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1. | | Title: Susto, a folk illnessAuthor: Rubel, Arthur J Published: University of California Press, 1984 Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Latin American Studies | PsychologyPublisher's Description: Widespread throughout Latin America, susto is a folk illness associated with a broad array of symptoms. It is considered by susceptible populations to be a sickness caused by the separation of soul and body which is precipitated by a supernatural force. Most studies of culture-bound diseases have relied on descriptive approaches that focus on pathologies derived from medical textbooks. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, looking for explanations of susto in the interaction of social, physiological, and psychological factors. [brief]Similar Items | 2. | | Title: Speak, bird, speak again: Palestinian Arab folktales Author: Muhawi, Ibrahim 1937- Published: University of California Press, 1989 Subjects: Anthropology | Literature in Translation | Middle Eastern Studies | Folklore and MythologyPublisher's Description: Were it simply a collection of fascinating, previously unpublished folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales would merit praise and attention because of its cultural rather than political approach to Palestinian studies. But it is much more than this. By combining their respective expertise in English literature and anthropology, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana bring to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture.As native Palestinians, the authors are well-suited to their task. Over the course of several years they collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The authors have also provided footnotes, an international typology, a comprehensive motif index, and a thorough analytic guide to parallel tales in the larger Arab tradition in folk narrative. Speak, Bird, Speak Again is an essential guide to Palestinian culture and a must for those who want to deepen their understanding of a troubled, enduring people. [brief]Similar Items | 3. | | | 4. | | Title: History and tradition in Melanesian anthropology Author: Carrier, James G Published: University of California Press, 1992 Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia OtherPublisher'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]Similar Items | 5. | | Title: Cry for luck: sacred song and speech among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of northwestern California Author: Keeling, Richard Published: University of California Press, 1993 Subjects: Anthropology | EthnomusicologyPublisher's Description: The "sobbing" vocal quality in many traditional songs of northwestern California Indian tribes inspired the title of Richard Keeling's comprehensive study. Little has been known about the music of aboriginal Californians, and Cry for Luck will be welcomed by those who see the interpretation of music as a key to understanding other aspects of Native American religion and culture.Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok peoples, medicine songs and spoken formulas were applied to a range of activities from hunting deer to curing an upset stomach or gaining power over an uninterested member of the opposite sex. Keeling inventories 216 specific forms of "medicine" and explains the cosmological beliefs on which they were founded. This music is a living tradition, and many of the public dances he describes are still performed today. Keeling's comparative, historical perspective shows how individual elements in the musical tradition can relate to the development of local cultures and the broader sphere of North American prehistory. [brief]Similar Items | 6. | | Title: Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern worldAuthor: Wolf, Eric R 1923- Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | SociologyPublisher'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]Similar Items | 7. | | Title: Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China Author: Harrell, Stevan Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: Anthropology | China | Ethnic Studies | SociologyPublisher's Description: Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, the first scholarly study in a Western language on the Yi in four decades, brings this little-known part of the world to life. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China is a remarkable collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being valuable as an ethnographic study, this book is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. This book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines. [brief]Similar Items | 8. | | Title: A carnival of parting: the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand as sung and told by Madhu Natisar Nath of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan Author: Nath, Madhu Natisar Published: University of California Press, 1993 Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Hinduism | South AsiaPublisher's Description: Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with him.The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting." [brief]Similar Items | 9. | | Title: Women writing cultureAuthor: Behar, Ruth 1956- Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Gender Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | SociologyPublisher's Description: In this collection of new reflections on the sexual politics, racial history, and moral predicaments of anthropology, feminist scholars explore a wide range of visions of identity and difference. How are feminists redefining the poetics and politics of ethnography? What are the contradictions of women studying women? How have gender, race, class, and nationality been scripted into the canon?Through autobiography, fiction, historical analysis, experimental essays, and criticism, the contributors offer exciting responses to these questions. Several pieces reinvestigate the work of key women anthropologists like Elsie Clews Parsons, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, while others reevaluate the writings of women of color like Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, and Alice Walker. Some selections explore how sexual politics help to determine what gets written and what is valued in the anthropological canon. Other pieces explore new forms of feminist ethnography that 'write culture' experimentally, thereby challenging prevailing, male-biased anthropological models. [brief]Similar Items | 10. | | Title: Ethnocriticism: ethnography, history, literature Author: Krupat, Arnold Published: University of California Press, 1992 Subjects: Literature | Anthropology | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Native American StudiesPublisher's Description: Ethnocriticism moves cultural critique to the boundaries that exist between cultures. The boundary traversed in Krupat's dexterous new book is the contested line between native and mainstream American literatures and cultures.For over a century the discourses of ethnography, history, and literature have sought to represent the Indian in America. Krupat considers all these discourses and the ways in which Indians have attempted to "write back," producing an oppositional - or at least a parallel - discourse. [brief]Similar Items | 11. | | Title: Rara!: vodou, power, and performance in Haiti and its diasporaAuthor: McAlister, Elizabeth A Published: University of California Press, 2002 Subjects: Religion | Cultural Anthropology | African American Studies | American Studies | Latin American StudiesPublisher's Description: Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics. Working deftly with highly original ethnographic material, Elizabeth McAlister shows how Rara bands harness the power of Vodou . . . [more]Similar Items | 12. | | Title: Listen to the heron's words: reimagining gender and kinship in North India Author: Raheja, Gloria Goodwin 1950- Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Women's Studies | South AsiaPublisher's Description: In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak, telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The heron's words - and women's expressive genres more generally - criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are compelling and consequential for the women in North India.The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village women. [brief]Similar Items | 13. | | | 14. | | Title: Tribes of India: the struggle for survival Author: Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von 1909- Published: University of California Press, 1982 Subjects: Anthropology | Asian StudiesSimilar Items | 15. | | Title: Grounds for play: the Nauṭaṅkī theatre of North India Author: Hansen, Kathryn Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: Literature | Cultural Anthropology | South AsiaPublisher's Description: The nautanki performances of northern India entertain their audiences with often ribald and profane stories. Rooted in the peasant society of pre-modern India, this theater vibrates with lively dancing, pulsating drumbeats, and full-throated singing. In Grounds for Play , Kathryn Hansen draws on field research to describe the different elements of nautanki performance: music, dance, poetry, popular story lines, and written texts. She traces the social history of the form and explores the play of meanings within nautanki narratives, focusing on the ways important social issues such as political authority, community identity, and gender differences are represented in these narratives.Unlike other styles of Indian theater, the nautanki does not draw on the pan-Indian religious epics such as the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for its subjects. Indeed, their storylines tend to center on the vicissitudes of stranded heroines in the throes of melodramatic romance. Whereas nautanki performers were once much in demand, live performances now are rare and nautanki increasingly reaches its audiences through electronic media - records, cassettes, films, television. In spite of this change, the theater form still functions as an effective conduit in the cultural flow that connects urban centers and the hinterland in an ongoing process of exchange. [brief]Similar Items | 16. | | Title: Disciplined hearts: history, identity, and depression in an American Indian communityAuthor: O'Nell, Theresa DeLeane 1957- Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Native American Ethnicity | Native American StudiesPublisher'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]Similar Items | 17. | | Title: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat Author: Applegate, Celia Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: History | European History | German StudiesPublisher's Description: At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat - the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.The ideas and activities clustered around Heimat shed new light particularly on problems of modernization. Instead of viewing the Germans as a dangerously anti-modern people, Applegate argues that they used the cultivation of Heimat to ground an abstract nationalism in their attachment to familiar places and to reconcile the modern industrial and urban world with the rural landscapes and customs they admired. Primarily a characteristic of the middle classes, love of Heimat constituted an alternative vision of German unity to the familiar aggressive, militaristic one. The Heimat vision of Germany emphasized cultural diversity and defined German identity by its internal members rather than its external enemies.Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention. [brief]Similar Items | 18. | | Title: Birth as an American rite of passageAuthor: Davis-Floyd, Robbie Published: University of California Press, 1992 Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender StudiesPublisher's Description: Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth - routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? And why, in spite of the natural childbirth movement, has hospital birth become even more intensely technologized? Robbie Davis-Floyd argues that these obstetrical procedures are rituals that reflect a cultural belief in the superiority of science over nature. Her interviews with 100 mothers and many health care professionals reveal in detail both the trauma and the satisfaction women derive from childbirth. She also calls for greater cultural and medical tolerance of the alternative beliefs of women who choose to birth at home. [brief]Similar Items | 19. | | Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia Author: Schwartz, William B 1922- Published: University of California Press, 1998 Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public PolicyPublisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children. [brief]Similar Items | 20. | | Title: Divine passions: the social construction of emotion in India Author: Lynch, Owen M 1931- Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | HistoryPublisher's Description: Naked holy men denying sexuality and feeling; elderly people basking in the warmth and security provided by devoted and attentive family members; fastidious priests concerned solely with rules of purity and minutiae of ritual practice; puritanical moralists concealing women and sexuality behind purdah's veils - these are familiar Western stereotypes of India. The essays in Divine Passions , however, paint other, more colorful and emotionally alive pictures of India: ecstatic religious devotees rolling in temple dust; gray-haired elders worrying about neglect and mistreatment by family members; priests pursuing a lusty, carefree ideal of the good life; and jokers reviling one another with bawdy, sexual insults at marriages.Drawing on rich ethnographic data from emotion-charged scenarios, these essays question Western academic theories of emotion, particularly those that reduce emotions to physiological sensations or to an individual's private feelings. Presenting an alternative view of emotions as culturally constructed and morally evaluative concepts grounded in the bodily self, the contributors to Divine Passions help dispel some of the West's persistent misconceptions of Indian emotional experience. Moreover, the edition as a whole argues for a new and different understanding of India based on field research and an understanding of the devotional (bhakti) tradition. [brief]Similar Items |
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