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Title: Absent lord: ascetics and kings in a Jain ritual culture 
Author: Babb, Lawrence A
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to worship beings that one believes are completely indifferent to, and entirely beyond the reach of, any form of worship whatsoever? How would such a relationship with sacred beings affect the religious life of a community? Using these questions as his point of departure, Lawrence A. Babb explores the ritual culture of image-worshipping Svetambar Jains of the western Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.Jainism traces its lineages back to the ninth century B.C.E. and is, along with Buddhism, the only surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic religious traditions. It is known and celebrated for its systematic practice of non-violence and for the intense rigor of the asceticism it promotes. A unique aspect of Babb's study is his linking of the Jain tradition to the social identity of existing Jain communities.Babb concludes by showing that Jain ritual culture can be seen as a variation on pan-Indian ritual patterns. In illuminating this little-known religious tradition, he demonstrates that divine "absence" can be as rich as divine "presence" in its possibilities for informing a religious response to the cosmos.   [brief]
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Title: Fulk Nerra, the neo-Roman consul, 987-1040: a political biography of the Angevin count
Author: Bachrach, Bernard S 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval Studies | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants.Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography.   [brief]
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: Observations in Lower California 
Author: Baegert, Jacob 1717-1772
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: History | United States History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
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Title: Society and politics in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla 
Author: Bagge, Sverre 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval History | Medieval Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Heimskringla is the best known and most important book of Old Norse kings' sagas. A medieval masterpiece, the collection was written by Snorri Sturluson in the first half of the thirteenth century. The sagas have been studied primarily as literary sources and chronicles of specific historical events, but Sverre Bagge, a noted historian, finds in Heimskringla something more: a brimming guidebook to the culture and politics of Icelandic society.What kind of observer was Snorri Sturluson, and how did he see the world he lived in? Bagge concentrates on Snorri the historian, viewing him in the context of European history in general and contemporary Icelandic and Norwegian society in particular. But it is Snorri's perception of events that matters, more than the "real" events or the society that produced them. With chapters on themes such as conflicts and the "game of politics" that pervades the sagas, Bagge's analysis of Heimskringla is a model for contemporary historians now probing the relationship between narrative and history.   [brief]
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Title: The short, swift time of gods on earth: the Hohokam chronicles 
Author: Bahr, Donald M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: In the spring of 1935, at Snaketown, Arizona, two Pima Indians recounted and translated their entire traditional creation narrative. Juan Smith, reputedly the last tribesman with extensive knowledge of the Pima version of this story, spoke and sang while William Smith Allison translated into English and Julian Hayden, an archaeologist, recorded Allison's words verbatim. The resulting document, the "Hohokam Chronicles," is the most complete natively articulated Pima creation narrative ever written and a rare example of a single-narrator myth.Now this extraordinary work, composed of thirty-six separate stories, is presented in its entirety for the first time. Beautifully expressed, the narrative constitutes a kind of scripture for a native church, beginning with the creation of the universe out of the void and ending with the establishment in the sixteenth century of present-day villages. Central to the story is the murder/resurrection of a god-man, Siuuhu, who summoned the Pimas and Papagos (Tohono O'odham) as his army of vengeance and brought about the conquest of his murderers, the ancient Hohokam.Donald Bahr extensively annotates the text and supplements it with other Pima-Papago versions of similar stories. Important as a social and historic document, this book adds immeasurably to the growing body of Native American literature and to our knowledge of the development of Pima-Papago culture.   [brief]
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Title: Thing knowledge: a philosophy of scientific instruments
Author: Baird, Davis
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Philosophy | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.   [brief]
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Title: Coronations: medieval and early modern monarchic ritual 
Author: Bak, János M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: Fascination with royal pomp and circumstance is as old as kingship itself. The authors of Coronations examine royal ceremonies from the ninth to the sixteenth century, and find the very essence of the monarchical state in its public presentation of itself. This book is an enlightened response to the revived interest in political history, written from a perspective that cultural historians will also enjoy. The symbolic and ritual acts that served to represent and legitimate monarchical power in medieval and early modern Europe include not only royal and papal coronations but also festive entries, inaugural feasts, and rulers' funerals.Fifteen leading scholars from North America, Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Denmark explore the forms and the underlying meanings of such events, as well as problems of relevant scholarship on these subjects. All the contributions demonstrate the importance of in-depth study of rulership for the understanding of premodern power structures. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on the findings of ethnography and anthropology, combined with rigorous critical evaluation of the written and iconic evidence. The editor's historiographical introduction surveys the past and present of this field of study and proposes some new lines of inquiry. "For 'reality' is not a one-dimensional matter: even if we can establish what actually transpired, we still need to ask how it was perceived by those present."   [brief]
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Title: From savage to Negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954
Author: Baker, Lee D 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | African American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture, and the law. Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions - Plessy v. Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision of 1954) - Baker shows how racial categories change over time.Baker paints a vivid picture of the relationships between specific African American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. He demonstrates that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which skillfully appropriated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.   [brief]
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Title: When government fails: the Orange County bankruptcy
Author: Baldassare, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Economics and Business | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Law | California and the West
Publisher's Description: When Orange County, California, filed for Chapter 9 protection on December 6, 1994, it became the largest municipality in United States history to declare bankruptcy. In the first comprehensive analysis of this momentous fiscal crisis, Mark Baldassare uncovers the many twists and turns from the dark days in December 1994 to the financial recovery of June 1996. Utilizing a wealth of primary materials from the county government and Merrill Lynch, as well as interviews with key officials and players in this drama, Mark Baldassare untangles the causes of this $1.64 billion fiasco.He finds three factors critical to understanding the bankruptcy: one, the political fragmentation of the numerous local governments in the area; two, the fiscal conservatism underlying voters' feelings about their tax dollars; three, the financial austerity in state government and in meeting rising state expenditures. Baldassare finds that these forces help to explain how a county known for its affluence and conservative politics could have allowed its cities' school, water, transportation, and sanitation agencies to be held hostage to this failed investment pool. Meticulously examining the events that led up to the bankruptcy, the local officials' response to the fiscal emergency, and the road to fiscal recovery - as well as the governmental reforms engendered by the crisis - When Government Fails is a dramatic and instructive economic morality tale. Eminently readable, it underlines the dangers inherent in a freewheeling bull economy and the imperatives of local and state governments to protect fiscal assets. As Baldassare shows, Orange County need not - and should not - happen again.   [brief]
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: Russia's last capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1921 Lenin surprised foreign observers and many in his own Party, by calling for the legalization of private trade and manufacturing. Within a matter of months, this New Economic Policy (NEP) spawned many thousands of private entrepreneurs, dubbed Nepmen. After delineating this political background, Alan Ball turns his attention to the Nepmen themselves, examining where they came from, how they fared in competition with the socialist sector of the economy, their importance in the Soviet economy, and the consequences of their "liquidation" at the end of the 1920s. Alan Ball's history of this experiment with capitalism is strikingly relevant to current efforts toward economic reform in the USSR.   [brief]
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Title: The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and national identity
Author: Banet-Weiser, Sarah 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study.Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.   [brief]
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Title: A critic writes: essays by Reyner Banham
Author: Banham, Reyner
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Art | American Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings.The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.   [brief]
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Title: Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: legitimizing the Jewish diaspora 
Author: Bar-Kochva, Bezalel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | History | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Debate over the authenticity of "On the Jews" has persisted for nearly 1,900 years. Bezalel Bar-Kochva attempts to overcome this stalemate in his finely detailed and convincingly argued study that proves the forgery of the book and suggests not only a source for the text, but also a social, political, and cultural setting that explains its conception.Bar-Kochva argues that the author of this treatise belonged to the moderate conservative Jews of Alexandria, whose practices were contrary to the contemporary trends of Hellenistic Judaism. They rejected the application of Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretations of the Holy scriptures and advocated the use of Pentateuch Hebrew as the language for educating and for religious services. They showed a keen interest in Judea and identified themselves with the Jews of the Holy Land. "On the Jews," then, was the manifesto of this group and was written at the peak period of the Hasmonean kingdom. Its main purpose was to legitimize Jewish residence in Egypt, despite being explicitly prohibited in the Pentateuch, and to justify the continued residence of Jews there in a time of prosperity and expansion of the Jewish independent state.   [brief]
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Title: The Arab world: society, culture, and state
Author: Barakat, Halim Isber
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This wide-ranging examination of Arab society and culture offers a unique opportunity to know the Arab world from an Arab point of view. Halim Barakat, an expatriate Syrian who is both scholar and novelist, emphasizes the dynamic changes and diverse patterns that have characterized the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century.The Arab world is not one shaped by Islam, nor one simply explained by reference to the sectarian conflicts of a "mosaic" society. Instead, Barakat reveals a society that is highly complex, with many and various contending polarities. It is a society in a state of becoming and change, one whose social contradictions are at the root of the struggle to transcend dehumanizing conditions. Arguing from a perspective that is both radical and critical, Barakat is committed to the improvement of human conditions in the Arab world.   [brief]
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Title: China's new voices: popular music, ethnicity, gender, and politics, 1978-1997
Author: Baranovitch, Nimrod 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | China | Popular Music | Ethnomusicology | Politics | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the most comprehensive study to date of the rich popular music scene in contemporary China. Focusing on the city of Beijing and drawing upon extensive fieldwork, China's New Voices shows that during the 1980s and 1990s, rock and pop music, combined with new technologies and the new market economy, have enabled marginalized groups to achieve a new public voice that is often independent of the state. Nimrod Baranovitch analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on three important contexts: ethnicity, gender, and state politics. His study is a fascinating look at the relationship between popular music in China and broad cultural, social, and political changes that are taking place there. Baranovitch's sources include formal interviews and conversations conducted with some of China's most prominent rock and pop musicians and music critics, with ordinary people who provide lay perspectives on popular music culture, and with others involved in the music industry and in academia. Baranovitch also observed recording sessions, concerts, and dance parties, and draws upon TV broadcasts and many publications in Chinese about popular music. keywords: Ethnicity   [brief]
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Title: Cross-cultural filmmaking: a handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos
Author: Barbash, Ilisa 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Ethnic Studies | Photography
Publisher's Description: This extraordinary handbook was inspired by the distinctive concerns of anthropologists and others who film people in the field. The authors cover the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of filming, from fundraising to exhibition, in lucid and complete detail - information never before assembled in one place. The first section discusses filmmaking styles and the assumptions that frequently hide unacknowledged behind them, as well as the practical and ethical issues involved in moving from fieldwork to filmmaking. The second section concisely and clearly explains the technical aspects, including how to select and use equipment, how to shoot film and video, and the reasons for choosing one or the other, and how to record sound. Finally, the third section outlines the entire process of filmmaking: preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution. Filled with useful illustrations and covering documentary and ethnographic filmmaking of all kinds, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking will be as essential to the anthropologist or independent documentarian on location as to the student in the classroom.   [brief]
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Title: Surviving freedom: after the Gulag
Author: Bardach, Janusz
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European Studies | Sociology | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in the reign of terror that Stalin perpetrated on his own people. In the critically acclaimed Man Is Wolf to Man, Bardach recounted his horrific experiences in the Kolyma labor camps in northeastern Siberia, the deadliest camps in Stalin's gulag system. In this sequel Bardach picks up the narrative in March 1946, when he was released. He traces his thousand-mile journey from the northeastern Siberian gold mines to Moscow in the period after the war, when the country was still in turmoil. He chronicles his reunion with his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the Polish embassy in Moscow; his experiences as a medical student in the Stalinist Soviet Union; and his trip back to his hometown, where he confronts the shattering realization of the toll the war has taken, including the deaths of his wife, parents, and sister. In a trenchant exploration of loss, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and existential loneliness, Bardach plumbs his ordeal with honesty and compassion, affording a literary window into the soul of a Stalinist gulag survivor. Surviving Freedom is his moving account of how he rebuilt his life after tremendous hardship and personal loss. It is also a unique portrait of postwar Stalinist Moscow as seen through the eyes of a person who is both an insider and outsider. Bardach's journey from prisoner back to citizen and from labor camp to freedom is an inspiring tale of the universal human story of suffering and recovery.   [brief]
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Title: Of women, outcastes, peasants, and rebels: a selection of Bengali short stories
Author: Bardhan, Kalpana
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Fiction | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Until now the large body of socially focused Bengali literature has remained little known to Western readers. This collection includes some of the finest examples of Bengali short stories - stories that reflect the turmoil of a changing society traditionally characterized by rigid hierarchical structures of privilege and class differentiation.Written over a span of roughly ninety years from the early 1890s to the late 1970s, the twenty stories in this collection represent the work of five authors. Their characters, drawn from widely varying social groups, often find themselves caught up in tumultuous political and social upheaval.The reader encounters Rabindranath Thakur's extraordinarily spirited and bold heroines; Manik Bandyopadhyay's peasants, laborers, fisherfolk, and outcastes; and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's rural underclass of snake-charmers, corpse-handlers, stick-wielders, potters, witches, and Vaishnava minstrels. Mahasweta Devi gives voice to the semi-landless tribals and untouchables effectively denied the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution; Hasan Azizul Huq depicts the plight of the impoverished of Bangladesh.   [brief]
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