Title: Land mammals of Oregon
Author: Verts, B. J
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Zoology | Biology | Natural History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of mammals in the state of Oregon since 1936, when Vernon Bailey's The Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon was published. It provides a basic reference for mammalogists, wildlife biologists, students, and anyone interested in mammalian life in the northwestern United States. Indeed, researchers in states adjacent to Oregon will find much useful information regarding the mammals their regions share with Oregon. Descriptions of all 136 extant or recently extirpated mammal species in Oregon are in the book, with information on geographical variation, diet, reproduction, ontogeny, mortality, and behavior. The authors provide range maps and lists of collection localities based on their examination of 55,265 museum specimens and brief accounts of morphology, species diversity, distribution, and fossil records. Keys to orders, families, and species are provided for identification of unknown specimens. Also helpful is the introductory section with its discussion of skull morphology, evolutionary history, basic taxonomy, zoogeography, zoonotic diseases, and the history of mammalogy in Oregon. A bibliography of 2,925 references makes the volume especially useful for anyone wishing to do further research.   [brief]
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Title: When government fails: the Orange County bankruptcy
Author: Baldassare, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Economics and Business | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Law | California and the West
Publisher's Description: When Orange County, California, filed for Chapter 9 protection on December 6, 1994, it became the largest municipality in United States history to declare bankruptcy. In the first comprehensive analysis of this momentous fiscal crisis, Mark Baldassare uncovers the many twists and turns from the dark days in December 1994 to the financial recovery of June 1996. Utilizing a wealth of primary materials from the county government and Merrill Lynch, as well as interviews with key officials and players in this drama, Mark Baldassare untangles the causes of this $1.64 billion fiasco.He finds three factors critical to understanding the bankruptcy: one, the political fragmentation of the numerous local governments in the area; two, the fiscal conservatism underlying voters' feelings about their tax dollars; three, the financial austerity in state government and in meeting rising state expenditures. Baldassare finds that these forces help to explain how a county known for its affluence and conservative politics could have allowed its cities' school, water, transportation, and sanitation agencies to be held hostage to this failed investment pool. Meticulously examining the events that led up to the bankruptcy, the local officials' response to the fiscal emergency, and the road to fiscal recovery - as well as the governmental reforms engendered by the crisis - When Government Fails is a dramatic and instructive economic morality tale. Eminently readable, it underlines the dangers inherent in a freewheeling bull economy and the imperatives of local and state governments to protect fiscal assets. As Baldassare shows, Orange County need not - and should not - happen again.   [brief]
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Title: Sea cliffs, beaches, and coastal valleys of San Diego County: some amazing histories and some horrifying implications 
Author: Kuhn, Gerald G
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Geography | California and the West | Marine and Freshwater Sciences | Geology | Ecology
Publisher's Description: California's coastal zones are areas of extreme vulnerability, subject to the vicissitudes of weather and prone to erosion, landslides, and flooding. Gerald Kuhn and Francis Shepard examine and analyze these threats to coastal stability in a thought-provoking and detailed study of the coastal area of San Diego County from the nineteenth century to the present. An invaluable resource for oceanographers, geologists, meteorologists, coastal engineers, property owners, developers, and planning and regulatory agencies.   [brief]
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Title: Postsuburban California: the transformation of Orange County since World War II
Author: Kling, Rob
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Sociology | United States History | American Studies | California and the West | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Neither a city nor a traditional suburb, Orange County, California represents a striking example of a new kind of social formation. This multidisciplinary volume offers a cogent case study of the "postsuburban" phenomenon.
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Title: Disciplined hearts: history, identity, and depression in an American Indian community
Author: O'Nell, Theresa DeLeane 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Native American Ethnicity | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: "This is a good place for your work. Depression is a big problem here. About 70-80% of our people are depressed." When she arrived at the Flathead Reservation in Montana to start an ethnographic study of depression, medical anthropologist Theresa DeLeane O'Nell repeatedly encountered such statements. This astonishingly widespread concern propelled the author into the complex lives of these modern American Indian people and into the historical roots of their contemporary situation.In Disciplined Hearts, O'Nell draws on recent anthropological theory to locate Flathead depression in the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. According to O'Nell, Flathead narratives of depression are tales in which narrators use their demoralization as a guide for modern Indian life. Underlying their tales, she says, is the dramatic assertion that depression is the natural condition of "real Indians" - those who have "disciplined" their hearts by recasting their personal sadness into compassion for others.This rich account of family and community life describes the moral imagination with which Flathead Indian people weave together historical and personal loss, American Indian identity, and social responsibility. Based on her ethnographic and clinical work, O'Nell pinpoints American Indian depression within a complex interplay of cultural ideas of the self and the Indian family, emotion and ethnic identity, and historical relations between Indians and whites.   [brief]
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Title: A Ming society: Tài-ho County, Kiangsi, fourteenth to seventeenth centuries 
Author: Dardess, John W 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries gives rise to an unusually sound and immediate understanding of how Ming society functioned and changed over time.   [brief]
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Title: The Dinosauria
Author: Weishampel, David B 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | Paleontology | Geology | Biology
Publisher's Description: The Dinosauria provides a state-of-the-science view of current world research on dinosaur behavior, evolution, and extinction. Its internationally renowned authors, all specialists on the various members of the Dinosauria, contribute definitive descriptions and illustrations of these magnificent Mes . . . [more]
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Title: Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: an exploration of the comparative method 
Author: Gregor, Thomas
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | Geography
Publisher's Description: One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this innovative volume illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia the authors expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new and rewarding directions.   [brief]
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Title: New world disorder: the Leninist extinction
Author: Jowitt, Kenneth
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Communism, or as Ken Jowitt prefers, Leninism, has attracted, repelled, mystified, and terrified millions for nearly a century. In his brilliant, timely, and controversial study, New World Disorder , Jowitt identifies and interprets the extraordinary character of Leninist regimes, their political corruption, extinction, and highly unsettling legacy.Earlier attempts to grasp the essence of Leninism have treated the Soviet experience as either a variant of or alien to Western history, an approach that robs Leninism of much of its intriguing novelty. Jowitt instead takes a "polytheist" approach, Weberian in tenor and terms, comparing the Leninist to the liberal experience in the West, rather than assimilating it or alienating it.Approaching the Leninist phenomenon in these terms and spirit emphasizes how powerful the imperatives set by the West for the rest of the world are as sources of emulation, assimilation, rejection, and adaptation; how unyielding premodern forms of identification, organization, and action are; how novel, powerful, and dangerous charisma as a mode of organized indentity and action can be.The progression from essay to essay is lucid and coherent. The first six essays reject the fundamental assumptions about social change that inform the work of modernization theorists. Written between 1974 and 1990, they are, we know now, startingly prescient. The last three essays, written in early 1991, are the most controversial: they will be called alarmist, pessimistic, apocalyptic. They challenge the complacent, optimistic, and self-serving belief that the world is being decisively shaped in the image of the West - that the end of history is at hand.   [brief]
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Title: Emigrants and society: Extremadura and America in the sixteenth century 
Author: Altman, Ida
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | United States History
Publisher's Description: The opening of the New World to Spanish settlement had more than the limited impact on individuals and society which scholars have traditionally granted it. Many families and young single people left the neighboring cities of Cáceres and Trujillo in the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain for the Indies. By maintaining ties with home and one another, and sometimes returning, these emigrants developed patterns of involvement that on one level were linked directly to place of origin and on another would come to characterize the emigration movement as a whole. Ida Altman shows that the Indies could and did have a substantial and perceptible effect on local society in Spain, as the New World quickly became an important arena of activity for people seeking new and better opportunities. Her findings suggest interesting conclusions regarding the relationship of sixteenth-century Spanish emigration to the larger movement of people from Europe to the Western Hemisphere in modern times.   [brief]
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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]
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Title: Entangled edens: visions of the Amazon
Author: Slater, Candace
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Literature | Folklore and Mythology | Natural History | Latin American Studies | History of Science
Publisher's Description: Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of plants and animals without comprehending its equally astonishing human and cultural diversity. Early explorers describe encounters with fearsome warrior women and tell of golden cities complete with twenty-four-carat kings. Contemporary miners talk about a living, breathing gold. TV documentaries decry deforestation and mercury poisoning. How do these disparate visions of the Amazon relate to one another? As she fits the pieces of the puzzle together, Slater shows how today's widespread portrayal of the region as a fragile rain forest on the brink of annihilation is every bit as likely as earlier depictions to obscure important aspects of this immense and complicated region. In this book, Slater draws on her fifteen years of experience collecting stories and oral histories among many different groups of people in the Amazon. Throughout Entangled Edens, the voices of contemporary Amazonians mingle with the analyses of such writers as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Slater convinces us that these stories and ideas, together with an understanding of their origins and ongoing impact, are as critical as scientific analyses in the fight to preserve the rain forest.   [brief]
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Title: Ancient Titicaca: the evolution of complex society in southern Peru and northern Bolivia
Author: Stanish, Charles 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Archaeology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish's book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not yet been published. This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. Stanish provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, he discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. He then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of first Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius. The provocative data and interpretations of this book will also make us think anew about the rise and fall of other civilizations throughout history.   [brief]
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Title: Rediscovering Palestine: merchants and peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 
Author: Doumani, Beshara 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Drawing on previously unused primary sources, this book paints an intimate and vivid portrait of Palestinian society on the eve of modernity. Through the voices of merchants, peasants, and Ottoman officials, Beshara Doumani offers a major revision of standard interpretations of Ottoman history by investigating the ways in which urban-rural dynamics in a provincial setting appropriated and gave meaning to the larger forces of Ottoman rule and European economic expansion. He traces the relationship between culture, politics, and economic change by looking at how merchant families constructed trade networks and cultivated political power, and by showing how peasants defined their identity and formulated their notions of justice and political authority.Original and accessible, this study challenges nationalist constructions of history and provides a context for understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is also the first comprehensive work on the Nablus region, Palestine's trade, manufacturing, and agricultural heartland, and a bastion of local autonomy. Doumani rediscovers Palestine by writing the inhabitants of this ancient land into history.   [brief]
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Title: Countering colonization: Native American women and Great Lakes missions, 1630-1900 
Author: Devens, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Native American Studies | American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | Women's Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: With Countering Colonization , Carol Devens offers a well-documented, revisionary history of Native American women. From the time of early Jesuit missionaries to the late nineteenth century, Devens brings Ojibwa, Cree, and Montagnais-Naskapi women of the Upper Great Lakes region to the fore. Far from being passive observers without regard for status and autonomy, these women were pivotal in their own communities and active in shaping the encounter between Native American and white civilizations.While women's voices have been silenced in most accounts, their actions preserved in missionary letters and reports indicate the vital part women played during centuries of conflict. In contrast to some Indian men who accepted the missionaries' religious and secular teachings as useful tools for dealing with whites, many Indian women felt a strong threat to their ways of life and beliefs. Women endured torture and hardship, and even torched missionaries' homes in an attempt to reassert control over their lives. Devens demonstrates that gender conflicts in Native American communities, which anthropologists considered to be "aboriginal," resulted in large part from women's and men's divergence over the acceptance of missionaries and their message.This book's perspective is unique in its focus on Native American women who acted to preserve their culture. In acknowledging these women as historically significant actors, Devens has written a work for every scholar and student seeking a more inclusive understanding of the North American past.   [brief]
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Title: Tracing the veins: of copper, culture, and community from Butte to Chuquicamata
Author: Finn, Janet L 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | American Studies | California and the West | Economics and Business | Environmental Studies | Latino Studies
Publisher's Description: This tale of two cities - Butte, Montana, and Chuquicamata, Chile - traces the relationship of capitalism and community across cultural, national, and geographic boundaries. Combining social history with ethnography, Janet Finn shows how the development of copper mining set in motion parallel processes involving distinctive constructions of community, class, and gender in the two widely separated but intimately related sites. While the rich veins of copper in the Rockies and the Andes flowed for the giant Anaconda Company, the miners and their families in both places struggled to make a life as well as a living for themselves.Miner's consumption, a popular name for silicosis, provides a powerful metaphor for the danger, wasting, and loss that penetrated mining life. Finn explores themes of privation and privilege, trust and betrayal, and offers a new model for community studies that links local culture and global capitalism.   [brief]
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Title: Border matters: remapping American cultural studies
Author: Saldívar, José David
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Popular Culture | Literature
Publisher's Description: Border Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. José Saldívar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of texts - corridos , novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldívar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas.This intellectually adventurous, politically engaged study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices in a way that permanently changes our understanding of both the Chicano experience and the meaning of cultural theory. Defying national (and nationalistic) paradigms of culture, Saldívar argues that the culture of the borderlands is trans-national, constituting a social space in which new relations, hybrid cultures, and multi-voiced aesthetics are negotiated.Saldívar's critical readings treat culture as a social force and reveal the presence of social contexts within cultural texts. Border Matters maps out a new terrain for the study of culture, reshaping the way we understand migration, national identity, and intellectual inquiry itself.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Lines in the water: nature and culture at Lake Titicaca
Author: Orlove, Benjamin S
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Environmental Studies | Latin American Studies | Conservation
Publisher's Description: This beautifully written book weaves reflections on anthropological fieldwork together with evocative meditations on a spectacular landscape as it takes us to the remote indigenous villages on the shore of Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes. Ben Orlove brings alive the fishermen, reed cutters, boat builders, and families of this isolated region, and describes the role that Lake Titicaca has played in their culture. He describes the landscapes and rhythms of life in the Andean highlands as he considers the intrusions of modern technology and economic demands in the region. Lines in the Water tells a local version of events that are taking place around the world, but with an unusual outcome: people here have found ways to maintain their cultural autonomy and to protect their fragile mountain environment. The Peruvian highlanders have confronted the pressures of modern culture with remarkable vitality. They use improved boats and gear and sell fish to new markets but have fiercely opposed efforts to strip them of their indigenous traditions. They have retained their customary practice of limiting the amount of fishing and have continued to pass cultural knowledge from one generation to the next--practices that have prevented the ecological crises that have followed commercialization of small-scale fisheries around the world. This book--at once a memoir and an ethnography--is a personal and compelling account of a research experience as well as an elegantly written treatise on themes of global importance. Above all, Orlove reminds us that human relations with the environment, though constantly changing, can be sustainable.   [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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