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: Fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival
Author: Nordstrom, Carolyn 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Fieldwork Under Fire is a path-breaking collection of essays written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. These essays combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often surprising creative strategies people use to survive.In "writing violence," the authors give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, these essays bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.   [brief]
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Title: Big money crime: fraud and politics in the savings and loan crisis
Author: Calavita, Kitty
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Economics and Business | Criminology
Publisher's Description: At a cost of $500 billion to American taxpayers, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was the worst financial crisis of the twentieth century as well as a crime unparalleled in American history. Yet the vast majority of its perpetrators will never be prosecuted, and those who were have received minimal sentences. In the first in-depth scrutiny of the ways and means of this disaster, this groundbreaking book comes to disturbing conclusions about the deliberate nature of this financial fraud, the political collusion involved, and the leniency of the criminal justice system in dealing with these "Gucci-clad white-collar criminals."Using material from over one hundred interviews with government officials and industry leaders and recently declassified documents, the authors show how - contrary to previous government and "expert" explanations that chalked the disaster up to business risks gone awry or adverse economic conditions - S&L leaders engaged in deliberate fraud, stealing from their own corporations to speculate on high-risk ventures. Tempted by the insurance net, perpetrators looted their own institutions in a new kind of white-collar crime the authors dub "collective embezzlement." Big Money Crime also demonstrates how systematic political collusion - not just policy errors - was a critical ingredient in this unprecedented series of frauds. Bringing together statistics from a variety of government agencies, the authors provide a close reading of the track record of prosecutions and sentencing and find that "suite crime" receives much more lenient treatment than "street crime," despite its significantly higher price tag. The book concludes with a number of modest, but no less urgent, policy recommendations to counter the current deregulatory trend and to avert a replay of the S&L debacle in other financial sectors. FROM THE BOOK :"We built thick walls; we have cameras; we have time clocks on the vaults . . . all these controls were to protect against somebody stealing the cash. Well, you can steal far more money, and take it out the back door. The best way to rob a bank is to own one." - House Committee on Government Operations, 1988   [brief]
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Title: Crime, cultural conflict, and justice in rural Russia, 1856-1914
Author: Frank, Stephen 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems | European History | Law | Criminology
Publisher's Description: This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality - and of peasants - with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.   [brief]
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Title: Hooliganism: crime, culture, and power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 
Author: Neuberger, Joan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: n this pioneering analysis of diffuse underclass anger that simmers in many societies, Joan Neuberger takes us to the streets of St. Petersburg in 1900-1914 to show us how the phenomenon labeled hooliganism came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern city: increasing hostility between class . . . [more]
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Title: After the lovedeath: sexual violence and the making of culture
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | Music
Publisher's Description: This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.To make his case, Kramer uses operatic lovedeaths, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the Tolstoy novella named after it; the writings of Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, psychoanalysis, and the logic of dreams. In formal and informal reflections, he explores the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he imagines alternatives that could allow gender to be freed from the existing system of polarities that inevitably promote sexual violence.Kramer's writing avoids the conventional dress of intellectual authority and moves between music and literature in a style that is both intimate and effective. He combines informed scholarship with candid personal utterance and makes clear what is at stake in this crucial debate. After the Lovedeath will have a profound impact on anyone interested in new ways to think about gender.   [brief]
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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: Yakuza: Japan's criminal underworld
Author: Kaplan, David E 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Japan | Politics | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong - more than four times the size of the American Mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock most Westerners. Here is the first book to reveal the extraordinary reach of Japan's Mafia. Originally published in 1986, Yakuza was so controversial in Japan that it could not be published there for five years. But in the West it has long served as the standard reference on Japanese organized crime, inspiring novels, screenplays, and criminal investigations. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro spent nearly two decades conducting hundreds of interviews with everyone from street-level hoodlums and police to Japan's most powerful godfathers. The result is a searing indictment of corruption in the world's second-largest economy. This updated, expanded, and thoroughly revised edition of Yakuza tells the full story of Japan's remarkable crime syndicates, from their feudal start as bands of medieval outlaws to their emergence as billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business, art, and more.   [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 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: Mass mediations: new approaches to popular culture in the Middle East and beyond 
Author: Armbrust, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Media Studies | Music | Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West. The volume will have wide appeal both to Middle Eastern scholars and to readers interested in global and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Showing signs of violence: the cultural politics of a twentieth-century headhunting ritual 
Author: George, Kenneth M 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: Showing Signs of Violence deals with the ceremonies of pangngae, a mock headhunt that lingers stubbornly at the center of political life in a marginal upland community in Sulawesi, Indonesia. No killing takes place in this ritual - no actual heads are taken - but its rhetoric of violence is unmistakable and real.Kenneth M. George vividly details the rites of pangngae, from the headhunters' secret and predatory journey downriver to the week of public festivity that follows their exuberant return. He puts special emphasis on the songs, speeches, and liturgies of the headhunt and shows how this ritual is neither a relic form of primitive violence nor an obsolete discourse on the social horizons of a remote community. In fact, the themes, purposes, and circumstances of pangngae make it the most public and community-defining form of ceremonial violence for this small mountain enclave as it confronts the dilemmas presented by Indonesian modernity and state culture.   [brief]
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Title: Leveling crowds: ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in South Asia
Author: Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | Politics | Asian History | Religion
Publisher's Description: Ethno-nationalist conflicts are rampant today, causing immense human loss. Stanley J. Tambiah is concerned with the nature of the ethno-nationalist explosions that have disfigured so many regions of the world in recent years. He focuses primarily on collective violence in the form of civilian "riots" in South Asia, using selected instances in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India. He situates these riots in the larger political, economic, and religious contexts in which they took place and also examines the strategic actions and motivations of their principal agents. In applying a wide range of social theory to the problems of ethnic and religious violence, Tambiah pays close attention to the history and culture of the region.On one level this provocative book is a scrupulously detailed anthropological and historical study, but on another it is an attempt to understand the social and political changes needed for a more humane order, not just in South Asia, but throughout the world.   [brief]
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Title: Crimes against nature: squatters, poachers, thieves, and the hidden history of American conservation 
Author: Jacoby, Karl 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | United States History | Natural History
Publisher's Description: Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on the impact that conservation in these areas had on rural people, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting and fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in these newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This engagingly written study demonstrates the important ways in which class has influenced environmental history.   [brief]
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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: The Shanghai Green Gang: politics and organized crime, 1919-1937
Author: Martin, Brian G
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Politics | Criminology
Publisher's Description: In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence - from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports - to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide.Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.   [brief]
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Title: Epic encounters: culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
Author: McAlister, Melani 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Middle Eastern History | Popular Culture | Middle Eastern Studies | Ethnic Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: In the last half of the twentieth century, cultural products--from films and news reports to museum exhibits and novels--profoundly shaped ideas about the relationship between Americans and the Middle East. In this innovative book, Melani McAlister explores the cultural history of political interests, arguing that U.S. encounters with the Middle East were influenced by both the presence of oil and the religious symbolism of the region. McAlister's richly textured study shows how culture functions as a social and historical force in shaping politics and identity. She skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of popular culture with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic politics of race. McAlister begins by situating the postwar development of U.S.-Middle East relations, including the rise of anticolonialism and the establishment of the state of Israel. Subsequent chapters consider specific events and cultural texts such as the epic film The Ten Commandments, the King Tut museum exhibit, writings from the Black arts movement, the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis, and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In each of these cases, McAlister demonstrates how representations of the Middle East have been a site of struggle over both the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the construction of race, religion, and gender within the United States. Truly interdisciplinary, this work will appeal to a wide audience as it illuminates the significant intersection of culture and politics that is at the heart of both nationalism and globalization.   [brief]
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Title: When abortion was a crime: women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973 
Author: Reagan, Leslie J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | United States History | Medicine
Publisher's Description: As we approach the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade , it's crucial to look back to the time when abortion was illegal. Leslie Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion, which although illegal was nonetheless widely available, but always with threats for both doctor and patient. In a time when many young women don't even know that there was a period when abortion was a crime, this work offers chilling and vital lessons of importance to everyone.The linking of the words "abortion" and "crime" emphasizes the difficult and painful history that is the focus of Leslie J. Reagan's important book. Her study is the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with Roe v. Wade in 1973. Although illegal, millions of abortions were provided during these years to women of every class, race, and marital status. The experiences and perspectives of these women, as well as their physicians and midwives, are movingly portrayed here.Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion. While abortions have been typically portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, she finds that abortion providers often practiced openly and safely. Moreover, numerous physicians performed abortions, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women often found cooperative practioners, but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat.Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion again under attack in the United States, this book offers vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.   [brief]
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Title: Violence workers: police torturers and murderers reconstruct Brazilian atrocities
Author: Huggins, Martha Knisely 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Of the twenty-three Brazilian policemen interviewed in depth for this landmark study, fourteen were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "violence workers" and the other group of "atrocity facilitators" who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: Why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds - on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?   [brief]
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Title: Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel 
Author: Ron, James
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | European Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Christianity | Judaism | Islam | Christianity
Publisher's Description: James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion. Frontiers and Ghettos presents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on Ron's field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, Turkey, and Africa, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today's nationalist wars.   [brief]
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