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Berghahn New Paperbacks
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eBook available
April 2025 The Helmand Baluch
A Native Ethnography of the People of Southwest Afghanistan
Amiri, G. R.
The late Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Aghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan in the 1970s and published the ethnography in Farsi in Kabul in 1987. This volume, the first English translation, describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology
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eBook available
April 2025 The Vienna Gestapo, 1938-1945
Crimes, Perpetrators, Victims
Boeckl-Klamper, E., Mang, T., & Neugebauer, W.
The Vienna Gestapo was the most important instrument of Nazi terror on Austrian soil. Through expert historical analysis of the Vienna Gestapo in the years 1938-1945, this volume provides a comprehensive presentation of not only the victims of persecution but also of the structures, organization and individuals actively involved on the Gestapo side.
Subjects: History: World War II Jewish Studies
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eBook available
April 2025 Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation
Between Text and Practice
Hausmair, B., Jervis, B., Nugent, R., & Williams, E. (eds)
How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States, exploring the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the relationship between rules, lived experience, and social identity.
Subjects: Archaeology History: Medieval/Early Modern Sociology History (General)
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eBook available
April 2025 Island Historical Ecology
Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean
Siegel, P. (ed)
Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural intervention, focusing on selected islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. This volume goes on to compare these ecologies with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands, placing the Caribbean into a larger context of island historical ecology.
Subjects: Archaeology Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
April 2025 German Rule, African Subjects
State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia
Zimmerer, J.
This classic study, now available for the first time in English, explains how German colonial ambitions foundered in present-day Namibia. As it shows, the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities could not accommodate the practical, lived realities of both colonizer and colonized.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2025 History and Belonging
Representations of the Past in Contemporary European Politics
Berger, S. & Tekin, C. (eds)
One of the EU’s primary strategies in European unification has been to construct a common representation of European history, yet the question remains: is there an uncontested history of Europe? History and Belonging addresses this question along with many others related to the EU’s post-national identity policies.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2025 A History Shared and Divided
East and West Germany since the 1970s
Bösch, F. (ed)
Divided History uniquely explores how East and West Germany responded to the new challenges and crises of the 1970s, and reunification. Topics range from political, labor, and business issues to migration and environmental issues, showing how the two German states remained inextricably connected in the 1970s and 1980s.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2025 Fire on the Island
Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu
Bratrud, T.
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
May 2025 The Museum of Mankind
Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department
Burt, B.
The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997, as the devolved Ethnography Department of the British Museum. This memoir of over forty years’ service with the Department is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures.
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
May 2025 The Wheel of Autonomy
Rhetoric and Ethnicity in the Omo Valley
Girke, F.
Through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, this book offers an interactionalist analysis of how the Kara – a small population in southern Ethiopia – negotiate ethnic and non-ethnic differences among themselves, the relations with their various neighbors, and eventually their integration in the Ethiopian state.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
May 2025 Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples
Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development
Chatty, D. & Colchester, M. (eds)
The second edition of this remarkable book updates the immense advances in policy and soft international law with regards to the rights of mobile indigenous peoples in conservation.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
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eBook available
June 2025 The Southeast Asia Connection
Trade and Polities in the Eurasian World Economy, 500 BC–AD 500
Chew, S. C.
Over world history, Southeast Asia’s contribution to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not been given much attention. This book attempts to recalibrate these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than a region of peripheral entrepôts.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
June 2025 Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined
A European History of Concepts Beyond the Nation State
Ihalainen, P. & Holmila, A. (eds)
Understanding the dynamics between nationalisms and internationalisms allows evaluating ongoing processes and intervening in current debates. Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined, uses a multidisciplinary approach to a long term and macro-level history of international projects since the eighteenth century to assess how spaces of politics have been debated and redefined in different European political cultures.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century
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eBook available
June 2025 Planning for the Planet
Environmental Expertise and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1960–1980
Schleper, S.
In the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern not only led to widespread calls for new policies, but also created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise by the likes of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. This book explores how conservation experts confronted new challenges tied to rival scientific approaches, Cold War politics, decolonization, and more.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
June 2025 Artifak
Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu
DeBlock, H.
Artifak investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in Vanuatu, in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, and in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in the context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies
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eBook available
June 2025 Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire
Transnational Approaches
Habermas, R. (ed)
Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire sheds light on the multitude of worldviews, belief systems, and rituals that defined the borders between the secular and the religious in the German imperial era.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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June 2025 Stories Make the World
Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary
Most, S.
Today, at a time when we are seeking to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and conflicting narratives, an understanding of storytelling is of vital importance for making sense of the world. In this book, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary film and other forms of storytelling remain so essential today.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Literary Studies
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eBook available
July 2025 Constructing Industrial Pasts
Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation
Berger, S. (ed)
The contributions in this volume demonstrate that even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches as well as straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Heritage Studies
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eBook available
July 2025 Ambiguous Transitions
Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania
Massino, J.
Ambiguous Transitions provides an accessible, intimate exploration of gender and citizenship in socialist Romania. Author Jill M. Massino connects women’s everyday lives to larger political, economic, and social processes, challenging conventional understandings of life in socialist Romania as uniformly oppressive.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
July 2025 Exchanging Objects
Nineteenth-Century Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution
Nichols, C. A.
As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange.
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
July 2025 Chinese Medicine in East Africa
An Intimacy with Strangers
Hsu, E.
Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
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eBook available
July 2025 In the Meantime
Toward an Anthropology of the Possible
Masquelier, A. & Durham, D. (eds)
The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
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July 2025 Elsdon Best
Holman, J. P. & Delgado Rosa, F.
This volume is dedicated to the New Zealander ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931) who is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
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eBook available
August 2025 The Art of Resistance
Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century
Fiddler, A.
The 1999 Austrian election results produced an uprising against a turn to the political right. The Art of Resistance examines artworks created in responses to the Freedom Party of Austria and analyses the styles and strategies deployed by a large range of artists who clashed against increased normalization of far-right thinking.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
August 2025 Ice and Snow in the Cold War
Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments
Herzberg, J., Kehrt, C., & Torma, F. (eds)
This fascinating volume demonstrates that regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery were of no small importance during the Cold War. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of “East” and “West.”
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Environmental Studies (General)
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eBook available
August 2025 Of Jaguars and Butterflies
Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy
Lloyd, G. & Vilaça, A.
Jointly authored by an anthropologist and a philosopher, this book investigates some of the most puzzling ideas and practices reported in modern ethnography and ancient philosophy concerning topics such as humans, animals, persons, spirits, agency, selfhood, consciousness, nature, life, death, disease and health.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
August 2025 Exceptional Experiences
Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork
Rethmann, P. & Wulff, H. (eds)
Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)