Berghahn Books
Robbery & restitution; the conflict over Jewish property in Europe.
A January 2002 conference in Berlin drew historians from several European countries and the US who have studied the Holocaust in particular and World War II in general to discuss the theft of Jewish property by the Nazi regime and later restitution for the crimes. The 16 papers, just by dealing with so many countries and border-crossings, represents an example of European History, as opposed to national history. Frequent mention of this English edition suggest that there is another one, but no information is provided. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Selling the economic miracle; economic reconstruction and politics in West Germany, 1949-1957.
Spicka (history, Shippensburg U) explores the electoral messaging and public relations campaigns that were used by West Germany's Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union party coalition to sell their social market economic policies during the 1950s. He looks at the party politics behind the formulation of economic policy; the impact of price increases and economic crisis on German public opinion and how political leaders responded to public opinion; the allied public relations campaigns waged by the Society for the Promotion of Social Compromise, an organization founded by West German industry; the use of economic policy as an electoral symbol of defense from threats from the communist east; and the full flowering of the CDU/CSU's campaigning techniques in the Bundestag election of 1957. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Skilled visions; between apprenticeship and standards.
Editor Grasseni (anthropology, U. of Bergamo) and her contributors use case studies and maintain an ethnographic approach in their essays on the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of vision to provide new contexts for the critique of visualism in the debate on practice and the construction of knowledge. They examine the training of vision in a variety of settings and consider local knowledge not as a given but in its complex relationship with the overarching (and overwhelming) socio-technical network. Topics include the significance of vision in social anthropology, getting sight skills in cattle breeding, tying irony to cognition and cognition to visual skill, recognizing the role of play in medieval imaging, learning in workplaces, mapping and learning to see, and schooling the eye in scientific and medical settings, including developing new and appropriate ideas about insight, hindsight and second sight. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Strangers either way; the lives of Croatian refugees in their new home.
Politicians argued that providing a Croatian homeland would develop national identity and prevent ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and virulent nationalism. However, those who were more or less forced to migrate from Serbia to Croatia were treated as foreigners or aliens. Zmegac (international migration and transnational communities, The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb) describes the experiences of individual ethnic Croats whose migration was not at all a homecoming, covering the ethnology of individuals and her study of Croats from the Srijem area, the results of exchanges of farms and physical goods to complete the migration, nostalgia, resignation, sorrow and attempts at integration, the special case of the elderly, means of constructing difference and identifying the self, the tension between individual and collective integration, and the ways in which the receiving community affected success in transition. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Sustainability and communities of place.
Twelve essays presented by Maida (U. of California at Los Angeles) are principally concerned with exploring "the ways local communities have reinvented themselves using cultural knowledge to blend traditional sentiments with fully modern sensibilities, and to sustain both local and regional networks and the sense of cultural identity amid large-scale dislocations within their own societies and in the international economy." The contributions include case studies and theoretical papers examining conflicts between local and global knowledge in the operation of Alaska Native Corporations, bureaucratization as a threat to local knowledge and the environment in the Philippines, environmental politics and activism during the post-socialist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, food practices among urban ethnic migrant communities, attitudes towards land use and development in an urbanizing agricultural area of California, and social changes wrought from ecotourism. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
