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Title: Evolution of sickness and healing 
Author: Fabrega, Horacio
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Medicine | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine.To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework.   [brief]
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Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya 
Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African History
Publisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years.   [brief]
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Title: The temptations of evolutionary ethics 
Author: Farber, Paul Lawrence 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | History | Ethics | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory.Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture.Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten - thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes.Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.   [brief]
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Title: AIDS: the making of a chronic disease 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Medicine | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past: it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague.In this follow-up to AIDS: The Burdens of History , editors Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox present essays that describe how AIDS has come to be regarded as a chronic disease. Representing diverse fields and professions, the twenty-three contributors to this work use historical methods to analyze politics and public policy, human rights issues, and the changing populations with HIV infection. They examine the federal government's testing of drugs for cancer and HIV, and show how the policy makers' choice of a specific historical model (chronic disease versus plague) affected their decisions. A powerful photo essay reveals the strengths of women from various backgrounds and lifestyles who are coping with HIV. A sensitive account of the complex relationships of the gay community to AIDS is included. Finally, several contributors provide a sampling of international perspectives on the impact of AIDS in other nations.   [brief]
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Title: AIDS: the burdens of history 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: The AIDS epidemic has posed more urgent historical questions than any other disease of modern times. How have societies responded to epidemics in the past? Why did the disease emerge when and where it did? How has it spread among members of particular groups? And how will the past affect the future - in particular, what does the history of medical science and public health tell us about our ability to control the epidemic and eventually to cure the disease?Historical methods of inquiry change, and people who use these methods often disagree on theory and practice. Indeed, the contributors to this volume hold a variety of opinions on controversial historiographic issues. But they share three important principles: cautious adherence to the "social constructionist" view of past and present; profound skepticism about historicism's idea of progress; and wariness about "presentism," the distortion of the past by seeing it only from the point of view of the present.Each of the twelve essays addresses an aspect of the burdens of history during the AIDS epidemic. By "burdens" is meant the inescapable significance of events in the past for the present. All of these events are related in some way to the current epidemic and can help clarify the complex social and cultural responses to the crisis of AIDS.This collection illuminates present concerns directly and forcefully without sacrificing attention to historical detail and to the differences between past and present situations. It reminds us that many of the issues now being debated - quarantine, exclusion, public needs and private rights - have their parallels in the past. This will be an important book for social historians and general readers as well as for historians of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: The French Revolution and the birth of modernity 
Author: Fehér, Ferenc 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Politics | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Written from widely different perspectives, these essays characterize the Great Revolution as the dawn of the modern age, the grand narrative of modernity. The scope of issues under scrutiny is extremely broad, ranging from the analyses of the hotly debated class character of 1789 and the problem of . . . [more]
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Title: Spectacle and society in Livy's history 
Author: Feldherr, Andrew 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Classical History | Comparative Literature | Literature
Publisher's Description: Public spectacle - from the morning rituals of the Roman noble to triumphs and the shows of the Arena - formed a crucial component of the language of power in ancient Rome. The historian Livy (c. 60 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), who provides our fullest description of Rome's early history, presents his account of the growth of the Roman state itself as something to be seen - a visual monument and public spectacle. Through analysis of several episodes in Livy's History , Andrew Feldherr demonstrates the ways in which Livy uses specific visual imagery to make the reader not only an observer of certain key events in Roman history but also a participant in those events. This innovative study incorporates recent literary and cultural theory with detailed historical analysis to put an ancient text into dialogue with contemporary discussions of visual culture.In Spectacle and Society in Livy's History , Feldherr shows how Livy uses the literary representation of spectacles from the Roman past to construct a new sense of civic identity among his readers. He offers a new way of understanding how Livy's technique addressed the political and cultural needs of Roman citizens in Livy's day. In addition to renewing our understanding of Livy through modern scholarship, Feldherr provides a new assessment of the historian's aims and methods by asking what it means for the historian to make readers spectators of history.   [brief]
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Title: City culture and the madrigal at Venice 
Author: Feldman, Martha
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History
Publisher's Description: Martha Feldman's exploration of sixteenth-century Venetian madrigals centers on the importance to the Venetians of Ciceronian rhetorical norms, which emphasized decorum through adherence to distinct stylistic levels. She shows that Venice easily adapted these norms to its long-standing mythologies of equilibrium, justice, peace, and good judgment. Feldman explains how Venetian literary theorists conceived variety as a device for tempering linguistic extremes and thereby maintaining moderation. She further shows how the complexity of sacred polyphony was adapted by Venetian music theorists and composers to achieve similar ends.At the same time, Feldman unsettles the kinds of simplistic alignments between the collectivity of the state and its artistic production that have marked many historical studies of the arts. Her rich social history enables a more intricate dialectics among sociopolitical formations; the roles of individual printers, academists, merchants, and others; and the works of composers and poets. City Culture offers a new model for situating aesthetic products in a specific time and place, one that sees expressive objects not simply against a cultural backdrop but within an integrated complex of cultural forms and discursive practices.   [brief]
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Title: Paris as revolution: writing in the nineteenth-century city 
Author: Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Social Theory | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation. For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city could be known and a vital principle through which it could be portrayed.In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural geography, Paris as Revolution "reads" the nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives. Ferguson moves easily between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and their literature. In her understanding and reconstruction of the guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Vallès, and others, alongside the novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Vallès, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its emergence.   [brief]
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Title: A simple matter of salt: an ethnography of nutritional deficiency in Spain 
Author: Fernandez, Renate Lellep
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
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Title: The colonial elite of early Caracas: formation & crisis, 1567- 1767 
Author: Ferry, Robert J
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Latin American Studies
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Title: From my grandmother's bedside: sketches of postwar Tokyo 
Author: Field, Norma 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor , returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she finds - both in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japan - forms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan.Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily life - conversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmother - with observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.   [brief]
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Title: Winners in peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and postwar Japan 
Author: Finn, Richard B
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: Singular for its breadth and balance, Winners in Peace chronicles the American Occupation of Japan, an episode that profoundly shaped the postwar world. Richard B. Finn, who participated in the Occupation as a young naval officer and diplomat, tells the full story of the activities from 1945 to 1952. He focuses on the two main actors, General Douglas MacArthur and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, and details the era's major events, programs, and personalities, both American and Japanese.Finn draws on an impressive range of sources - American, Japanese, British, and Australian - including interviews with nearly one hundred participants in the Occupation. He describes the war crimes trials, constitutional reforms, and American efforts to rebuild Japan. The work of George Kennan in making political stability and economic recovery the top goals of the United States became critical in the face of the developing Cold War. Winners in Peace will aid our understanding of Japan today - its economic growth, its style of government, and the strong pacifist spirit of its people.   [brief]
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Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African Studies | Social Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
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Title: Crossing the line: a year in the land of apartheid 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: African Studies | Politics | Social Problems | Autobiography | Education | African History
Publisher's Description: William Finnegan's compelling account of a year spent teaching in a colored high school, "across the line," in Cape Town, South Africa brings the irrationality and injustice of apartheid into focus for the American reader. A new preface, written after the author's observation of the historic 1994 el . . . [more]
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Title: Romain Rolland and the politics of intellectual engagement 
Author: Fisher, David James
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | European History
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Title: Catullan provocations: lyric poetry and the drama of position 
Author: Fitzgerald, William 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Classics | Comparative Literature | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.   [brief]
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Title: Thinking fragments: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism in the contemporary West 
Author: Flax, Jane
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Gender Studies | Psychiatry | Political Theory | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Thinking Fragments provides a brilliant critique of psychoanalytic, feminist, and postmodern theory. Examining the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Irigaray, Derrida, Rorty, and Foucault, among others, Flax conducts a "conversation" among psychoanalysts, feminist thinkers, and postmodern theorists, evaluating the ways in which each group of thinkers succeeds in coming to terms with crises in contemporary Western culture. As she analyzes each theory in turn, the others are used to identify and interrogate its gaps and omissions. The result is a postmodern text of intertwined ideas, devoid of clear beginnings, endings, conclusions.Flax addresses the question, "how is it possible to theorize in the contemporary West?" With the demise of objective notions of truth, knowledge, self and power, intellectuals have devised these new modes of thinking which both reflect and contribute to the uncertainties of the contemporary West. Each also addresses at least one aspect of what has become most problematic to modern individuals: How to come to terms with self, gender, knowledge and power without resorting to concepts that stress objectivity, universal knowledge, and a unitary self.Flax finds that neither psychoanalysis, nor feminism, nor postmodernism is adequate to the task for which it was conceived. Each can illuminate certain aspects of problems of self, gender, knowledge, and power, but none is sufficient on its own. In fact, each incorporates characteristic blindnesses rooted in part in the very difficulties it addresses. Despite their failures, Flax concludes that these modes of theorizing are our best tools thus far, compelling us to use them even while we grapple with the problems they raise. Thinking Fragments is a wide-ranging study that will elicit much discussion and debate. It is an essential text for social scientists and humanists alike, as well as anyone else who thinks about how to "do" theory in the contemporary West.   [brief]
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Title: The new German cinema: music, history, and the matter of style 
Author: Flinn, Caryl
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Music
Publisher's Description: When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity - national, political, personal, and sexual - music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn's study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference - including that embodied in Germany's difficult history - rather than to "master" or "get past" it. Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music's role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement's charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.   [brief]
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Title: Traditional oral epic: the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian return song 
Author: Foley, John Miles
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European Literature | Folklore and Mythology | Religion | Language and Linguistics | Classics | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex body of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics.Until now, the emphasis in studies of oral traditional works has been placed on addressing the correspondences among traditions - shared structures of "formula," "theme," and "story-pattern." Traditional Oral Epic explores the incongruencies among traditions and focuses on the qualities specific to certain oral and oral-derived works. It is certain to inspire further research in this field.   [brief]
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