Middle Eastern nationalisms, representations of British Asian youth in the wake of the London bombings of July 2005, the lived experience of Englishness by women residents of London, identity in the political rhetorics of the Labour and Conservative parties, and the elision of the power relationship of the US/UK "special relationship" in the representation of British national identity found in the proposed memorial garden for British victims of the September 11th attacks. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The enigma of the Kerala woman; a failed promise of literacy.
Mukhopadhyay (economics, U. of New Delhi) takes a critical eye to the assumed link between high literacy among women in the Indian state of Kerala and a more equal social status for Kerala women compared with those in neighboring areas. A combination of data collected by the Gender Network, case studies, and b&w photographs with anthropological captions, the text discusses the limitations of modern indicators of gender equality, a gender disparity caused by sex-selective abortions and poor attention to maternal health, and the recent history of "reform" efforts for women in the area, among other issues. This book is distributed by Berghahn Books. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Experiencing new worlds.
Cultural and individual identities in the Pacific region have changed, and continue to change, as they move within colonial and post-colonial regimes. Add the influence of globalization, and those changes become even more profound, and spread from the merely biographical to the cognitive and cultural. This first volume in a new series integrates cultural and psychological methods in 15 essays, drawing on practice theory, cognitive science and the anthropology of space as they address human agency, memory, and landscape in the midst of such deep changes. Contributors examine theoretical backgrounds of study and research methods, including their application in "exotic" settings, the influence of emplacement and landscape, as in the power of the organization of space and knowledge, the meaning of magic or major disaster in the evaluation of spaces and environments, and ways memory alters perceptions, whether of people, places, smells, or interplay between cultural elements. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Gendering modern German history; rewriting historiography.
Three decades was deemed plenty long enough to wait for a critical stocktaking of the gendering of the historiography on Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries. So a German-North American conference was held in Toronto in March 2003, and though the 11 papers here began there, they have been substantially revised and rewritten to different editorial guidelines. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Holistic anthropology; emergence and convergence.
If human social organization is fundamentally a problem of human ecology and thus concerns material and mental creativity, human biology, and the co-evolution of society and culture, then full understanding of human society requires a holistic anthropology that can incorporate diverse areas of inquiry. Parkin (social anthropology, U. of Oxford, UK) and Ulijaszek (human ecology, U. of Oxford) present 10 essays that explore the ramifications of holism in anthropology. They discuss the concept of bio-culturalism, evolutionary approaches to human behavior, bio-culturalism in Chinese medicine, anthropological theory and the multiple determinacies of the present, the evolution and history of religion, and other topics. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
An improbable war?; the outbreak of World War I and European political culture before 1914.
The web of treaties, royal family relationships, and mutual trade dependencies was supposed to work against war in Europe. Tell that to the archduke and archduchess bleeding to death in their respective corsets in Sarajevo. Had they not been shot by a Bosnian separatist, would there be no Italian fascism, German National Socialism, Soviet Leninism and Stalinism? This collection of 18 articles, with a foreword by former president Jimmy Carter, delineates the influence of the "long nineteenth century" on the development of World War I. It addresses Austria-Hungary's decision to make war and the role of its political elite, international relations and the decline of the "culture of peace," the Kaiser's disappearing war guilt, the military situation (including the status of arms control and the naval race), subjective expectations and public opinion, the influence of culture and religion, and perspectives on the European war by contemporary non-Europeans. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Inclusionary rhetoric/exclusionary practices; left-wing politics and migrants in Italy.
Drawing on fieldwork in Bologna, Peró (sociology, U. of Nottingham) offers ethnographic perspectives on how the mainstream left in Italy, and to an extent in all of Europe, has been constructing the issue of immigration. He highlights how these constructions have changed in the recent past, how they relate to the wider transformations that have occurred in left-wing politics during the same period, and how they compare with those of various other political forces and institutions. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Italian politics; the end of the Berlusconi era?
Political and other social scientists, mostly from Italy but also from Britain and Canada, explore possibilities now that media mogul Silvio Berlusconi is out of office. Their topics include the Sgrena-Calipari case, the bank takeover bids and the role of the Bank of Italy, the Italian church in the year of the papal succession, and the problem of Italy's international competitiveness. No index is provided. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Kinship in Europe; approaches to long-term developments (1300-1900).
Scholarship has long believed that the importance of kinship declined steadily in Europe between the Middle Ages and the 20th century as the institution of the nuclear family emerged, and has steadfastly refused to acknowledge empirical evidence and methodological reflection over the past two decades have called the matter into question. Historians who have conducted such studies and come to such conclusions here band together to present their findings beyond the jurisdiction of their department heads. Their topics include anthropological theory, the politics of kinship in Bern, Tuscany, European migrant networks, Swiss kin marriages and 19th-century Vannes. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The limits of loyalty; imperial symbolism, popular allegiances, and state patriotism in the late Habsburg monarchy.
Recognizing different layers of national, regional, and local identities present in Austro-Hungarian society, historians from Europe and the US, incorporate into their analysis of popular allegiances an identity at the imperial level. Among their topics are military veterans and popular patriotism in imperial Austria 1870-1914, Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen, and Croatian student protest and the limits of loyalty at the end of the 19th century. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Making peace with the earth; what future for the human species and the planet?
It appears the conflict between humans and the environment has become a world war, with the most poor taking the most casualties. Editor Bindé, who directs the Office of Analysis and Forecasting at UNESCO, supports contributors from a variety of disciplines who examine population growth, resource allocation, energy, development, water, biodiversity simplification of lifestyles and ethics. They analyze the means by which we will experience limits to growth, the nature of development within those limits, the process of dematerialization and sustainable development, the impact of climate change on water availability, the coming crisis in water, the state of global biodiversity and the oceans, reduction of the ecological footprints, ecological pacts, reduction of consumption, lessons from prehistory, and a return to the "natural contract." (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Manual of ethnography.
This is the first published English translation of social anthropologist Marcel Mauss' longest work, which is based on the many lectures he gave on ethnography "for travelers, administrators and missionaries" in the 1920s and 30s. The manual — compiled by a student and not complete due to the author's failing health at the time — details observation methodology, principles, and emerging studies within the subjects of: social morphology; technology; techniques of the body; aesthetics; and economic, jural, moral, and religious phenomena. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Pious pursuits; German Moravians in the Atlantic World.
Historians and other scholars examine contributions by the Germany Protestant denomination and its members to the European colonization of the New World during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The topics include Moravian physicians and their medicine in colonial North America, piety and profit in the North Carolina backcountry market 1770-1810, dismantling female leadership among 18th-century Moravians, and religious radicals confronting slavery and race in the modern age. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Religious division and social conflict; the emergence of Hindu nationalism in rural India.
Froerer (anthropology, Brunel U., Britain) describes the emergence of Hindu nationalism in an anonymous mixed Hindu/Christian adivasi village in Chhattisgarh, central India between October 1997 and August 1999. Her goal is to provide an explicit ethnographic account of the national Hindutva movement, particularly the role of activists from the RSS Party who serve as conversion specialists and the primary facilitators in the process. Distributed in the US by Berghahn Books. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Ways of knowing; anthropological approaches to crafting experience and knowledge.
This collection of 14 essays describes the sometimes agonizing process of creating and maintaining ways of learning about ourselves and others, focusing on paradigms and polemics from dialectics in philosophy, the practice of an anthropology of philosophy, using religion as a way of knowing, and auditing or "dumbing down" knowledge. Those on time and the disruption of knowing describe the case of the Potosi cover-up, Gaden's brand of ethnographic knowledge, and an embodiment of knowledge in the village of the sick, while those on rethinking the embodiment address the art of crafting knowledge, communities of practice and form, and the elasticity of perception. The collection closes with the thought of Riles, abjection and knowledge at unusual sites, and teaching and learning experiences. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
