Title: The hyena people: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia
Author: Salamon, Hagar
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Anthropology | African Studies
Publisher's Description: The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. Hagar Salamon presents the first in-depth study of this group, called the "Hyena people" by their non-Jewish neighbors. Based on more than 100 interviews with Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel, Salamon's book explores the Ethiopia within as seen through the lens of individual memories and expressed through ongoing dialogues. It is an ethnography of the fantasies and fears that divide groups and, in particular, Jews and non-Jews.Recurring patterns can be seen in Salamon's interviews, which thematically touch on religious disputations, purity and impurity, the concept of blood, slavery and conversion, supernatural powers, and the metaphors of clay vessels, water, and fire. The Hyena People helps unravel the complex nature of religious coexistence in Ethiopia and also provides important new tools for analyzing and evaluating inter-religious, interethnic, and especially Jewish-Christian relations in a variety of cultural and historical contexts.   [brief]
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Title: Marxist modern: an ethnographic history of the Ethiopian revolution
Author: Donham, Donald L. (Donald Lewis)
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: African Studies | History | Cultural Anthropology | African History | Politics
Publisher's Description: Modernity has become a keyword in a number of recent intellectual discussions. In this book, Donald L. Donham shows that similar debates have long occurred, particularly among peoples located on the margins of world power and wealth. Based on extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia - conducted over a twenty-year period - Marxist Modern provides a cultural history of the Ethiopian revolution that highlights the role of modernist ideas.Moving between the capital, Addis Ababa, and Maale, the home of a small ethnic group in the south, Donham constructs a narrative of upheaval and change, presenting local people's understandings of events, as these echoed with and appropriated stories of other world revolutions. With the help of poststructuralist insights and theories of narrative, Donham locates a recurrent dialectic between modernist Marxism, local Maale traditionalisms, and antimodernist, evangelical Christianity. One of the most consequential outcomes of this interaction - until the late 1980s - was the creation of a more powerful state, one that penetrated peasant communities ever more deeply and pervasively.Combining sophisticated theory with fascinating ethnographic detail, this study contributes to the theory of revolution as well as the study of modernity. In doing so, it seeks to integrate ethnography and history in a new way.   [brief]
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Title: A history of Ethiopia
Author: Marcus, Harold G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: African Studies | African History | Postcolonial Studies
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Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [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: Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China
Author: Hinsch, Bret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: The first detailed treatment of the Chinese homosexual tradition in any Western language, Passions of the Cut Sleeve shatters preconceptions and stereotypes. Gone is the image of the sternly puritanical Confucian as sole representative of Chinese sexual practices - and with it the justification for the modern Chinese insistence that homosexuality is a recent import from the decadent West. Rediscovering the male homosexual tradition in China provides a startling new perspective on Chinese society and adds richly to our understanding of homosexuality.Bret Hinsch's reconstruction of the Chinese homosexual past reveals unexpected scenes. An emperor on his deathbed turns over the seals of the empire to a male beloved; two men marry each other with elaborate wedding rituals; parents sell their son into prostitution. The tradition portrays men from all levels of society - emperors, transvestite actors, rapists, elegant scholars, licentious monks, and even the nameless poor.Drawing from dynastic histories, erotic novels, popular Buddhist tracts, love poetry, legal cases, and joke books, Passions of the Cut Sleeve evokes the complex and fascinating male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age until its decline in recent times.   [brief]
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Title: Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern world
Author: Wolf, Eric R 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This collection of twenty-eight essays by renowned anthropologist Eric R. Wolf is a legacy of some of his most original work, with an insightful foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the essays, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, Wolf prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, as well as an intellectual autobiography that introduces the collection as a whole. Sydel Silverman, who completed the editing of the book, says in her preface, "He wanted this selection of his writings over the past half-century to serve as part of the history of how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems into its purview."   [brief]
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Title: Male colors: the construction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
Author: Leupp, Gary P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Asian Studies | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class structure and gender roles. Gary P. Leupp fills the gap with a dynamic examination of the origins and nature of the tradition. Based on a wealth of literary and historical documentation, this study places Tokugawa homosexuality in a global context, exploring its implications for contemporary debates on the historical construction of sexual desire.Combing through popular fiction, law codes, religious works, medical treatises, biographical material, and artistic treatments, Leupp traces the origins of pre-Tokugawa homosexual traditions among monks and samurai, then describes the emergence of homosexual practices among commoners in Tokugawa cities. He argues that it was "nurture" rather than "nature" that accounted for such conspicuous male/male sexuality and that bisexuality was more prevalent than homosexuality. Detailed, thorough, and very readable, this study is the first in English or Japanese to address so comprehensively one of the most complex and intriguing aspects of Japanese history.   [brief]
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Title: Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain
Author: Ginsburg, Faye D
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Media Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Electronic Media | Postcolonial Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Sociology | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media - film, television, video - are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.   [brief]
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Title: Envisioning power: ideologies of dominance and crisis
Author: Wolf, Eric R 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Social Theory | Social and Political Thought | Political Theory | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: With the originality and energy that have marked his earlier works, Eric Wolf now explores the historical relationship of ideas, power, and culture. Responding to anthropology's long reliance on a concept of culture that takes little account of power, Wolf argues that power is crucial in shaping the circumstances of cultural production. Responding to social-science notions of ideology that incorporate power but disregard the ways ideas respond to cultural promptings, he demonstrates how power and ideas connect through the medium of culture.Wolf advances his argument by examining three very different societies, each remarkable for its flamboyant ideological expressions: the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico, and National Socialist Germany. Tracing the history of each case, he shows how these societies faced tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises, prompting ideological responses that drew on distinctive, historically rooted cultural understandings. In each case study, Wolf analyzes how the regnant ideology intertwines with power around the pivotal relationships that govern social labor. Anyone interested in the history of anthropology or in how the social sciences make comparisons will want to join Wolf in Envisioning Power .   [brief]
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Title: From savage to Negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954
Author: Baker, Lee D 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | African American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture, and the law. Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions - Plessy v. Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision of 1954) - Baker shows how racial categories change over time.Baker paints a vivid picture of the relationships between specific African American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. He demonstrates that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which skillfully appropriated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.   [brief]
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Title: Disrupted lives: how people create meaning in a chaotic world
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Our lives are full of disruptions, from the minor - a flat tire, an unexpected phone call - to the fateful - a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States. FROM THE BOOK :"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."   [brief]
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Title: History and tradition in Melanesian anthropology 
Author: Carrier, James G
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: Melanesian societies, like village societies in many parts of the world, are frequently portrayed as existing in a timeless, traditional present. These seven original essays offer an alternative view, one showing that historical evidence can and must inform our understanding of contemporary cultures.This collection brings together anthropologists and historians who maintain that the "timeless-traditionalism" approach of anthropology is inadequate. Life in the existing societies of Melanesia cannot be understood, they say, without examining how these societies are shaped by Western influences. The historical perspective that acknowledges ongoing political, economic, and social change results in less stereotypical descriptions of these traditional cultures. Historians and anthropologists of Melanesia and the Pacific will find here original and enlightening work that is sure to influence the theoretical orientation of Melanesian anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: apes, people, and their genes
Author: Marks, Jonathan (Jonathan M.) 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Evolution | Physical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Mammalogy
Publisher's Description: The overwhelming similarity of human and ape genes is one of the best-known facts of modern genetic sciencenm. But what does this similarity mean? Does it, as many have suggested, have profound implications for understanding human nature? Well-known molecular anthropologist Jonathan Marks uses the human-versus-ape controversy as a jumping-off point for a radical reassessment of a range of provocative issues--from the role of science in society to racism, animal rights, and cloning. Full of interesting facts, fascinating personalities, and vivid examples that capture times and places, this work explains and demystifies human genetic science--showing ultimately how it has always been subject to social and political influences and teaching us how to think critically about its modern findings. Marks presents the field of molecular anthropology--a synthesis of the holistic approach of anthropology with the reductive approach of molecular genetics--as a way of improving our understanding of the science of human evolution. As he explores the intellectual terrain of this field, he lays out its broad areas of interest with issues ranging from the differences between apes and humans to the biological and behavioral variations expressed in humans as a species. Marks confronts head-on the problems of racial classification in science. He describes current theories about race and uses work in primatology, comparative anatomy, and molecular anthropology to debunk them. He also sheds new light on the controversial Great Ape Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project, and much more. This iconoclastic, witty, and extremely readable book illuminates the deep background of human variation and asks us to reconsider the role of science in modern society.   [brief]
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Title: Annihilating difference: the anthropology of genocide
Author: Hinton, Alexander Laban
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Asian Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | History | Sociology | Media Studies | Religion | Religion
Publisher's Description: Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.   [brief]
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Title: Nomad: a year in the life of a Qashqa'i tribesman in Iran
Author: Beck, Lois 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Borzu Qermezi was the headman and political leader of a group of nomadic pastoralists who were part of the Qashqa'i confederacy of southwest Iran. Proud, complex, strong-willed, witty, and cunning, Borzu successfully led his people on their annual migrations for many years. He regulated their travel; mediated conflicts; intervened in (and sometimes exacerbated) tense situations between his people and other nomads; and dealt with the government police agency. Structuring the account around the four seasons, Lois Beck recounts the day-to-day activities of Borzu during the year she spent traveling with his people. She describes the rigors of nomadic life and the consequences of decisions made in haste.During 1970 to 1971, Borzu and his people were faced with many difficulties. When the expected winter rains did not fall, pastures and crops shriveled. Unable to sell their starving livestock for any profit, Borzu's people saw their debts to urban merchants and moneylenders increase. At the same time, Iran exercised more bureaucratic control over the Qashqa'i by applying new policies over migratory schedules and the allocation of scarce pastures, and by introducing non-Qashqa'i agriculturalists and livestock investors as legitimate land users. All these measures threatened the nomad's way of life and eventually undermined the role of headmen such as Borzu. Lois Beck details the vicissitudes endured by Borzu's people and the strategies he devised to cope with them.Blending ethnographic and historical material, this book contains information unavailable for other tribal and nomadic pastoral groups in the Middle East and central Asia. Through Beck's deft analysis, we come to understand why nomadic pastoralism was once an important part of this vast region, and why tribal society has endured.   [brief]
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Title: The heart of the pearl shell: the mythological dimension of Foi sociality 
Author: Weiner, James F
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Anthropology
Publisher's Description: For the Foi people who live on the edge of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea, the flow of pearl shells is the "heart" of their social life. The pearl shell is the exchange item that mediates the creation of their most important sexual and social roles. The Heart of the Pearl Shell analyzes a number of myths of the Foi people, elegantly bringing together significant ethnographic materials in a way that has important implications for the development of social theory in anthropology and in Melanesian studies. Scholars of semiotic-symbolic anthropology and of comparative religion will also share the author's interest in the meaning and role of mythology in Foi culture.Instead of relying on orthodox methods of Freudian or structuralist interpretation, James Weiner assumes there is a dialectical relationship between the images of Foi myth and the images of the Foi's social world. He demonstrates how each set of these images is dependent upon the other for its creation. This innovative study locates Foi social meaning in the re-creation and attempted solution of the moral dilemmas that are crystallized in mythology and other poetic usages.   [brief]
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Title: National ideology under socialism: identity and cultural politics in Ceauşescu's Romania
Author: Verdery, Katherine
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Cultural Anthropology | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a re . . . [more]
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Title: Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexican national space
Author: Lomnitz Adler, Claudio
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces - in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico - Exits from the Labyrinth links rich ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.   [brief]
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Title: The wrestler's body: identity and ideology in north India 
Author: Alter, Joseph S
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: The Wrestler's Body tells the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the insights of anthropology, Joseph Alter writes an ethnography of the wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of the wrestler's identity and ideology.Young men in North India may choose to join an akhara, or gymnasium, where they subject themselves to a complex program of physical and moral fitness. Alter's first-hand description of each detail of the wrestler's regimen offers a unique perspective on South Asian culture and society. Wrestlers feel that moral reform of Indian national character is essential and advocate their way of life as an ideology of national health. Everyone is called on to become a wrestler and build collective strength through self-discipline.   [brief]
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