Category Archives: Blog

Polina Manolova: Brexit and the production of “illegal” EU migrants

Bulgarians on their way to the “West” EU immigration was the primary source of contention in the debates surrounding the recent referendum about the United Kingdom’s EU membership. The “leave” campaign continuously bombarded the public with warnings about “uncontrollable hordes” of EU benefit seekers (for a discussion on the construction of migrant categories, see Apostolova […]

Katharina Bodirsky: The UK voted out: Some reflections on European “unity in diversity”

Against the predictions of the last polls, a narrow majority of the UK voters decided to leave the EU. Once again, the political crisis of Europe has deepened. And once again, it does not seem as if this deepening of the crisis will force a fundamental reorientation of the “European project.” In the following, I […]

Focaal Volume 2016, Issue 75: In/visible—In/secure

Zoë Goodman: What’s the point of the “Mauss haus”? The Gift and anthropology today

On 30 April 2016, a group of anthropological heavyweights congregated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), under the aegis of a workshop entitled “The gift that keeps on giving.” The workshop, organized to launch Jane Guyer’s expanded edition of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (2016), brought into being the third […]

Focaal Volume 2016, Issue 74: After dispossession

We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal. This issue’s theme section, titled “After dispossession” and guest edited by Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen, addresses how seemingly global processes become entangled in local affairs […]

Ines Hasselberg: Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

Enduring Uncertainty is a volume of the “Dislocations” series published by Berghahn Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and […]

Chris Hann: On Saxony-Anhalt bashing

Regional elections in Germany have seldom if ever attracted as much attention as they did on Sunday, 13 March 2016. This was the first opportunity for the electorate to express its opinion about the “refugee policy” pursued by Chancellor Angela Merkel since early September 2015. Not only her own Christian Democratic Union but also the […]

Judith Beyer & Felix Girke: Naypyitaw: Rescaling materiality, capitalizing space

Since 2012, we have carried out twelve months of urban anthropological research in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and its economic and cultural center. Until February 2016, however, we had not once visited the country’s capital, Naypyitaw, a planned city of immense size. It had not been a priority for our work, but we also had […]

Anna Hedlund: Sharp lines, blurred structures: Politics of wartime rape in armed conflict

Whenever there is armed conflict, sexual violence and rape, often against women and girls, soon emerge as central concerns in the global public. This is an important topic, as rape is often used as “a weapon of war.” It is a dangerous concern, nevertheless. Opposing war parties commonly develop public relations strategies aimed at exploiting […]

Elissa Helms: Men at the borders: Gender, victimhood, and war in Europe’s refugee crisis

This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). Even for the kind of conservative politics that argues for keeping asylum seekers out of the European Union or the United States, a variety of social roles and behavior are deemed acceptable for […]