Title: Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain
Author: Ginsburg, Faye D
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Media Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Electronic Media | Postcolonial Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Sociology | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media - film, television, video - are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.   [brief]
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Title: The white scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and poor whites in Texas cotton culture
Author: Foley, Neil
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Ethnic Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In a book that fundamentally challenges our understanding of race in the United States, Neil Foley unravels the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This engrossing narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, bridges the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. The White Scourge describes a unique borderlands region, where the cultures of the South, West, and Mexico overlap, to provide a deeper understanding of the process of identity formation and to challenge the binary opposition between "black" and "white" that often dominates discussions of American race relations.In Texas, which by 1890 had become the nation's leading cotton-producing state, the presence of Mexican sharecroppers and farm workers complicated the black-white dyad that shaped rural labor relations in the South. With the transformation of agrarian society into corporate agribusiness, white racial identity began to fracture along class lines, further complicating categories of identity. Foley explores the "fringe of whiteness," an ethno-racial borderlands comprising Mexicans, African Americans, and poor whites, to trace shifting ideologies and power relations. By showing how many different ethnic groups are defined in relation to "whiteness," Foley redefines white racial identity as not simply a pinnacle of status but the complex racial, social, and economic matrix in which power and privilege are shared.Foley skillfully weaves archival material with oral history interviews, providing a richly detailed view of everyday life in the Texas cotton culture. Addressing the ways in which historical categories affect the lives of ordinary people, The White Scourge tells the broader story of racial identity in America; at the same time it paints an evocative picture of a unique American region. This truly multiracial narrative touches on many issues central to our understanding of American history: labor and the role of unions, gender roles and their relation to ethnicity, the demise of agrarian whiteness, and the Mexican-American experience.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of force: media and the construction of police brutality
Author: Lawrence, Regina G 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: When police brutality becomes front-page news, it triggers a sudden, intense interaction between the media, the public, and the police. Regina Lawrence ably demonstrates how these news events provide the raw materials for looking at underlying problems in American society. Journalists, policy makers, and the public use such stories to define a problematic situation, and this process of problem definition gives the media a crucial role in our public policy debates. Lawrence extensively analyzes more than 500 incidents of police use-of-force covered by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 1994, with additional analysis of more recent incidents such as as the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York. The incidents include but are not limited to those defined as "police brutality." Lawrence reveals the structural and cultural forces that both shape the news and allow police to define most use-of-force incidents, which occur in far greater numbers than are reported, she says. Lawrence explores the dilemma of obtaining critical media perspectives on policing policies. She examines the factors that made the coverage of the Rodney King beating so significant, particularly after the incident was captured on video. At the same time, she shows how an extraordinary news event involving the police can become a vehicle for marginalized social groups to gain entrance into the media arena. In contrasting "event-driven" problem definition with the more thoroughly studied "institutionally driven" news stories, Lawrence's book fills a major gap in media studies. It also offers a broader understanding of the interplay between the criminal justice system and the media in today's world.   [brief]
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Title: The worth of a child
Author: Murray, Thomas H 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Medicine | Social Problems | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child?Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child? The Worth of a Child couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists.   [brief]
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Title: In search of god the mother: the cult of Anatolian Cybele
Author: Roller, Lynn E
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | Ancient History | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Religion | Comparative Religions
Publisher's Description: This book examines one of the most intriguing figures in the religious life of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Phrygian Mother Goddess, known to the Greeks and Romans as Cybele or Magna Mater, the Great Mother. Her cult was particularly prominent in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), and spread from there through the Greek and Roman world. She was an enormously popular figure, attracting devotion from common people and potentates alike. This book is the first comprehensive assembly and discussion of the entire extant evidence concerning the worship of the Phrygian Mother Goddess, from her earliest appearance in the prehistoric record to the early centuries of the Roman Empire.Lynn E. Roller presents and analyzes literary, historiographic, and archaeological data with equal acuity and flair. While previous studies have tended to emphasize the more outrageous aspects of the Mother Goddess's cult, such as her orgiastic rituals and the eunuch priests who attended her, this book places a special focus on Cybele's position in Anatolia and the ways in which the identity of the goddess changed as her cult was transmitted to Greece and Rome. Roller gives a detailed account of the growth, spread, and evolution of her cult, her ceremonies, and her meaning for her adherents.This book will introduce students of Classical antiquity to many aspects of the Great Mother which have been previously unexamined, and will interest anyone who has ever been piqued by curiosity about the Mother Goddess of the ancient Western world.   [brief]
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Title: The lustre of our country: the American experience of religious freedom
Author: Noonan, John Thomas 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Law | United States History | Religion | American Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: A New York Times Notable Book This remarkable work offers a fresh approach to a freedom that is often taken for granted in the United States, yet is one of the strongest and proudest elements of American culture: religious freedom. In this compellingly written, distinctively personal book, Judge John T. Noonan asserts that freedom of religion, as James Madison conceived it, is an American invention previously unknown to any nation on earth. The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious liberty is central to the American experience and to American influence around the world.Noonan's original book is a history of the idea of religious liberty and its relationship with the law. He begins with an intellectual autobiography, describing his own religious and legal training. After setting the stage with autobiography, Noonan turns to history, with each chapter written in a new voice. One chapter takes the form of a catechism (questions and answers), presenting the history of the idea of religious freedom in Christianity and the American colonies. Another chapter on James Madison argues that Madison's support of religious freedom was not purely secular but rather the outcome of his own religious beliefs. A fictional sister of Alexis de Toqueville writes, contrary to her brother's work, that the U.S. government is very closely tied to religion. Other chapters offer straightforward considerations of constitutional law.Throughout the book, Noonan shows how the free exercise of religion led to profound changes in American law - he discusses abolition, temperance, and civil rights - and how the legal notion of religious liberty influenced revolutionary France, Japan, and Russia, as well as the Catholic Church during Vatican II. The Lustre of Our Country is a celebration of religious freedom - a personal and profound statement on what the author considers America's greatest moral contribution to the world.   [brief]
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Title: Academic freedom and the Japanese imperial university, 1868-1939
Author: Marshall, Byron K
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Education
Publisher's Description: Byron K. Marshall offers here a dramatic study of the changing nature and limits of academic freedom in prewar Japan, from the Meiji Restoration to the eve of World War II.Meiji leaders founded Tokyo Imperial University in the late nineteenth century to provide their new government with necessary technical and theoretical knowledge. An academic elite, armed with Western learning, gradually emerged and wielded significant influence throughout the state. When some faculty members criticized the conduct of the Russo-Japanese War the government threatened dismissals. The faculty and administration banded together, forcing the government to back down. By 1939, however, this solidarity had eroded. The conventional explanation for this erosion has been the lack of a tradition of autonomy among prewar Japanese universities. Marshall argues instead that these later purges resulted from the university's 40-year fixation on institutional autonomy at the expense of academic freedom.Marshall's finely nuanced analysis is complemented by extensive use of quantitative, biographical, and archival sources.   [brief]
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Title: Ahead of the curve: David Baltimore's life in science
Author: Crotty, Shane 1974-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Autobiographies and Biographies | History of Science | Science
Publisher's Description: Shane Crotty's biography of David Baltimore details the life and work of one of the most brilliant, powerful, and controversial scientists of our time. Although only in his early sixties, Baltimore has made major discoveries in molecular biology, established the prestigious Whitehead Institute at MIT, been president of Rockefeller University, won the Nobel Prize, and been vilified by detractors in one of the most scandalous and protracted investigations of scientific fraud ever. He is now president of Caltech and a leader in the search for an AIDS vaccine. Crotty not only tells the compelling story of this larger-than-life figure, he also treats the reader to a lucid account of the amazing revolution that has occurred in biology during the past forty years. Basing his narrative on many personal interviews, Crotty recounts the milestones of Baltimore's career: completing his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in eighteen months, participating in the anti - Vietnam War movement, winning a Nobel Prize at age thirty-seven for the codiscovery of reverse transcriptase, and co-organizing the recombinant DNA/genetic engineering moratorium. Along the way, readers learn what viruses are and what they do, what cancer is and how it happens, the complexities of the AIDS problem, how genetic engineering works, and why making a vaccine is a complicated process. And, as Crotty considers Baltimore's public life, he retells the famous scientific fraud saga and Baltimore's vindication after a decade of character assassination. Crotty possesses the alchemical skill of converting technical scientific history into entertaining prose as he conveys Baltimore's huge ambitions, intensity, scientific genius, attitude toward science and politics, and Baltimore's own view about what happened in the "Baltimore Affair." Ahead of the Curve shows why with his complex personality, keen involvement in public issues, and wide-ranging interests David Baltimore has not only shaped the face of American science as we know it today, but has also become a presence in our culture.   [brief]
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Title: Broken tablets: the cult of the law in French art from David to Delacroix 
Author: Ribner, Jonathan P
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art History | French Studies | European Literature | European History | Law
Publisher's Description: In this first study of art, law, and the legislator, Jonathan Ribner provides a revealing look at French art from 1789 to 1848, the period in which constitutional law was established in France. Drawing on several disciplines, he discusses how each of the early constitutional regimes in France used imagery suggesting the divine origin and sacred character of its laws.Primarily a study of art and politics, Broken Tablets discusses painting, sculpture, prints, and medals (many reproduced here for the first time), as well as contemporary literature, including the poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo. Ribner assesses the ways in which legislation imagery became an instrument of political propaganda, and he clearly illuminates the cult of the law as it became personalized under Napoleon, monarchist under the Restoration, and defensive under Louis-Phillipe.   [brief]
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Title: American media and mass culture: left perspectives
Author: Lazere, Donald
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: History | United States History | Media Studies
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Title: The fourth estate and the Constitution: freedom of the press in America 
Author: Powe, L. A. Scot
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Law | Politics | American Studies | Media Studies
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Title: Fear at the edge: state terror and resistance in Latin America
Author: Corradi, Juan E 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Despite the emergence of fragile democracies in Latin America in the 1980s, a legacy of fear and repression haunts this region. This provocative volume chronicles the effect of systematic state terror on the social fabric in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.The contributors, primarily Latin American scholars, examine the deep sense of insecurity and the complex social psychology of people who live in authoritarian regimes. There is Argentina, where the brutal repression of the 1976 coup almost completely smothered individuals who might once have opposed government practices, and Uruguay, where the government forced the population into neutrality and isolation and cast a silent pall on everyday life. Accounts of repression and resistance in Chile and Brazil are also vividly presented. The denial and rationalization by citizens in all four countries can only be understood in the context of the generalized fear and confusion created by the violent military campaigns, which included abductions, torture, and disappearances of alleged terrorists.The recent transition to civilian rule in these countries has spotlighted their powerful legacy of fear. These important essays reveal disturbing insights into how fear is generated, legitimized, accommodated, and resisted among people living under totalitarian rule.   [brief]
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Title: Nothing bad happens to good girls: fear of crime in women's lives
Author: Madriz, Esther 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies | Women's Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: "The possibility of being a victim of a crime is ever present on my mind; thinking about it as natural as breathing." - 40-year-old womanThis is a compelling analysis of how women in the United States perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior. Esther Madriz draws on focus groups and in-depth interviews to show the damage that fear can wreak on women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although anxiety about crime affects virtually every woman, Madriz shows that race and class position play a role in a woman's sense of vulnerability.Fear of crime has resulted in public demand for stronger and more repressive policies throughout the country. As funds for social programs are cut, Madriz points out, those for more prisons and police are on the increase. She also illustrates how media images of victims - "good" victims aren't culpable, "bad" victims invite trouble - and a tough political stance toward criminals are linked to a general climate of economic uncertainty and conservatism.Madriz argues that fear itself is a strong element in keeping women in subservient and self-limiting social positions. "Policing" themselves, they construct a restricted world that leads to positions of even greater subordination: Being a woman means being vulnerable. Considering the enormous attention given to crime today, including victims' rights and use of public funds, Madriz's informative study is especially timely.   [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: Searching for life: the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the disappeared children of Argentina
Author: Arditti, Rita 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: FROM THE BOOK :"I want to touch you and kiss you.""You are my mother's sister and only one year older; you must have something of my mother in you." - A found child after being returned to her family Searching for Life traces the courageous plight of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who challenged the ruthless dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Acting as both detectives and human rights advocates in an effort to find and recover their grandchildren, the Grandmothers identified fifty-seven of an estimated 500 children who had been kidnapped or born in detention centers. The Grandmothers' work also led to the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only bank of its kind in the world, and to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the "right to identity," that is now incorporated in the new adoption legislation in Argentina. Rita Arditti has conducted extensive interviews with twenty Grandmothers and twenty-five others connected with their work; her book is a testament to the courage, persistence, and strength of these "traditional" older women.The importance of the Grandmothers' work has effectively transcended the Argentine situation. Their tenacious pursuit of justice defies the culture of impunity and the historical amnesia that pervades Argentina and much of the rest of the world today. In addition to reconciling the "living disappeared" with their families of origin, these Grandmothers restored a chapter of history that, too, had been abducted and concealed from its rightful heirs.   [brief]
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Title: Building the fourth estate: democratization and the rise of a free press in Mexico
Author: Lawson, Chappell H 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Based on an in-depth examination of Mexico's print and broadcast media over the last twenty-five years, this book is the most richly detailed account available of the role of the media in democratization, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between changes in the press and changes in the political system. In addition to illuminating the nature of political change in Mexico, this accessibly written study also has broad implications for understanding the role of the mass media in democratization around the world.   [brief]
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Title: Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 
Author: Kinder, Marsha
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Television and Radio | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: How do children today learn to understand stories? Why do they respond so enthusiastically to home video games and to a myth like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And how are such fads related to multinational media mergers and the "new world order"? In assessing these questions, Marsha Kinder provides . . . [more]
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Title: The state and the mass media in Japan, 1918-1945
Author: Kasza, Gregory James
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Gregory Kasza examines state-society relations in interwar Japan through a case study of public policy toward radio, film, newspapers, and magazines.
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Title: Henry David Thoreau and the moral agency of knowing 
Author: Tauber, Alfred I
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Philosophy | Literature | History and Philosophy of Science | Ethics
Publisher's Description: In his graceful philosophical account, Alfred I. Tauber shows why Thoreau still seems so relevant today - more relevant in many respects than he seemed to his contemporaries. Although Thoreau has been skillfully and thoroughly examined as a writer, naturalist, mystic, historian, social thinker, Transcendentalist, and lifelong student, we may find in Tauber's portrait of Thoreau the moralist a characterization that binds all these aspects of his career together. Thoreau was caught at a critical turn in the history of science, between the ebb of Romanticism and the rising tide of positivism. He responded to the challenges posed by the new ideal of objectivity not by rejecting the scientific worldview, but by humanizing it for himself. Tauber portrays Thoreau as a man whose moral vision guided his life's work. Each of Thoreau's projects reflected a self-proclaimed "metaphysical ethics," an articulated program of self-discovery and self-knowing. By writing, by combining precision with poetry in his naturalist pursuits and simplicity with mystical fervor in his daily activity, Thoreau sought to live a life of virtue - one he would characterize as marked by deliberate choice. This unique vision of human agency and responsibility will still seem fresh and contemporary to readers at the start of the twenty-first century.   [brief]
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Title: Republic of fear: the politics of modern Iraq
Author: Makiya, Kanan
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: In 1968 a coup d'état brought into power an extraordinary regime in Iraq, one that stood apart from other regimes in the Middle East. Between 1968 and 1980, this new regime, headed by the Arab Ba'th Socialist party, used ruthless repression and relentless organization to transform the way Iraqis think and react to political questions. In just twelve years, a party of a few thousand people grew to include nearly ten percent of the Iraqi population.This book describes the experience of Ba'thism from 1968 to 1980 and analyzes the kind of political authority it engendered, culminating in the personality cult around Saddam Hussein. Fear, the author argues, is at the heart of Ba'thi politics and has become the cement for a genuine authority, however bizarre.Examining Iraqi history in a search for clues to understanding contemporary political affairs, the author illustrates how the quality of Ba'thi pan-Arabism as an ideology, the centrality of the first experience of pan-Arabism in Iraq, and the interaction between the Ba'th and communist parties in Iraq from 1958 to 1968 were crucial in shaping the current regime.Saddam Hussein's decision to launch all-out war against Iran in September 1980 marks the end of the first phase of this re-shaping of modern Iraqi politics. The Iraq-Iran war is a momentous event in its own right, but for Iraq, the author argues, the war diverts dissent against the Ba'thi regime by focusing attention on the specter of an enemy beyond Iraq's borders, thus masking a hidden potential for even greater violence inside Iraq.   [brief]
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