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Berghahn Books

    Blood and Fire
    Introductory Readings in Anthropology
    Genocide in the Ottoman Empire
    Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology
    Deleuzian Intersections
    Struggles for Home
    • 2024

      The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

      Remaking the Human
    • 2024

      Through a series of empirically and theoretically informed reflections, Opening Up the University offers insights into the process of setting up and running programs that cater to displaced students. Including contributions from educators, administrators, practitioners, and students, this expansive collected volume aims to inspire and question those who are considering creating their own interventions, speaking to policy makers and university administrators on specific points relating to the access and success of refugees in higher education, and suggests concrete avenues for further action within existing academic structures.

      Opening Up the University
    • 2024

      Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.

      Arctic Abstractive Industry
    • 2024

      The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants' lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.

      Tangled Mobilities
    • 2024

      Ownership of cryptocurrencies and related assets has given rise to self-described "coin-communities." Discussing the notions around social dynamics, this collection explores how crowd and community formations manifest empirically in cryptocurrency sociality online. It suggests that tensions between cryptocurrency adopters generate political, moral, and cosmological realities, which intensify crowding dynamics online. Pioneering in its approach to the increasing digitalization and datafication of everyday life, the volume encourages scholars to explore further how "decentralized" and "trustless" technologies take part in the construction of postmodern crowds.

      Crypto Crowds
    • 2024

      The vast majority of forced migrants & refugees seek shelter and respite in countries of the Global South, where humanitarian spaces and practices of care are no exceptions to international humanitarianism but rather part of a project founded on hybrid forms of care that include local and vernacular practices. Care in a Time of Humanitarianism presents complex histories of forced migration and humanitarianism in an accessible way. It applies a comparative approach to highlight the diverse cultural and religious traditions of care that are adopted across the Global South for the "distant others".

      Care in a Time of Humanitarianism
    • 2023

      Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

      Ethnographies of Power
    • 2023

      Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

      Resisting Persecution
    • 2023

      The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish "outsiders" to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness - as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text - these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

      Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema
    • 2023

      The distinction between basic and applied research was central to twentieth-century science and policymaking, and if this framework has been contested in recent years, it nonetheless remains ubiquitous in both scientific and public discourse. Employing a transnational, diachronic perspective informed by historical semantics, this volume traces the conceptual history of the basic-applied distinction from the nineteenth century to today, taking stock of European developments alongside comparative case studies from the United States and China. It shows how an older dichotomy of pure and applied science was reconceived in response to rapid scientific progress and then further transformed by the geopolitical circumstances of the postwar era.

      Basic and Applied Research