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1. cover
Title: Rhetorics of self-making online access is available to everyone
Author: Battaglia, Debbora
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this highly original volume advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice of equating an individuated self with the Western world and a relational self with the non-Western world. Contributions cover a broad range of topics - from the development of the eccentric self to the ritual circumcision of Jewish males.   [brief]
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2. cover
Title: The Social importance of self-esteem online access is available to everyone
Author: Mecca, Andrew
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: Is the well-being of a society dependent on the well-being of its citizenry? Does individual self-esteem play a causal role in chronic social problems such as child abuse, school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, welfare dependency?In an attempt to answer these questions, the State of California established a task force on self-esteem and social responsibility in 1987. The aim of this body was to determine what connections might exist between these two factors and to suggest policy guidelines relating to the welfare of Californians and to the expenditure of public resources. The ten essays in this volume, prepared by faculty members of the University of California, draw on research in the social and behavioral sciences to explore these issues. They assess the substantive assertions and research findings in the field and make careful evaluations of their reliability and validity. In many cases strong connections between self-esteem and problematic behavior are established, in others the connections are weak, and in some the causal relationship is, as yet, imperfectly understood.One of the conclusions of the book is that research on these issues needs to be improved, particularly in the areas of comparative and longitudinal studies. Guidelines for future research are suggested, and some points of policy direction are elaborated. These essays may indeed promote additional research, for the premise that social stability and welfare are largely dependent on the psychological state of a people poses a challenging and provocative counter-emphasis to the assumption that social institutions are the primary determinants of individual welfare.   [brief]
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3. cover
Title: A'aisa's gifts: a study of magic and the self
Author: Stephen, Michele
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Indigenous Religions | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Filled with insight, provocative in its conclusions, A'aisa's Gifts is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea and a valuable contribution to anthropological theory. Based on twenty years' fieldwork, this richly detailed study of Mekeo esoteric knowledge, cosmology, and self-conceptualizations recasts accepted notions about magic and selfhood. Drawing on accounts by Mekeo ritual experts and laypersons, this is the first book to demonstrate magic's profound role in creating the self. It also argues convincingly that dream reporting provides a natural context for self-reflection. In presenting its data, the book develops the concept of "autonomous imagination" into a new theoretical framework for exploring subjective imagery processes across cultures.   [brief]
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4. cover
Title: The disenchanted self: representing the subject in the Canterbury tales online access is available to everyone
Author: Leicester, H. Marshall (Henry Marshall) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: The question of the "dramatic principle" in the Canterbury Tales , of whether and how the individual tales relate to the pilgrims who are supposed to tell them, has long been a central issue in the interpretation of Chaucer's work. Drawing on ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and social theory, Leicester proposes that Chaucer can lead us beyond the impasses of contemporary literary theory and suggests new approaches to questions of agency, representation, and the gendered imagination.Leicester reads the Canterbury Tales as radically voiced and redefines concepts like "self" and "character" in the light of current discussions of language and subjectivity. He argues for Chaucer's disenchanted practical understanding of the constructed character of the self, gender, and society, building his case through close readings of the Pardoner's, Wife of Bath's, and Knight's tales. His study is among the first major treatments of Chaucer's poetry utilizing the techniques of contemporary literary theory and provides new models for reading the poems while revising many older views of them and of Chaucer's relation to his age.   [brief]
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5. cover
Title: Domestic individualism: imagining self in nineteenth-century America
Author: Brown, Gillian
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | Gender Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed.In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes - abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia - she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.   [brief]
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6. cover
Title: The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing
Author: Csordas, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Religion | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.   [brief]
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7. cover
Title: Images and ideologies: self-definition in the Hellenistic world online access is available to everyone
Author: Bulloch, A. W
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Philosophy | Ancient History | Art History
Publisher's Description: This volume captures the individuality, the national and personal identity, the cultural exchange, and the self-consciousness that have long been sensed as peculiarly potent in the Hellenistic world. The fields of history, literature, art, philosophy, and religion are each presented using the format of two essays followed by a response.Conveying the direction and focus of Hellenistic learning, eighteen leading scholars discuss issues of liberty versus domination, appropriation versus accommodation, the increasing diversity of citizen roles and the dress and gesture appropriate to them, and the accompanying religious and philosophical ferment. The result is an arresting view of the incredible and unprecedented diversity of the Hellenistic world.   [brief]
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8. cover
Title: Earthly bodies, magical selves: contemporary pagans and the search for community
Author: Pike, Sarah M 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Recent decades have seen a revival of paganism, and every summer people gather across the United States to celebrate this increasingly popular religion. Sarah Pike's engrossing ethnography is the outcome of five years attending neo-pagan festivals, interviewing participants, and sometimes taking part in their ceremonies. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves incorporates her personal experience and insightful scholarly work concerning ritual, sacred space, self-identity, and narrative. The result is a compelling portrait of this frequently misunderstood religious movement. Neo-paganism began emerging as a new religious movement in the late 1960s. In addition to bringing together followers for self-exploration and participation in group rituals, festivals might offer workshops on subjects such as astrology, tarot, mythology, herbal lore, and African drumming. But while they provide a sense of community for followers, Neo-Pagan festivals often provoke criticism from a variety of sources - among them conservative Christians, Native Americans, New Age spokespersons, and media representatives covering stories of rumored "Satanism" or "witchcraft." Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves explores larger issues in the United States regarding the postmodern self, utopian communities, cultural improvisation, and contemporary spirituality. Pike's accessible writing style and her nonsensationalistic approach do much to demystify neo-paganism and its followers.   [brief]
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9. cover
Title: Many Rāmāyaṇas: the diversity of a narrative tradition in South Asia online access is available to everyone
Author: Richman, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Throughout Indian history, many authors and performers have produced, and many patrons have supported, diverse tellings of the story of the exiled prince Rama, who rescues his abducted wife by battling the demon king who has imprisoned her. The contributors to this volume focus on these "many" Ramayanas .While most scholars continue to rely on Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana as the authoritative version of the tale, the contributors to this volume do not. Their essays demonstrate the multivocal nature of the Ramayana by highlighting its variations according to historical period, political context, regional literary tradition, religious affiliation, intended audience, and genre. Socially marginal groups in Indian society - Telugu women, for example, or Untouchables from Madhya Pradesh - have recast the Rama story to reflect their own views of the world, while in other hands the epic has become the basis for teachings about spiritual liberation or the demand for political separatism. Historians of religion, scholars of South Asia, folklorists, cultural anthropologists - all will find here refreshing perspectives on this tale.   [brief]
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10. cover
Title: The color of gender: reimaging democracy online access is available to everyone
Author: Eisenstein, Zillah R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Gender Studies | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative volume, Zillah Eisenstein uncovers the hidden sexual and racial politics of the past decade. Beginning where she left off in her award-winning book The Female Body and the Law , Eisenstein takes the reader on a feminist-inspired road trip, traveling from the thicket of recent abortion decisions to the revolutions of 1989 to the murky chambers of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Along the way, she enunciates a wholly original conception of individual privacy and sexual rights.Eisenstein brings a range of topics to her discussion: the L.A. riots, crack babies, Murphy Brown, political correctness, the 1992 presidential election, the Gulf War. She seeks to redirect our thinking about democracy away from universal conceptions that mask racial and gender oppression to the specific realities of women and people of color. A respect for multiple differences - as represented in the needs of women of color and their bodies - is, she says, essential to inclusive universal rights. Reproductive freedoms and sexual equality, not abstract notions of civil liberties, provide the wellsprings of a meaningful democratic life. Using this perspective to evaluate the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, Eisenstein finds that the separation between their ideals and the reality of the market system illustrates the failings of democratic theory, especially for women.Eisenstein's controversial arguments will provoke a rethinking of what race and gender mean today.   [brief]
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11. cover
Title: Body work: beauty and self-image in American culture
Author: Gimlin, Debra L 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of "body work." Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned "beauty myth." Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth. Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities. This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.   [brief]
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12. cover
Title: A Chinese bestiary: strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas = [Shan hai jing]
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Art | Asian Literature | China | Folklore and Mythology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China. Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty. This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.   [brief]
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13. cover
Title: Rugged justice: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the American West, 1891-1941 online access is available to everyone
Author: Frederick, David C
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | California and the West | Law
Publisher's Description: Few chapters in American judicial history have enjoyed as colorful a past as has the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Created in 1891, its jurisdiction now encompasses California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Hawaii, and Alaska. David Frederick has mined archival sources, including court records and legal papers throughout the West and in Washington, D.C., to document the Ninth Circuit's first fifty years. His findings are much more than a record of the court, however, for they also provide a unique social and cultural history of the West.During these years, the court heard key cases involving railroads, the Alaska gold rush, Chinese immigration, organized labor, and use of natural resources. Many of the decisions from this period foreshadowed issues that are with us today. Frederick also documents the court's part in Western development and in issues relating to World War I, Prohibition, New Deal legislation, and the evolving role of federal judges.Frederick portrays the West's most important judicial institution with clarity and intelligence, reminding us that the evolution of the Ninth Circuit both reflected and affected the dramatic changes occurring in the West during the court's early years. This is a book that will appeal not only to lawyers, but to historians, sociologists, and general readers as well.   [brief]
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14. cover
Title: Interpreting the self: autobiography in the Arabic literary tradition online access is available to everyone
Author: Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Comparative Literature | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Autobiography is a literary genre which Western scholarship has ascribed mostly to Europe and the West. Countering this assessment and presenting many little-known texts, this comprehensive work demonstrates the existence of a flourishing tradition in Arabic autobiography. Interpreting the Self discusses nearly one hundred Arabic autobiographical texts and presents thirteen selections in translation. The authors of these autobiographies represent an astonishing variety of geographical areas, occupations, and religious affiliations. This pioneering study explores the origins, historical development, and distinctive characteristics of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, drawing from texts written between the ninth and nineteenth centuries c.e. This volume consists of two parts: a general study rethinking the place of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, and the translated texts. Part one demonstrates that there are far more Arabic autobiographical texts than previously recognized by modern scholars and shows that these texts represent an established and - especially in the Middle Ages - well-known category of literary production. The thirteen translated texts in part two are drawn from the full one-thousand-year period covered by this survey and represent a variety of styles. Each text is preceded by a brief introduction guiding the reader to specific features in the text and providing general background information about the author. The volume also contains an annotated bibliography of 130 premodern Arabic autobiographical texts.In addition to presenting much little-known material, this volume revisits current understandings of autobiographical writing and helps create an important cross-cultural comparative framework for studying the genre.   [brief]
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15. cover
Title: The Society of Six: California colorists
Author: Boas, Nancy 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six - Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest - created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism.The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.   [brief]
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16. cover
Title: Passions of the tongue: language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 online access is available to everyone
Author: Ramaswamy, Sumathi
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | South Asia | Language and Linguistics | Asian History | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.   [brief]
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17. cover
Title: The color bind: California's battle to end affirmative action online access is available to everyone
Author: Chavez, Lydia 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Public Policy | California and the West
Publisher's Description: The Color Bind tells the story of how Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, two unknown academics, decided to write Proposition 209 in 1992 and thereby set in motion a series of events, far beyond their control, destined to transform the legal, political, and everyday meaning of civil rights for the next generation. Going behind the mass media coverage of the initiative, Lydia Chávez narrates the complex underlying motivations and maneuvering of the people, organizations, and political parties involved in the campaign to end affirmative action in California.For the first time, the role of University of California regent Ward Connerly in the campaign - one largely assigned to public relations - is put into perspective. In the course of the book Chávez also provides a rare behind-the-scenes journalistic account of the complex and fascinating workings of the initiative process. Chávez recreates the post-election climate of 1994, when the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) appeared to be the right-time, right-place vehicle for Governor Pete Wilson and other Republican presidential prospects. President Clinton and the state Democratic Party thought the CCRI would splinter the party and jeopardize the upcoming presidential election. The Republicans, who saw the CCRI as a "wedge issue" to use against the Democrats, found to their surprise that the initiative was much more divisive in their own party.Updating her text to include the most current material, Chávez deftly delineates the interplay of competing interests around the CCRI, and explains why the opposition was unsuccessful in its strategy to fight the initiative. Her analysis probes the momentous - and national - implications of this state initiative in shaping the future of affirmative action in this country.   [brief]
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18. cover
Title: The private worlds of Marcel Duchamp: desire, liberation, and the self in modern culture online access is available to everyone
Author: Seigel, Jerrold
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life.At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle.Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.   [brief]
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19. cover
Title: Encounters with aging: mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings - even the endocrinological changes - associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies.Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders.Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole.Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.   [brief]
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20. cover
Title: Haiti, history, and the gods
Author: Dayan, Joan 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | History | Folklore and Mythology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In Haiti, History, and the Gods Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here - overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions - have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres , are seldom used as historical sources.Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.   [brief]
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