Berghahn Books imprint: 740 books
Difference and Sameness as Modes of Integration
Anthropological Perspectives on Ethnicity and Religion
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2017
What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local...
Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-east Africa
Volume I: Ethiopia and Kenya
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2009
Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in northeast Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention...
On Retaliation
Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Basic Human Condition
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2017
Retaliation is associated with all forms of social and political organization, and retaliatory logics inform many different conflict resolution procedures from consensual settlement to compensation to violent escalations. This book derives a concept of retaliation from the overall notion of reciprocity,...
Arab Spring
Uprisings, Powers, Interventions
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2014
The events of the Arab Spring presented a dramatic reconstitution of politics and the public sphere through their aesthetic and performative uses of public space. Mass demonstrations have become a new global political form, grounded in the localization of globalizing processes, institutions, and relationships....
Order and Disorder
Anthropological Perspectives
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2008
Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining...
The Early Morning Phonecall
Somali Refugees' Remittances
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2010
As migration from poverty-stricken and conflict-affected countries continues to hit the headlines, this book focuses on an important counter-flow: the money that people send home. Despite considerable research on the impact of migration and remittances in countries of origin - increasingly viewed...
The State and the Social
State Formation in Botswana and its Precolonial and Colonial Genealogies
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2012
Botswana has been portrayed as a major case of exception in Africa—as an oasis of peace and harmony with an enduring parliamentary democracy, blessed with remarkable diamond-driven economic growth. Whereas the “failure” of other states on the continent is often attributed to the prevalence of...
The Power of Law in a Transnational World
Anthropological Enquiries
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2009
How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is...
Up, Down, and Sideways
Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2014
Using a “vertical slice” approach, anthropologists critically analyze the relationship between undemocratic uses and abuses of power and the survival of the human species. The contributors scrutinize modern institutions in a variety of regions—from Russia and Mexico to South Korea and the U.S....
Narratives in Motion
Journalism and Modernist Events in 1920s Portugal
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2016
Interwar Portugal was in many ways a microcosm of Europe’s encounter with modernity: reshaped by industrialization, urban growth, and the antagonism between liberalism and authoritarianism, it also witnessed new forms of media and mass culture that transformed daily life. This fascinating study...
Sustainable Development
An Appraisal from the Gulf Region
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2014
With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century. This volume gives a wide ranging introduction...
Racism in the Modern World
Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2011
Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia,...
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Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2016
For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange, and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at...
Sugarlandia Revisited
Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2007
Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world’s prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the...