Please welcome guest bloggers Joana Breidenbach and Nyiri Pal

Please welcome two new guest bloggers, Joana Breidenbach and Nyiri Pal!

Joana Breidenbach obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in Munich in 1994.  Since 1992 she has written many books and articles on cultural globalisation, tourism and migration, including Tanz der Kulturen (The Dance of Cultures, with Ina Zukrigl, Munich: Kunstmann, 1998), a book that played a major role in introducing the issue of cultural globalisation into German public debates. She has been a columnist for the German business monthly brand eins and has published in journals as diverse as GEO and Current Anthropology. In 2007, she co-founded betterplace.org, an online market place for social initiative, where she heads the betterplaceLAB. She lives with her husband and two children in Berlin.

Nyíri Pál studied in Hungary, the U.S. and Russia. Most of his research has been on Chinese migration overseas; recently, he has been interested in contemporary Chinese ‘concessions’ overseas. He is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His most recent book, Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China, is coming out this spring from the University of Washington Press.

Seeing Culture Everywhere was written as a plea against the cultural determinism that is so common in today’s public debates, with the non-anthropologist reader in mind. The book traces the emergence of ‘culturalism’ (group cultural difference as an explanatory and normative paradigm) from international relations to the nation-state’s management of diversity and down to corporate trainings, suggesting reasons for the pervasiveness of this approach and advocating its replacement with an ethnographic perspective and practice.

I look forward to reading their posts and bid them a warm welcome!