Title: On the road to tribal extinction: depopulation, deculuration, and adaptive well-being among the Batak of the Philippines 
Author: Eder, James F
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: The cultural and even physical extinction of the world's remaining tribal people is a disturbing phenomenon of our time. In his study of the Batak of the Philippines, James Eder explores the adaptive limits of small human populations facing the ecological changes, social stresses, and cultural disru . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: Cousins and strangers: Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930
Author: Moya, Jose C 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: More than four million Spaniards came to the Western Hemisphere between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression. Unlike that of most other Europeans, their major destination was Argentina, not the United States. Studies of these immigrants - mostly laborers and peasants - have been scarce in comparison with studies of other groups of smaller size and lesser influence. Presenting original research within a broad comparative framework, Jose C. Moya fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of immigration to Argentina, one of the world's primary "settler" societies. Moya moves deftly between micro- and macro-analysis to illuminate the immigration phenomenon. A wealth of primary sources culled from dozens of immigrant associations, national and village archives, and interviews with surviving participants in Argentina and Spain inform his discussion of the origins of Spanish immigration, residence patterns, community formation, labor, and cultural cognitive aspects of the immigration process. In addition, he provides valuable material on other immigrant groups in Argentina and gives a balanced critique of major issues in migration studies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Postwar Japan as history
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Japan's catapult to world economic power has inspired many studies by social scientists, but few have looked at the 45 years of postwar Japan through the lens of history. The contributors to this book seek to offer such a view. As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. A provocative set of interpretative essays by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Japan and the dilemmas facing Japan today.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The elusive embryo: how women and men approach new reproductive technologies
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medical Anthropology | Medicine | Women's Studies | Science
Publisher's Description: In the first book to examine the industry of reproductive technology from the perspective of the consumer, Gay Becker scrutinizes the staggering array of medical options available to women and men with fertility problems and assesses the toll - both financial and emotional - that the quest for a biological child often exacts from would-be parents. Becker interviewed hundreds of people over a period of years; their stories are presented here in their own words. Absorbing, informative, and in many cases moving, these stories address deep-seated notions about gender, self-worth, and the cultural ideal of biological parenthood. Becker moves beyond people's personal experiences to examine contemporary meanings of technology and the role of consumption in modern life. What emerges is a clear view of technology as culture, with technology the template on which issues such as gender, nature, and the body are being rewritten and continuously altered. The Elusive Embryo chronicles the history and development of reproductive technology, and shows how global forces in consumer culture have contributed to the industry's growth. Becker examines how increasing use of reproductive technology has changed ideas about "natural" pregnancy and birth. Discussing topics such as in vitro fertilization, how men and women "naturalize" the use of a donor, and what happens when new reproductive technologies don't work, Becker shows how the experience of infertility has become increasingly politicized as potential parents confront the powerful forces that shape this industry. The Elusive Embryo is accessible, well written, and well documented. It will be an invaluable resource for people using or considering new reproductive technologies as well as for social scientists and health professionals.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The trouble with nature: sex in science and popular culture
Author: Lancaster, Roger N
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Gender Studies | Popular Culture | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Science | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Roger N. Lancaster provides the definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire in this spirited exposé of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene. Lancaster links the recent resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general with the current pitched battles over sexual politics. Ideas about a "hardwired" and immutable human nature are circulating at a pivotal moment in human history, he argues, one in which dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented normalization of lesbian and gay relationships are challenging received notions and commonly held convictions on every front. The Trouble with Nature takes on major media sources - the New York Times, Newsweek - and widely ballyhooed scientific studies and ideas to show how journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence. Lancaster also provides a novel and dramatic analysis of the social, historical, and political backdrop for changing discourses on "nature," including an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment. By showing how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender, Lancaster invites us to think more deeply and creatively about human acts and social relations.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Railroad crossing: Californians and the railroad, 1850-1910
Author: Deverell, William Francis
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Nothing so changed nineteenth-century America as did the railroad. Growing up together, the iron horse and the young nation developed a fast friendship. Railroad Crossing is the story of what happened to that friendship, particularly in California, and it illuminates the chaos that was industrial America from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth.Americans clamored for the progress and prosperity that railroads would surely bring, and no railroad was more crucial for California than the transcontinental line linking East to West. With Gold Rush prosperity fading, Californians looked to the railroad as the state's new savior. But social upheaval and economic disruption came down the tracks along with growth and opportunity.Analyzing the changes wrought by the railroad, William Deverell reveals the contradictory roles that technology and industrial capitalism played in the lives of Americans. That contrast was especially apparent in California, where the gigantic corporate "Octopus" - the Southern Pacific Railroad - held near-monopoly status. The state's largest employer and biggest corporation, the S.P. was a key provider of jobs and transportation - and wielder of tremendous political and financial clout.Deverell's lively study is peopled by a rich and disparate cast: railroad barons, newspaper editors, novelists, union activists, feminists, farmers, and the railroad workers themselves. Together, their lives reflect the many tensions - political, social, and economic - that accompanied the industrial transition of turn-of-the-century America.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading 
Author: Sinfield, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Women and economics: a study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution 
Author: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1860-1935
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Gender Studies | History | American Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: When Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first nonfiction book, Women and Economics , was published exactly a century ago, in 1898, she was immediately hailed as the leading intellectual in the women's movement. Her ideas were widely circulated and discussed; she was in great demand on the lecture circuit, and her intellectual circle included some of the most prominent thinkers of the age. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and Women and Economics was long out of print. Revived here with new introduction, Gilman's pivotal work remains a benchmark feminist text that anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s and resonates deeply with today's continuing debate about gender difference and inequality.Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a welcome disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life; anticipates the 1960s debate about wages for housework; calls for extensive childcare facilities and parental leave policies; and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks. She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life.The thorough and stimulating introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson provides substantial information about Gilman's life, personality, and background. It frames her impact on feminism since the Sixties and establishes her crucial role in the emergence of feminist and social thought.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Law and disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm strike of 1872
Author: Zelnik, Reginald E
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Labor Studies | European History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode - a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant - to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Recording conceptual art: early interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner, by Patricia Norvell
Author: Barry, Robert 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: Recording Conceptual Art features a highly provocative series of previously unpublished interviews conducted in early 1969 with some of the most dynamic, daring, and innovative artists of the tumultuous 1960s. The nine individuals - eight artists and one art dealer - are now known as major contributors to Conceptual art. These fascinating dialogues, conducted by Patricia Norvell, provide tantalizing moments of spontaneous philosophizing and brilliant insights, as well as moments of unabashed self-importance, with highly imaginative and colorful individuals.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Conventional wisdom: the content of musical form
Author: McClary, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: With her usual combination of erudition, innovation, and spirited prose, Susan McClary reexamines the concept of musical convention in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, Conventional Wisdom offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues.McClary looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves easily across a broad range of repertoires--the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. As one of the most influential trailblazers in contemporary musical understanding, McClary once again moves beyond the borders of the "purely musical" into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Those who know McClary only as a feminist writer will discover her many other sides, but not at the expense of gender issues, which are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music, Conventional Wisdom bravely tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Healing the infertile family: strengthening your relationship in the search for parenthood 
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Unlike most infertility books that focus on medical treatment, Healing the Infertile Family examines the social and emotional problems experienced by couples confronting infertility and suggests how they can be alleviated. In this updated edition, Gay Becker discusses her most recent study of couple . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: The listening composer
Author: Perle, George 1915-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Contemporary Music | Composers
Publisher's Description: George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music" - a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them.If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven.Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process.Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Temples and towns in Roman Iberia: the social and architectural dynamics of sanctuary designs from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D
Author: Mierse, William E
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | Art and Architecture | Architectural History | Art History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comparative study of Roman architecture on the Iberian peninsula, covering six centuries from the arrival of the Romans in the third century B.C. until the decline of urban life on the peninsula in the third century A.D. During this period, the peninsula became an influential cultural and political region in the Roman world. Iberia supplied writers, politicians, and emperors, a fact acknowledged by Romanists for centuries, though study of the peninsula itself has too often been brushed aside as insignificant and uninteresting. In this book William E. Mierse challenges such a view.By examining in depth the changing forms of temples and their placement within the urban fabric, Mierse shows that architecture on the peninsula displays great variation and unexpected connections. It was never a slavish imitation of an imported model but always a novel experiment. Sometimes the architectural forms are both new and unexpected; in some cases specific prototypes can be seen, but the Iberian form has been significantly altered to suit local needs. What at first may seem a repetition of forms upon closer investigation turns out to be theme and variation. Mierse brings to his quest an impressive learning, including knowledge of several modern and ancient languages and the archaeology of the Roman East, which allows him a unique perspective on the interaction between events and architecture.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: In one's own shadow: an ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China
Author: Liu, Xin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-reform rural China. Enriched with many vivid anecdotes describing life in the village of Zhaojiahe in northwestern China, In One's Own Shadow skillfully analyzes the changes and continuities marking the recent history of this region and highlights the broader implications for the way we understand Chinese modernity. Liu's narrative provides a wonderfully evocative exploration of many domains of everyday life such as kinship and marriage traditions, food systems, ceremonial celebrations, social relations, and village politics. He brings to life many of the personalities and customs of Zhaojiahe as he presents the villagers' strategies to modernize in an environment of scarce resources and a discredited cultural heritage. This accessibly written ethnography will be an essential contribution to the anthropology of China.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The politics of reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 
Author: Herbst, Jeffrey Ira
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Economic reform was the most pressing question for African and other Third World countries during the 1980s, and it will continue to dominate their public policy agendas during the coming decade. In this first full-length examination of the political economy of adjustment in Ghana, Jeffrey Herbst describes the causes of Ghana's dramatic economic decline and reviews the politics of reform that began in 1983.Ghana was one of the first African countries to adopt a comprehensive reform program and the one that has sustained adjustment longest. As Africa confronts the possibility of total economic collapse by the turn of the century, the Ghanaian experience will have profound ramifications across the continent in the debates regarding stabilization and structural change.Herbst devotes special attention to the interaction between the type of government and the politics of adjustment, the reaction of interest groups such as urban labor and the peasantry, and the relationship between economic and political change. His extended field research and sophisticated knowledge of the issues involved, both from the economic and political science literature, make this an extremely useful study. It will be important not only to Africanists, political scientists, economists, and sociologists, but also to government and financial leaders wrestling with economic reform in the Third World.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France, 1570-1715 
Author: Dewald, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations.Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Unequal alliance: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Philippines 
Author: Broad, Robin
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Politics | Southeast Asia | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this seminal work, U.S. development specialist Robin Broad chronicles the Philippine experiment with the structural adjustment model of development espoused by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Similar Items

Title: Representation of places: reality and realism in city design
Author: Bosselmann, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: People live in cities and experience them firsthand, while urban designers explain cities conceptually. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann takes on the challenging question of how designers can communicate the changes they envision in order that "the rest of us" adequately understand how those changes will affect our lives. New modes of imaging technology - from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models - allow professionals to explain their designs more clearly than ever before. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe. Yet decisions on what gets built are significantly influenced by these very representations. A portion of Bosselmann's book is based on innovative experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley's Visual Simulation Laboratory. In a section titled "The City in the Laboratory," he discusses how visual simulation was applied to projects in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. The concerns that Bosselmann addresses have an impact on large segments of society, and lay readers as well as professionals will find much that is useful in his timely, accessibly written book.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Founder of Hasidism: a quest for the historical Baʾal Shem Tov
Author: Rosman, Murray Jay
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This book goes farther than any previous work in uncovering the historical Israel ben Eliezer - known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Besht - the eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystic who profoundly influenced the shape of modern Judaism. As the progenitor of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov is one of the key figures in Jewish history; to understand him is to understand an essential element of modern Jewish life and religion.Because evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal, the Besht has long eluded historians and biographers. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve to mythologize rather than describe their subject. Rosman's study casts a bright new light on the traditional stories about the Besht, confirming and augmenting some, challenging others. By concentrating on accounts attributable directly to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, Rosman provides a portrait drawn from life rather than myth. In addition, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Rosman during the research for this book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Ba'al Shem Tov's life.   [brief]
Similar Items