Berghahn Books imprint: 740 books
Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology
A Critical Synthesis
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2013
The concept of "cultural transmission" is central to much contemporary anthropological theory, since successful human reproduction through social systems is essential for effective survival and for enhancing the adaptiveness of individual humans and local populations. Yet, what is understood...
Cultures of Colour
Visual, Material, Textual
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorise and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural...
Starry Nights
Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2017
Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting...
Constitutional Courts in Comparison
The US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2016
Constitutional litigation in general attracts two distinct types of conflict: disputes of a highly politicized or culturally controversial nature and requests from citizens claiming a violation of a fundamental constitutional right. The side-by-side comparison between the U.S. Supreme Court and the...
Culture Wars
Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2010
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters...
Anthropology as Ethics
Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2008
Anthropology as Ethics is concerned with rethinking anthropology by rethinking the nature of reality. It develops the ontological implications of a defining thesis of the Manchester School: that all social orders exhibit basically conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Continental...
Probing the Limits of Categorization
The Bystander in Holocaust History
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2018
Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges...
Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion
Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2018
During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic, this...
Voyage Through the Twentieth Century
A Historian's Recollections and Reflections
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2009
The account of the author’s life, spent between Europe and America, is at the same time an account of his generation, one that came of age between the two World Wars. Recalling not only circumstances of his own situation but that of his friends, the author shows how this generation faced a reality...
From Weimar to Hitler
Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-1934
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2018
Though often depicted as a rapid political transformation, the Nazi seizure of power was in fact a process that extended from the appointment of the Papen cabinet in the early summer of 1932 through the Röhm blood purge two years later. Across fourteen rigorous and carefully researched chapters,...
Keywords of Mobility
Critical Engagements
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2016
Scholars from various disciplines have used key concepts to grasp mobilities, but as of yet, a working vocabulary of these has not been fully developed. Given this context and inspired in part by Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), this edited volume presents contributions that critically analyze...
by Michael Banton†
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2015
Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish “race” as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the...
War Stories
The War Memoir in History and Literature
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre’s surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to...
Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future
Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2017
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate...