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Title: The Creation of tribalism in Southern Africa 
Author: Vail, Leroy
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | African History | African Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Despite a quarter century of "nation building," most African states are still driven by ethnic particularism - commonly known as "tribalism." The stubborn persistence of tribal ideologies despite the profound changes associated with modernization has puzzled scholars and African leaders alike. The bloody hostilities between the tribally-oriented Zulu Inkhata movement and supporters of the African National Congress are but the most recent example of tribalism's tenacity. The studies in this volume offer a new historical model for the growth and endurance of such ideologies in southern Africa.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish memories 
Author: Valensi, Lucette
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Collective memory: a living, breathing gift from the past, less fragmentary than the recollections of any one individual, more personal by far than "history." The authors of Jewish Memories saw in the large numbers of Jews who migrated to France during the twentieth century the chance to retrieve a past that might otherwise be lost forever. Through dozens of interviews, they listened to men and women talking of their lives and the places they came from, and found an almost uncanny resonance of individual voices with one another. Individual memories became part of a shared memory, projecting major themes of the Jewish tradition - exile and the sense of loss, the duty to remember, and the transmission of Jewish experience to the next generations.Hélène H. tells of dropping the all-important family teakettle during a terrified race to escape skirmishing soldiers. Charles H. talks about the innocent love he shared with a non-Jewish girl who studied with him. Anna D. describes her wordless reunion with her wounded husband after World War II. From communities now disappeared, scenes of home and family life, occupations, happy times and holidays reinforce one another, and we can feel the painful nostalgia for a kind of existence no longer possible.Two distinct but parallel sets of memories run through the narrative, that of Sephardi and that of Ashkenazi Jews, all of whom found their way to France. They arrived from Tunisia, Turkey, Poland, and Russia, from poor and well-to-do families, almost always driven from their homes by difficult circumstances, often with their most recent memories filled with horror and tragedy. The desire to remember it all and to pass it on to others who will also remember shines from every page, and makes this book as memorable for general readers as it is valuable for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians.   [brief]
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Title: Leadership and community in late antique Gaul
Author: Van Dam, Raymond
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: The rise of Christianity to the dominant position it held in the Middle Ages remains a paradoxical achievement. Early Christian communities in Gaul had been so restrictive that they sometimes persecuted misfits with accusations of heresy. Yet by the fifth century Gallic aristocrats were becoming bishops to enhance their prestige; and by the sixth century Christian relic cults provided the most comprehensive idiom for articulating values and conventions. To strengthen its appeal, Christianity had absorbed the ideologies of secular authority already familiar in Gallic society.   [brief]
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Title: From friend to comrade: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927
Author: Van de Ven, Hans J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | Politics
Publisher's Description: Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.   [brief]
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Title: South Africa, a study in conflict 
Author: Van den Berghe, Pierre L
Published: University of California Press,  1967
Subjects: African Studies
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Title: Stravinsky and the Rite of spring: the beginnings of a musical language 
Author: Van den Toorn, Pieter C 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Music | Composers
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Title: Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India
Author: Van Hollen, Cecilia Coale
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Asian Studies | South Asia | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?   [brief]
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Title: Memory and re-creation in troubadour lyric 
Author: Van Vleck, Amelia Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: In spite of the fame of individual singers, many of whose names are legendary, the songs of the troubadours often come to us in multiple versions, each with a different sequence of stanzas. What accounts for this variability? Authorial self-effacement might explain why much anonymous medieval poetry was "reworked," but Amelia Van Vleck argues that this answer will not suffice when the author of the song is well known and admired.Van Vleck outlines a new way of reading troubadour lyric by questioning the belief that chansonniers were compiled from song-sheets tracing back to written "authorized" copies. She challenges the very appropriateness of a concept of "text" as applied to troubadour lyric. Instead of superimposing a nineteenth-century notion of "lyric poetry" on these songs, reading them as "perfect" texts and attempting to re-establish an "authentic" version through textual criticism, we must, she claims, become aware of these songs as potential performances with moveable parts, each version a realization of the whole song. Van Vleck concludes that it was primarily the voice, not the pen, that created (and re-created) this innovative body of poetry that forms the very foundation of the Western European lyric.   [brief]
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Title: Proletarians of the North: a history of Mexican industrial workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933
Author: Vargas, Zaragosa
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | United States History | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies
Publisher's Description: Between the end of World War I and the Great Depression, over 58,000 Mexicans journeyed to the Midwest in search of employment. Many found work in agriculture, but thousands more joined the growing ranks of the industrial proletariat. Throughout the northern Midwest, and especially in Detroit, Mexican workers entered steel mills, packing houses, and auto plants, becoming part of the modern American working class.Zaragosa Vargas's work focuses on this little-known feature in the history of Chicanos and American labor. In relating the experiences of Mexicans in workplace and neighborhood, and in showing the roles of Mexican women, the Catholic Church, and labor unions, Vargas enriches our knowledge of immigrant urban life. His is an important work that will be welcomed by historians of Chicano Studies and American labor.   [brief]
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Title: Representations: images of the world in Ciceronian oratory 
Author: Vasaly, Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Literature | Politics | History | Literary Theory and Criticism | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: Ann Vasaly introduces representation theory into the study of Ciceronian persuasion and contends that an understanding of milieu - social, political, topographical - is crucial to understanding Ciceronian oratory. As a genre uniquely dependent on an immediate interaction between author and audience, ancient oratory becomes performance art.Vasaly investigates the way Cicero represented the contemporary physical world - places, topography, and monuments, both those seen and those merely mentioned - to his listeners and demonstrates how he used these representations to persuade. Her exceptionally well-written study deftly recaptures the immediacy of Cicero's oratory and makes a trenchant contribution to an important new area of inquiry in Classical Studies.   [brief]
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Title: For documentary: twelve essays
Author: Vaughan, Dai
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Anthropology | Photography | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: These essays, which span twenty-five years of writing and a lifetime of experience, offer fresh and challenging insights into documentary. Dai Vaughan, one of the most highly regarded documentary editors to have worked in Britain in recent decades, makes his starting point plain: "Most of us would feel that the word 'documentary' had not justified its place in the dictionary if the films so called did not manifest some relationship with the world not shared by others." That elusive relationship is the subject of his eloquent reflections and analyses.As critic, Vaughan contrasts the Olympic Games films of Riefenstahl (1936) and Ichikawa (1964); as participant, he tells how the introduction of portable 16mm equipment gave rise to cinéma vérité and observational visual anthropology. The twin perspective of analyst and practitioner results in a radical restatement of the documentary project, one in which documentary is seen as engaging the viewer's freedom in a way that fiction does not. A chapter near the end, "From Today, Cinema Is Dead," is uncompromising in its pessimistic view that digitalization threatens the privileged relationship we have always granted between a photograph and its object. Film theorists and filmmakers, indeed everyone who cares about how our society represents itself to itself, will find For Documentary engrossing as well as illuminating.   [brief]
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Title: Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
Author: Veer, Peter van der
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Religious nationalism is a subject of critical importance in much of the world today. Peter van der Veer's timely study on the relationship between religion and politics in India goes well beyond other books on this subject. He brings together several disciplines - anthropology, history, social theory, literary studies - to show how Indian religious identities have been shaped by pilgrimage, migration, language development, and more recently, print and visual media.Van der Veer's central focus is the lengthy dispute over the Babari mosque in Ayodhya, site of a bloody confrontation between Hindus and Muslims in December 1992. A thought-provoking range of other examples describes the historical construction of religious identities: cow protection societies and Sufi tombs, purdah and the political appropriation of images of the female body, Salman Rushdie and the role of the novel in nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, the Khalsa movement among Sikhs, and nationalist archaeology and the televised Ramayana .Van der Veer offers a new perspective on the importance of religious organization and the role of ritual in the formation of nationalism. His work advances our understanding of contemporary India while also offering significant theoretical insights into one of the most troubling issues of this century.   [brief]
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Title: The New World of the gothic fox: culture and economy in English and Spanish America
Author: Véliz, Claudio
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Claudio Véliz adopts the provocative metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs that Isaiah Berlin used to describe opposite types of thinkers. Applying this metaphor to modern culture, economic systems, and the history of the New World, Véliz provides an original and lively approach to understanding the development of English and Spanish America over the past 500 years.According to Véliz, the dominant cultural achievements of Europe's English- and Spanish-speaking peoples have been the Industrial Revolution and the Counter-Reformation, respectively. These overwhelming cultural constructions have strongly influenced the subsequent historical developments of their great cultural outposts in North and South America. The British brought to the New World a stubborn ability to thrive on diversity and change that was entirely consistent with their vernacular Gothic style. The Iberians, by contrast, brought a cultural tradition shaped like a vast baroque dome, a monument to their successful attempt to arrest the changes that threatened their imperial moment.Véliz writes with erudition and wit, using a multitude of sources - historians and classical sociologists, Greek philosophers, today's newspaper sports pages, and modern literature - to support a novel explanation of the prosperity and expanding cultural influence of the gothic fox and the economic and cultural decline endured by the baroque hedgehog.   [brief]
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Title: National ideology under socialism: identity and cultural politics in Ceauşescu's Romania
Author: Verdery, Katherine
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Cultural Anthropology | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a re . . . [more]
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Title: Land mammals of Oregon
Author: Verts, B. J
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Zoology | Biology | Natural History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of mammals in the state of Oregon since 1936, when Vernon Bailey's The Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon was published. It provides a basic reference for mammalogists, wildlife biologists, students, and anyone interested in mammalian life in the northwestern United States. Indeed, researchers in states adjacent to Oregon will find much useful information regarding the mammals their regions share with Oregon. Descriptions of all 136 extant or recently extirpated mammal species in Oregon are in the book, with information on geographical variation, diet, reproduction, ontogeny, mortality, and behavior. The authors provide range maps and lists of collection localities based on their examination of 55,265 museum specimens and brief accounts of morphology, species diversity, distribution, and fossil records. Keys to orders, families, and species are provided for identification of unknown specimens. Also helpful is the introductory section with its discussion of skull morphology, evolutionary history, basic taxonomy, zoogeography, zoonotic diseases, and the history of mammalogy in Oregon. A bibliography of 2,925 references makes the volume especially useful for anyone wishing to do further research.   [brief]
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Title: A certain realism: making use of Pasolini's film theory and practice
Author: Viano, Maurizio Sanzio 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films - Accattone , The Canterbury Tales , Medea , Saló - continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking.Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in theory and in practice. He finds that Pasolini's cinematic career exemplifies an "expressionistic realism" that acknowledges its subjective foundation instead of striving for an impossible objectivity.Focusing on the personal and expressionistic dimensions of Pasolini's cinema, Viano also argues that homosexuality is present in the films in ways that critics have thus far failed to acknowledge. Sure to generate controversy among film scholars, Italianists, and fans of the director's work, this accessible film-by-film treatment is an ideal companion for anyone watching Pasolini's films on video.   [brief]
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Title: The spirit of freedom: South African leaders on religion and politics 
Author: Villa-Vicencio, Charles
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: This collection of interviews explores the role of religion in the lives of eminent South Africans who led the struggle against apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, and seventeen other political, religious, and cultural leaders share the beliefs and values that informed the moral positions they adopted, often at great cost. From all ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, these men and women have shaped one of the greatest political transformations of the century.What emerges from the interviews are reflections on all aspects of life in an embattled country. There are stories of the homelands and townships, and tales of imprisonment and exile. Dedicated communists relate their intense youthful devotion to Christianity; Muslim activists discuss the complexity of their relationships with their communities. As the respondents grapple with difficult questions about faith, politics, and authority, they expose a more personal picture: of their daily lives, of their pasts, and of the enormous conflicts that arise in a society that continually strains the moral fiber of its citizens. Taken together, these interviews reveal the many-faceted vision that has fueled South Africa's struggle for democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoît Malon and French reformist socialism
Author: Vincent, K. Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Here is the first scholarly study of the life and thought of Benoît Malon (1841-1893), the most persuasive and visible spokesman for reformist socialism during the early years of the French Third Republic.Active in the generation of the French Left that came of age under the Second Empire, Malon was a prominent member of the First International in Paris and later joined the Paris Commune. As a result, he was forced into exile in Switzerland and Italy during the 1870s, where he became entangled in the struggles within the International. Malon attempted to steer a course between Marxist authoritarianism and anarchist utopianism, which he continued on his return to France in 1880.Vincent analyzes Malon's role as activist, editor, and author, arguing that Malon drew on a strong tradition of left-wing French republicanism. In his mature works, Malon articulated a socialism that emphasized broad moral and socioeconomic reform and advocated parliamentary rule as the appropriate source of national sovereignty. In helping the republican socialist Left shed its revolutionary associations, he pointed the way for later reformist socialists from Jean Jaurès to François Mitterrand.   [brief]
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Title: When capitalists collide: business conflict and the end of empire in Egypt 
Author: Vitalis, Robert 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Ancient History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Robert Vitalis's empirically rich study challenges the left-nationalist paradigm through which twentieth-century Egyptian history and politics has generally been interpreted. He argues with those who explain Egyptian economic development primarily in terms of class and of power struggles between British and Egyptian entrepreneurs and politicians.Vitalis offers a rare, detailed view of the objectives and political strategies of both international firms and Egypt's own big business rivals. He highlights the career of Muhammad Ahmad 'Abbud, modern Egypt's most successful businessman. Vitalis's argument can be effectively applied to many other Third World countries and his book makes a major contribution to ongoing debates regarding class, underdevelopment, and nationalism.   [brief]
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Title: Mirror of modernity: invented traditions of modern Japan
Author: Vlastos, Stephen 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of Japan's premodern and insular past. Building on the pathbreaking historical analysis of British traditions, The Invention of Tradition , sixteen American and Japanese scholars examine "age- . . . [more]
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