Berghahn Books
Conflict, catastrophe and continuity; essays on modern German history.
The 18 essays on German history presented here by Biess (modern German and European history, U. of California at San Diego, US), Roseman (Jewish studies, U. of Indiana, US), and Schissler (modern history, U. of Hanover, Germany) were penned by former students of the scholar of German history, Volker Berghahn, or historians influenced by him. The essays thus reflect the chronological range of Berghahn's focus (the 1860s to the 1960s) and address themes central to his oeuvre: society, elites, and domestic conflict; logics and continuities in German foreign policy; and the social and cultural transformation of postwar Germany. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Conflicted memories; Europeanizing contemporary histories.
To what extent do historians, merely by constructing a European history as a framework for analyzing events in and between countries, further the political agenda of European integration? That is, does the very existence of a European History reinforce the idea that integration is inevitable? The question is taken up by historians from across the continent. They look at contested memories, multiple conflicts, transnational interactions, and unfinished political processes. There is no index. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Conversations on the beach; fishermen's knowledge, metaphor and environmental change in South India.
In this ethnography of a small fishing village in the central Indian state of Kerala, Hoeppe (social anthropology, U. of Heidelberg, Germany) explores local environmental knowledge and views of human-environment relations as revealed in language, particularly in its metaphoric and figurative manifestations. Over the course of the study, he discusses the metaphoric conceptualization of space, fishing as an active social process of knowledge making, fishermen's social relationship with the sea and accompanying symbolic interpreting rituals, and fishermen's perceptions of state interventions that have affected local fishing in the colonial and independence eras. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Escape from hell; the true story of the Auschwitz protocol.
In what has come to be known as the Auschwitz Protocol, Wetzler (1918-1988) and a fellow escapee provided rare documentation of the horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. Their smuggled report, said by British historian Sir Martin Gilbert to have saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews, is appended along with other documents. The rest of the book, translated from the Slovak and featuring photos, is a memoir written in the third person in novel-like form to incorporate additional eyewitness accounts. Várnai is at the U. of Cambridge. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The European puzzle; the political structuring of cultural identities at a time of transition.
The ten essays presented here by Demossier (French and anthropology, U. of Bath, UK) explore the impact of the political and economic process of integration on the way cultural identity is conceptualized in Europe. Topics addressed include national identity as an obstacle to integration, the place of European identity within the debate over multiculturalism versus universalism, the utilization of culture and identity as "heritage" for tourism development, the creation and shaping of identities in European cinema, sport as the site of contestation over identity, the possibility of fostering a sense of European identity through political parties, and the city as a form of organization central to European identity. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Finding Europe; discourses on margins, communities, images.
As Europe continues to define and redefine itself economically and politically through the European Union, scholars are very busy doing the same with history, working with one of the two leading theories about how Europe became Europe and will continue to become Europe. The first focused on values (such as Christian ethics, individualism, capitalism, tolerance); the other focused on the process of post-Enlightenment European construction. This collection integrates elements of the two theories, reflecting upon Europe's public debate over what it really is, the ethnic and religious outsider, Semitic Spain, gender and the body, magic and witchcraft, the republic of merchants and scholars, the courts as exemplars, the grand tour, citizenship and language, shared images of law and shared resistance to violence, the still-evolving network of museums, and the tree as model of intellectual organization. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Fire in the dark; telling Gypsiness in North East England.
Buckler seeks reasons for why Gypsies and local official officials in northern England are not able to reach agreement on what seem tractable if not easy conflicts even when everyone is clearly making a sustained effort to do so. Among her perspectives are people and practice in an indeterminate place, stories and the telling of family, and managing multiple perspectives. She long worked in the arts and urban regeneration, then studied anthropology to get a foundation for cross-cultural work, and now does research for local governments. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Framing the fifties; cinema in a divided Germany.
German and North American scholars of film and of German literature and culture examine German cinema during a period most scholars seem happy enough to dismiss as an aberration to be safely ignored. Their topics include ambivalences of national identity and masculinity in the star persona of Peter van Eyck, Cold War fantasies, representations of the Other Germany in documentaries, and re-territorializing enjoyment in the Adenaur era. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The future of indigenous museums; perspectives from the southwest Pacific.
The goals of many indigenous cultural centers and museums include preserving the heritage of the local population but also may involve capturing the tourist market. As they attempt to attain both goals they must create practices as they go, and sometimes must make compromises. Editor Stanley (art and design, U. of Central England) calls upon his and his contributors' extensive experience in both collection and display in Melanesia, Europe and North America to determine how these cultural centers and museums evolve and develop best practices, including those most likely to support community and cultural development. The case studies presented here come from island Melanesia, including the Solomon Islands, Southern New Ireland and New Caledonia, northern Australia, and New Guinea with examples of women's projects, museums for field workers, and even displays of violent events. The collection closes with comments on the future of indigenous museums. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Holding worlds together; ethnographies of knowing and belonging.
Anthropologists from the University of Oslo, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe explore various efforts people make to forge connections that enable a sense of certainty, stability, or belonging in what may be perceived as a fragmented world. Nine studies look at trust and reciprocity in transnational flows, the understanding of migration and the discourse of nationalism among Dominicans in New York City, re-articulating identity in a Norwegian town, and other topics. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The kinning of foreigners; transnational adoption in a global perspective.
The US is not in the lead per capita in adopting children from developing nations; in fact, Norway leads the pack. Howell, (social anthropology, U. of Oslo) herself an Norwegian adoptive parent, evaluates the experience and finds unexpected ambiguities and paradoxes. For example, although transnational adoption is essential to the study of the creation of kinship few academics study it. Governments and their experts have become extraordinarily involved in one of the most intimate of life's activities, the rearing of children. Transnational adoption has become part of a web of globalized approaches to rationality and morality. Howell also finds extensive assimilation, one consequence being complex or tangled identities, intrusive psycho-technical expertise and a singular lack of development of sophistication in adoption and trust between developed and developing nations. The hardcover edition (ISBN 978-1-84545-184-4) was published in 2006. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The limits of Atlanticism; perceptions of state, nation, and religion in Europe and the United States.
Having served as the Ombudsperson for Human Rights in the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and observed the negotiations over the Dayton Accords (or the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina), Haller (Johann Wolfgang Goethe U., Germany) came to the conclusion that there are fundamental differences between Western Europe and the United States on questions of state sovereignty, nationalism, and religious difference that hardly originated with the current Bush administration. Finding European approaches to be superior, at the very least in regards to Bosnia and Herzegovina, he describes how these differences manifest in different negotiating styles and demands and traces their roots back to the Westphalian primacy of the state in Europe versus the primacy of society over the state in the New World. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Modern crises and traditional strategies; local ecological knowledge in island Southeast Asia.
As our understanding of its significant role in economic development grew in the 1990s, many countries created plans and programs intended to support environmental sustainability. How well those plans and programs worked was put to the test in island southeast Asia from 1996 to 2003 as people of that region responded to political, economic and environmental instability. The contributors of these nine case studies explain how climate changes affected foragers in farmers in Borneo, how agricultural modernization affected the Kasepuhan rice industry, and how systems responded to environmental stress in Java. They describe the conservation of the remaining rain forest in upland Banten, traditional and innovative subsistence strategies in Buano during socio-environmental stress, changes in Minahasan agricultural strategies in north Sulawest, responses to permanent political and environmental crisis in Palawan, forest regulation in East Timor, and transmission of knowledge about environmental forces in central Java. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Nanking atrocity, 1937-38.
Wakabayashi (history, York U., Canada) and his colleagues introduce new research findings on the Nanking Atrocity of 1937-38 — alternatively known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking — collectively finding that "the Atrocity was a shameful violation of law and morality" by the Japanese, but also finding themselves in "grudging and qualified agreement that certain intractable facts betray key points in the official Chinese narrative and in Western accounts that follow it." The volume's 16 chapters provide narrative accounts of Japanese war crimes outside and inside of Nanking city, raise doubts over the official Chinese civilian death toll, suggest that accounts of a "100-man killing contest" at the Nanking war crimes trial were fabricated, analyze the motivations of a Japanese reserve officer active in Nanking, explore the issue of Chinese collaborators, reexamine the role played by foreigners in the refugee area known as the Nanking Safety Zone, expose flaws in the work of Nanking denier Higashinakano Osamichi, analyze Western reception of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, and explore varied Japanese reactions to the issues raised by Japanese war-time atrocities. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Portraits of hope; Armenians in the contemporary world.
They are poets, historians, scholars, high clergy, journalists, painters, filmmakers, the leaders of foundations and international organizations, diplomats, and owners and executives of businesses, and they all remember. Armenians may be found in all walks of life, and in virtually any country you can name, but they share a memory only very few are old enough to have actually experienced. In the First World War about a million and a half Armenians were killed by invading Turks in an extended act of genocide. Not only do living Armenians live with that memory but they also live with the claims by Turks that the genocide never happened or that its ghastly statistics were grossly exaggerated. These 50 narrators, situated from India to Beirut to Los Angeles, tell of survival of memory, the search for truth, and their place as Armenians in what is both a just and unjust world. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Postcoloniality; the French dimension.
Postcoloniality, as defined by Majumdar (francophone studies, U. of Portsmouth, UK) for the purposes of this study, is concerned with the transformation of old ideological and cultural forms and the development of new forms of discourse that accompanied the decline of formal capitalist imperialism. Examining the evolution of French postcoloniality, she is particularly focused on the particular status of counter-discourses that arise to challenge dominant forms of hegemonic discourse and ideology, as well as questions concerning the validity of ideas, representations, and meanings; whether they aspire to the status of theory; and how theoretical validity is to be judged. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Possessing the world; taking the measurement of colonisation from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
In this comparative history of the construction and collapse of the modern colonial empires, Etemad (history, U. of Geneva and U. of Lausanne, Switzerland) analyzes the tools of empire that allowed for conquest. While acknowledging the importance of the technological advances provided by the second Industrial Evolution together with medical advances against tropical diseases, he argues that they are insufficient to explain early colonial conquests and suggests that it was the successful recruitment of indigenous soldiers that best explains colonial successes, in that it placed the human cost of colonization onto the colonized peoples themselves. He also compares and contrasts the experiences of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, where significant European settlement resulted in a form of independence of a qualitatively different nature from the decolonization of those areas of the world without such settlement. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Professional identities; policy and practice in business and bureaucracy.
Ardener (international development, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford U., UK) and Moore (international human resource management, Royal Holloway, U. of London, UK) bring together seven essays on how individuals' ethnic, gender, corporate, and professional identities interact in businesses and bureaucracies. It addresses how they are perceived in corporate settings around the world, how they view themselves, and how they think others see them. Specific papers consider business and change in the UK, Israeli absorption centers, the impact of privatization and managerialist discourse on European public sector institutions, and aid agencies in the developing world, with emphasis on themes of power and knowledge transfer, researcher perspectives, boundary construction and reinterpretation, the socioeconomic effects of globalization, and flexibility. Four of the papers were drawn from a workshop organized by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Queen Elizabeth House and a series of talks on "Corporate Images and Bureaucratic Identities," presented at the Ethnicity and Identity seminar at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford U. Contributors are scholars of social anthropology, gender studies, and global economic governance from Europe and Israel. The book is aimed at sociologists and those interested in identity, business and management, governance, and development studies. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Restitution and memory; material restoration in Europe.
Diner (Hebrew U. of Jerusalem, Israel) and Wunberg (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften Wien, Austria) bring together contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, historians, legal experts, and scholars in literary studies in order to explore connections between memory and property as they relate to the question of post-conflict restitution. Opening papers discuss general questions of the tension between loss and material restitution and commissions of inquiry and the practice of restitution. Other papers discuss the restitution claims of rural Jews in southern Germany, plundered Jewish libraries and book collections as "arsenals of collective memory," restitution in Central Europe in the post-Cold War era, issues of restitution and national memory in Hungary and Austria, expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia following World War II, comparison of memories of Arabs expelled from Haifa (Israel) in 1948 with the memories of Jews that settled in Haifa after 1948, and German practices of compensation to Jews after World War II. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Rethinking migration; new theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Looking beyond the emotionalism and the hype, the contributors of these 14 essays describe new empirical research about what international migration really means to the nations and people involved in it. They begin by describing recent theoretical and methodological developments in the study of international migration, particularly in those conducted by the US and Europe, then turn to the process of policy development and the emerging emigration state. They consider the new ramifications of dual citizenship, immigrant incorporation in western democracies, and the development of transnational communities and immigrant enterprise, including modes of transformation and social field perspectives on societies. They analyze ethnic convergence in entrepreneurship, measurement of undocumented migration and illegal migration, new theories of intergenerational integration, re-interpreting generation issues, and the role of religion in the origins and adaptations of immigrant groups in France, Germany and the US. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
