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Title: Struggling with destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984
Author: Wadley, Susan Snow 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Susan Wadley first visited Karimpur - the village "behind mud walls" made famous by William and Charlotte Wiser - as a graduate student in 1967. She returned often, adding her observations and experiences to the Wisers' field notes from the 1920s and 1930s. In this long-awaited book, Wadley gives us a work of unprecedented scope: a portrait of an Indian village as it has changed over a sixty-year period.She hears of changes in agriculture, labor relations, education, and the family. But Karimpur's residents do not speak with one voice in describing the ways their lives have changed - viewpoints vary considerably depending on the speaker's gender, economic status, and caste. Using cultural documents such as songs and stories, as well as data on household budgets and farming practices, Wadley examines what it means to be poor or rich, female or male. She demonstrates that the forms of subordination prescribed for women are paralleled by those prescribed for lower castes.Villagers also speak of political struggles in India, and of the importance of religion when confronting change. Their stories, songs, and life histories reveal the rich fabric of Karimpur and show how much can be learned from listening to its people.   [brief]
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Title: An anthropology of the subject: holographic worldview in New Guinea and its meaning and significance for the world of anthropology
Author: Wagner, Roy
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Pacific Rim Studies | Geography | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: An Anthropology of the Subject rounds out the theoretical-philosophical cosmos of one of the twentieth century's most intellectually adventurous anthropologists. Roy Wagner, having turned "culture" and "symbols" inside out (in The Invention of Culture and Symbols That Stand for Themselves, respectively), now does the same for the "subject" and subjectivity. In studying the human subject and the way human culture mirrors itself, Wagner has redefined holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency."   [brief]
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Title: Three artists (three women): modernism and the art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe
Author: Wagner, Anne Middleton 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This original and sharply obser-vant book gives new significance to three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women - the main element linking the three - is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.   [brief]
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Title: Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese secret service
Author: Wakeman, Frederic E
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The most feared man in China, Dai Li, was chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service during World War II. This sweeping biography of "China's Himmler," based on recently opened intelligence archives, traces Dai's rise from obscurity as a rural hooligan and Green Gang blood-brother to commander of the paramilitary units of the Blue Shirts and of the dreaded Military Statistics Bureau: the world's largest spy and counterespionage organization of its time. In addition to exposing the inner workings of the secret police, whose death squads, kidnappings, torture, and omnipresent surveillance terrorized critics of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li's personal story opens a unique window on the clandestine history of China's Republican period. This study uncovers the origins of the Cold War in the interactions of Chinese and American special services operatives who cooperated with Dai Li in the resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and who laid the groundwork for an ongoing alliance against the Communists during the revolution that followed in the 1940s. Frederic Wakeman Jr. illustrates how the anti-Communist activities Dai Li led altered the balance of power within the Chinese Communist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy. He reveals a complex and remarkable personality that masked a dark presence in modern China - one that still pervades the secret services on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Wakeman masterfully illuminates a previously little-understood world as he discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft. Anyone interested in the development of modern espionage will be intrigued by Spymaster, which spells out in detail the ways in which the Chinese used their own traditional methods, in addition to adapting foreign ways, to create a modern intelligence service.   [brief]
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Title: Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937
Author: Wakeman, Frederic E
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: Prewar Shanghai: casinos, brothels, Green Gang racketeers, narcotics syndicates, gun-runners, underground Communist assassins, Comitern secret agents. Frederic Wakeman's masterful study of the most colorful and corrupt city in the world at the time provides a panoramic view of the confrontation and collaboration between the Nationalist secret police and the Shanghai underworld.In detailing the life and politics of China's largest urban center during the Guomindang era, Wakeman covers an array of topics: the puritanical social controls implemented by the police; the regional differences that surfaced among Shanghai's Chinese, the influence of imperialism and Western-trained officials. Parts of this book read like a spy novel, with secret police, torture, assassination; and power struggles among the French, International Settlement, and Japanese consular police within Shanghai.Chiang Kai-shek wanted to prove that the Chinese could rule Shanghai and the country by themselves, rather than be exploited and dominated by foreign powers. His efforts to reclaim the crime-ridden city failed, partly because of the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, but also because the Nationalist police force was itself corrupted by the city.Wakeman's exhaustively researched study is a major contribution to the study of the Nationalist regime and to modern Chinese urban history. It also shows that twentieth-century China has not been characterized by discontinuity, because autocratic government - whether Nationalist or Communist - has prevailed.   [brief]
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Title: The waning of the communist state: economic origins of political decline in China and Hungary 
Author: Walder, Andrew George
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | European History | Asian History | China | European Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays offers a compelling explanation for the decline of communism in the two countries that went the furthest with economic reforms - China and Hungary. Articulating a vision of change that serves as a counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on citizen resistance and protest, the contributors focus instead on the declining organizational integrity of the centralized party-state. The essays illuminate a "quiet revolution from within" that beset the two regimes after they chose to reform their economies and make concessions to the private sector.The nine contributors, three each from the disciplines of sociology, political science, and anthropology, examine key trends that appeared in both countries. The chapters trace political consequences of economic reform that range from the decline of the central state's fiscal dominance to the revitalization of long-suppressed ethnic loyalties.   [brief]
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Title: How the other half works: immigration and the social organization of labor
Author: Waldinger, Roger David
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Labor Studies | Immigration | Chicano Studies | Social Problems | Urban Studies | California and the West | California and the West
Publisher's Description: How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.   [brief]
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Title: Strangers at the gates: new immigrants in urban America
Author: Waldinger, Roger David
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Urban Studies | African American Studies | Asian American Studies | Latino Studies | Labor Studies | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Immigration is remaking the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago, the multiethnic society of tomorrow is already in place. Yet today's urban centers appear unlikely to provide newcomers with the same opportunities their predecessors found at the turn of the last century. Using the latest sources of information, this hard-hitting volume of original essays looks at the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies in these American cities. Strangers at the Gates tells the real story of immigrants' prospects for success today and delineates the conditions that will hinder or aid the newest Americans in their quest to get ahead. This book stresses the crucial importance of understanding that immigration today is fundamentally urban and the equally important fact that immigrants are now flocking to places where low-skilled workers--regardless of ethnic background--are in particular trouble. These two themes are at the heart of this book, which also covers a range of provocative topics, often with surprising findings. Among the essayists, Nelson Lim enters the controversy over whether and how immigrants affect the employment prospects for African Americans; Mark Ellis investigates whether low immigrant wages depress other workers' salaries; William A.V. Clark contends that immigrants seem to be experiencing downward mobility; and Min Zhou asserts that trends among second-generation immigrants are decidedly more optimistic. These well-integrated and well-organized essays sit squarely at the intersection of sociology and economics, and along the way they point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of these two disciplines in understanding immigration. Providing a theoretically and empirically comprehensive overview of the economic fate of immigrants in major American cities, this book will make a major contribution to debates over immigration and the American future.   [brief]
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Title: Three Mile Island: a nuclear crisis in historical perspective
Author: Walker, J. Samuel
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Technology and Instruments | Environment | Technology and Society | United States History
Publisher's Description: Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood released The China Syndrome, featuring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas as a TVnews crew who witness what appears to be a serious accident at a nuclear power plant. In a spectacular coincidence, on March 28, 1979, less than two weeks after the movie came out, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. For five days, the citizens of central Pennsylvania and the entire world, amid growing alarm, followed the efforts of authorities to prevent the crippled plant from spewing dangerous quantities of radiation into the environment. This book is the first comprehensive account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. In gripping prose, J. Samuel Walker captures the high human drama surrounding the accident, sets it in the context of the heated debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and analyzes the social, technical, and political issues it raised. His superb account of those frightening and confusing days will clear up misconceptions held to this day about Three Mile Island. The heart of Walker's suspenseful narrative is a moment-by-moment account of the accident itself, in which he brings to life the players who dealt with the emergency: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state of Pennsylvania, the White House, and a cast of scientists and reporters. He also looks at the aftermath of the accident on the surrounding area, including studies of its long-term health effects on the population, providing a fascinating window onto the politics of nuclear power and an authoritative account of a critical event in recent American history.   [brief]
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Title: The conquest of Ainu lands: ecology and culture in Japanese expansion, 1590-1800
Author: Walker, Brett L 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Japan | Ethnic Studies | Ecology
Publisher's Description: This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu - the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago - at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era. Inspired by "new Western" historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern "frontier" but as a borderland or middle ground. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life - not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment - had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century. Walker takes a fresh and original approach. Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion.   [brief]
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Title: Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain
Author: Walker, Pamela J 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Christianity | Victorian History | Religion | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.   [brief]
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Title: Permissible dose: a history of radiation protection in the twentieth century
Author: Walker, J. Samuel
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Science | Environmental Studies | American Studies | United States History | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: How much radiation is too much? J. Samuel Walker examines the evolution, over more than a hundred years, of radiation protection standards and efforts to ensure radiation safety for nuclear workers and for the general public. The risks of radiation - caused by fallout from nuclear bomb testing, exposure from medical or manufacturing procedures, effluents from nuclear power, or radioactivity from other sources - have aroused more sustained controversy and public fear than any other comparable industrial or environmental hazard. Walker clarifies the entire radiation debate, showing that permissible dose levels are a key to the principles and practices that have prevailed in the field of radiation protection since the 1930s, and to their highly charged political and scientific history as well.   [brief]
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Title: Material girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Women's Studies | American Studies | Politics | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Madonna, Murphy Brown, Thelma and Louise: These much-discussed media icons are the starting points of Suzanna Walter's brilliant, much-needed introduction to feminist cultural theory. Accessible yet theoretically sophisticated, up-to-date and entertaining, Material Girls acquaints readers with the major theories, debates, and concepts in this new and exciting field.With numerous case studies and illustrations, Walters situates feminist cultural theory against the background of the women's movement and media studies. Using examples from film, television, advertising, and popular discourse, she looks at topics such as the "male gaze," narrative theory, and new work on female "ways of seeing" and spectatorship. Throughout, Walters provides a historically grounded account of representations of women in popular culture while critiquing the dominance of psychoanalytic and postmodern analyses.The first comprehensive guide to the approaches and debates that make up this growing field, Material Girls belongs on the shelf of every cultural critic and savvy student today.   [brief]
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Title: Lives together/worlds apart: mothers and daughters in popular culture 
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | American Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1940s film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge , Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship.In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years.Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club -to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.   [brief]
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Title: France at the Crystal Palace: bourgeois taste and artisan manufacture in the nineteenth century
Author: Walton, Whitney
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Whitney Walton approaches the nineteenth-century French industrial development from a new perspective - that of consumption. She analyzes the French performance at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to illustrate how bourgeois consumers influenced France's distinctive pattern of industrial development. She also demonstrates the importance of consumption and gender in class formation and reveals how women influenced industry in their role as consumers.Walton examines important consumer goods industries that have been rarely studied by historians, such as the manufacture of wallpaper, furniture, and bronze statues. Using archival sources on household possessions of the Parisian bourgeoisie as well as published works, she shows how consumers' taste for fashionable, artistic, well-made furnishings and apparel promoted a specialization unique to nineteenth-century France.   [brief]
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Title: Western times and water wars: state, culture, and rebellion in California
Author: Walton, John 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Politics | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History | Social Theory | Environmental Studies
Publisher's Description: Western Times and Water Wars chronicles more than a hundred years of tumultuous events in the history of California's Owens Valley. From the pioneer conquest of the native inhabitants to the infamous destruction of the valley's agrarian economy by water-hungry Los Angeles, this legendary setting is . . . [more]
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Title: Human rights and reform: changing the face of North African politics 
Author: Waltz, Susan Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | African History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization.This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Pulp surrealism: insolent popular culture in early twentieth-century Paris
Author: Walz, Robin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | French Studies | Comparative Literature
Publisher's Description: In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins, the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an interpretative history of the intersection between mass print culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the surrealist inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?", which Walz juxtaposes with reprints of actual suicide faits divers (sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.   [brief]
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Title: Women in the Chinese enlightenment: oral and textual histories
Author: Wang, Zheng
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | China | Women's Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally.In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.   [brief]
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Title: High culture fever: politics, aesthetics, and ideology in Deng's China 
Author: Wang, Jing 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian Literature | Asian History | Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought - Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School - that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy . In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.   [brief]
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