Title: Reversible destiny: mafia, antimafia, and the struggle for Palermo
Author: Schneider, Jane 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | History | Politics | Criminology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities. Charting the efforts of both the judiciary and a citizen's social movement to reverse the mafia's economic, political, and cultural power, the authors establish a framework for understanding both the difficulties and the accomplishments of Sicily's multifaceted antimafia efforts.   [brief]
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Title: Friends, brothers, and informants: fieldwork memoirs of Banaras 
Author: Kumar, Nita 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: "Why was Banaras such a mystery to me when I arrived in 1981? Was it ironically because I was an Indian and expected to have a privileged insight into it?"In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor.We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society.The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork - of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones - are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations - habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance - impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.   [brief]
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Title: Importing diversity: inside Japan's JET Program
Author: McConnell, David L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Politics | Education
Publisher's Description: In 1987, the Japanese government inaugurated the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program in response to global pressure to "internationalize" its society. This ambitious program has grown to be a major government operation, with an annual budget of $400 million (greater than the United States NEA and NEH combined) and more than six thousand foreign nationals employed each year in public schools all over Japan.How does a relatively homogeneous and insular society react when a buzzword is suddenly turned into a reality? How did the arrival of so many foreigners affect Japan's educational bureaucracy? How did the foreigners themselves feel upon discovering that English teaching was not the primary goal of the program? In this balanced study of the JET program, David L. McConnell draws on ten years of ethnographic research to explore the cultural and political dynamics of internationalization in Japan. Through vignettes and firsthand accounts, he highlights and interprets the misunderstandings of the early years of the program, traces the culture clashes at all levels of the bureaucracy, and speculates on what lessons the JET program holds for other multicultural initiatives.This fascinating book's jargon-free style and interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to educators, policy analysts, students of Japan, and prospective and former JET participants.   [brief]
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Title: Testing testing: social consequences of the examined life 
Author: Hanson, F. Allan 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Medical Anthropology | Psychiatry
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Title: Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China 
Author: Harrell, Stevan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | China | Ethnic Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, the first scholarly study in a Western language on the Yi in four decades, brings this little-known part of the world to life. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China is a remarkable collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being valuable as an ethnographic study, this book is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. This book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: Families of the forest: the Matsigenka Indians of the Peruvian Amazon
Author: Johnson, Allen W
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Ecology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The idea of a family level society, discussed and disputed by anthropologists for nearly half a century, assumes moving, breathing form in Families of the Forest. According to Allen Johnson's deft ethnography, the Matsigenka people of southeastern Peru cannot be understood or appreciated except as a family level society; the family level of sociocultural integration is for them a lived reality. Under ordinary circumstances, the largest social units are individual households or small extended-family hamlets. In the absence of such "tribal" features as villages, territorial defense and warfare, local or regional leaders, and public ceremonials, these people put a premium on economic self-reliance, control of aggression within intimate family settings, and freedom to believe and act in their own perceived self-interest. Johnson shows how the Matsigenka, whose home is the Amazon rainforest, are able to meet virtually all their material needs with the skills and labor available to the individual household. They try to raise their children to be independent and self-reliant, yet in control of their emotional, impulsive natures, so that they can get along in intimate, cooperative living groups. Their belief that self-centered impulsiveness is dangerous and self-control is fulfilling anchors their moral framework, which is expressed in abundant stories and myths. Although, as Johnson points out, such people are often described in negative terms as lacking in features of social and cultural complexity, he finds their small-community lifestyle efficient, rewarding, and very well adapted to their environment.   [brief]
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Title: Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern world
Author: Wolf, Eric R 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This collection of twenty-eight essays by renowned anthropologist Eric R. Wolf is a legacy of some of his most original work, with an insightful foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the essays, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, Wolf prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, as well as an intellectual autobiography that introduces the collection as a whole. Sydel Silverman, who completed the editing of the book, says in her preface, "He wanted this selection of his writings over the past half-century to serve as part of the history of how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems into its purview."   [brief]
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Title: Reason and passion: representations of gender in a Malay society 
Author: Peletz, Michael G
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This book provides a historical and ethnographic examination of gender relations in Malay society, in particular in the well-known state of Negeri Sembilan, famous for its unusual mixture of Islam and matrilineal descent. Peletz analyzes the diverse ways in which the evocative, heavily gendered symbols of "reason" and "passion" are deployed by Malay Muslims. Unlike many studies of gender, this book elucidates the cultural and political processes implicated in the constitution of both feminine and masculine identity. It also scrutinizes the relationship between gender and kinship and weighs the role of ideology in everyday life.Peletz insists on the importance of examining gender systems not as social isolates, but in relation to other patterns of hierarchy and social difference. His study is historical and comparative; it also explores the political economy of contested symbols and meanings. More than a treatise on gender and social change in a Malay society, this book presents a valuable and deeply interesting model for the analysis of gender and culture by addressing issues of hegemony and cultural domination at the heart of contemporary cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to go to school in Japan: the transition from home to preschool life
Author: Peak, Lois
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Education
Publisher's Description: Japanese two-year-olds are indulged, dependent, and undisciplined toddlers, but by the age of six they have become obedient, self-reliant, and cooperative students. When Lois Peak traveled to Japan in search of the "magical childrearing technique" behind this transformation, she discovered that the answer lies not in the family but in the preschool, where teachers gently train their pupils in proper group behavior. Using case studies drawn from two contrasting schools, Peak documents the important early stages of socialization in Japanese culture.Contrary to popular perceptions, Japanese preschools are play-centered environments that pay little attention to academic preparation. It is here that Japanese children learn their first lessons in group life. The primary goal of these cheerful--even boisterous--settings is not to teach academic facts of learning-readiness skills but to inculcate behavior and attitudes appropriate to life in public social situations.Peak compares the behavior considered permissible at home with that required of children at preschool, and argues that the teacher is expected to be the primary agent in the child's transition. Step by step, she brings the socialization process to life, through a skillful combination of classroom observations, interviews with mothers and teachers, transcripts of classroom events, and quotations from Japanese professional literature.   [brief]
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Title: The way the world is: cultural processes and social relations among the Mombasa Swahili 
Author: Swartz, Marc J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Marc Swartz takes us for the first time into the homes and neighborhoods of the Swahili in the East African port of Mombasa. At the same time he develops a new model for the operation and transmission of culture.In asking how cultural elements influence the social behavior of those who do not share them as well as of those who do, Swartz points to the mediation of status. The many types of status available to individuals provide guidelines that help explain, for example, why the broadly shared elements of Swahili culture (Islamic religion or the nuclear family) do not alone translate into behavior. The Way the World Is demonstrates in a highly original way how culture "works."   [brief]
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Title: Refuge of the honored: social organization in a Japanese retirement community 
Author: Kinoshita, Yasuhito 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Japan
Publisher's Description: Faced with the decline of the traditional family and the explosive growth of the over-65 population, the Japanese are looking for new ways to care for their elders. This timely study documents the birth of a major social phenomenon in Japan - the planned retirement community.In the mid-1980s, Yasuhito Kinoshita spent a year living in Japan's first such community, Fuji-no-Sato. His collaboration with Christie W. Kiefer, a cultural gerontologist, is the first detailed study of a retirement community in a non-Western culture.Fuji-no-Sato is a social community with no visible traditions. Kinoshita and Kiefer show that its residents' preference for long-established relationships creates the need for the invention of relationships that have no precedent in Japanese society.This book reveals much about Japanese culture, and about the "graying of society" that plagues the newly industrialized countries of Asia. Its lessons about sensitivity to the elderly's values and the need for clear communication have important applications in other cultures as well.   [brief]
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Title: Sex and sensibility: stories of a lesbian generation
Author: Stein, Arlene
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In the first book to analyze shifts in lesbian identity, consciousness, and culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, Arlene Stein contributes an important chapter to the study of the women's movement and offers a revealing portrait of the exchange between a radical generation of feminists and its successors. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian movement from the bar scene to the growth of alternative families, Stein illustrates how a generation of women transformed the woman-centered ideals of feminism into a culture and a lifestyle. Sex and Sensibility relates the development of a "queer" sensibility in the 1990s to the foundation laid by the gay rights and feminist movements a generation earlier. Beginning with the stories of thirty women who came of age at the climax of the 70s women's movement - many of whom defined lesbianism as a form of resistance to dominant gender and sexual norms - Stein explores the complex issues of identity that these women confronted as they discovered who they were and defined themselves in relation to their communities and to society at large. Sex and Sensibility ends with interviews of ten younger women, members of the post-feminist generation who have made it a fashion to dismiss lesbian feminism as overly idealistic and reductive. Enmeshed in Stein's compelling and personal narrative are coming-out experiences, questions of separatism, work, desire, children, and family. Stein considers the multiple identities of women of color and the experiences of intermittent and "ex" lesbians.Was the lesbian feminist experiment a success? What has become of these ideas and the women who held them? In answering these questions, Stein illustrates the lasting and profound effect that the lesbian feminist movement had, and continues to have, on contemporary women's definitions of sexual identity.   [brief]
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Title: The hyena people: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia
Author: Salamon, Hagar
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Anthropology | African Studies
Publisher's Description: The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. Hagar Salamon presents the first in-depth study of this group, called the "Hyena people" by their non-Jewish neighbors. Based on more than 100 interviews with Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel, Salamon's book explores the Ethiopia within as seen through the lens of individual memories and expressed through ongoing dialogues. It is an ethnography of the fantasies and fears that divide groups and, in particular, Jews and non-Jews.Recurring patterns can be seen in Salamon's interviews, which thematically touch on religious disputations, purity and impurity, the concept of blood, slavery and conversion, supernatural powers, and the metaphors of clay vessels, water, and fire. The Hyena People helps unravel the complex nature of religious coexistence in Ethiopia and also provides important new tools for analyzing and evaluating inter-religious, interethnic, and especially Jewish-Christian relations in a variety of cultural and historical contexts.   [brief]
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Title: Is Taiwan Chinese?: the impact of culture, power, and migration on changing identities
Author: Brown, Melissa J
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | China | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The "one China" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience - not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.   [brief]
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Title: Out of our minds: reason and madness in the exploration of Central Africa: the Ad. E. Jensen lectures at the Frobenius Institut, University of Frankfurt
Author: Fabian, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | African History | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.   [brief]
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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: Deeply into the bone: re-inventing rites of passage
Author: Grimes, Ronald L 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Anthropology | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Over the past two decades, North Americans have become increasingly interested in understanding and reclaiming the rites that mark significant life passages. In the absence of meaningful rites of passage, we speed through the dangerous intersections of life and often come to regret missing an opportunity to contemplate a child's birth, mark the arrival of maturity, or meditate on the loss of a loved one. Providing a highly personal, thoroughly informed, and cross-cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this book illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions. The work of a major scholar who has spent years writing and teaching about ritual, Deeply into the Bone instigates a conversation in which readers can fruitfully reflect on their own experiences of passage. Covering the significant life events of birth, initiation, marriage, and death, chapters include first-person stories told by individuals who have undergone rites of passage, accounts of practices from around the world, brief histories of selected ritual traditions, and critical reflections probing popular assumptions about ritual. The book also explores innovative rites for other important events such as beginning school, same-sex commitment ceremonies, abortion, serious illness, divorce, and retirement. Taking us confidently into the abyss separating the spiritual from the social scientific, the personal from the scholarly, and the narrative from the analytical, Grimes synthesizes an impressive amount of information to help us find more insightful ways of comprehending life's great transitions. As we face our increasingly complex society, Deeply into the Bone will help us reclaim the power of rites and understand their effect on our lives.   [brief]
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Title: Mesocosm: Hinduism and the organization of a traditional Newar city in Nepal 
Author: Levy, Robert I. (Robert Isaac) 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Tibet | Hinduism | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Mesocosm is a study of Hinduism in its most fully realized form as a symbolic system for organizing the life of a particular kind of city - what the author terms an "archaic" city. The work is a detailed description and analysis of the symbolic world of Bhaktapur, a unicultural city in the Kathmandu Valley, a city which is perhaps the last surviving example of a type of organization once widespread in the ancient world.Robert Levy views Bhaktapur as a structured "mesocosm," mediating between the microcosm of individual self-conception and the macrocosm of the culturally conceived larger universe. The city is a bounded entity, grounded on a minutely divided and interrelated sacrilized space. It uses that space, roles assigned by an elaborate caste system, a semantically differentiated pantheon, and the tempos and forms of the festival year and rites of passage to construct a "civic dance," a web of communication and instruction which deeply affects the experience of Bhaktapur's citizens. Levy investigates the meaning of the community to the people who live there and suggests how the religious forms that have challenged Hinduism in South Asia - Christianity and, above all, Islam - are profoundly antithetical to Hinduism as the organizing principle for cities such as Bhaktapur. Mesocosm is a groundbreaking contribution to anthropology, social and religious history, and Indian and Nepalese studies.   [brief]
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Title: Healing the infertile family: strengthening your relationship in the search for parenthood 
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Unlike most infertility books that focus on medical treatment, Healing the Infertile Family examines the social and emotional problems experienced by couples confronting infertility and suggests how they can be alleviated. In this updated edition, Gay Becker discusses her most recent study of couple . . . [more]
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Title: Sensory biographies: lives and deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists
Author: Desjarlais, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Buddhism | Aging
Publisher's Description: Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.   [brief]
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