Title: Reason and passion: representations of gender in a Malay society 
Author: Peletz, Michael G
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This book provides a historical and ethnographic examination of gender relations in Malay society, in particular in the well-known state of Negeri Sembilan, famous for its unusual mixture of Islam and matrilineal descent. Peletz analyzes the diverse ways in which the evocative, heavily gendered symbols of "reason" and "passion" are deployed by Malay Muslims. Unlike many studies of gender, this book elucidates the cultural and political processes implicated in the constitution of both feminine and masculine identity. It also scrutinizes the relationship between gender and kinship and weighs the role of ideology in everyday life.Peletz insists on the importance of examining gender systems not as social isolates, but in relation to other patterns of hierarchy and social difference. His study is historical and comparative; it also explores the political economy of contested symbols and meanings. More than a treatise on gender and social change in a Malay society, this book presents a valuable and deeply interesting model for the analysis of gender and culture by addressing issues of hegemony and cultural domination at the heart of contemporary cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Taming the wind of desire: psychology, medicine, and aesthetics in Malay shamanistic performance
Author: Laderman, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | Psychology | Southeast Asia | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Charged with restoring harmony and relieving pain, the Malay shaman places his patients in trance and encourages them to express their talents, drives, personality traits - the "Inner Winds" of Malay medical lore - in a kind of performance. These healing ceremonies, formerly viewed by Western anthropologists as exotic curiosities, actually reveal complex multicultural origins and a unique indigenous medical tradition whose psychological content is remarkably relevant to contemporary Western concerns.Accepted as apprentice to a Malay shaman, Carol Laderman learned and recorded every aspect of the healing seance and found it comparable in many ways to the traditional dramas of Southeast Asia and of other cultures such as ancient Greece, Japan, and India. The Malay seance is a total performance, complete with audience, stage, props, plot, music, and dance. The players include the patient along with the shaman and his troupe. At the center of the drama are pivotal relationships - among people, between humans and spirits, and within the self. The best of the Malay shamans are superb poets, dramatists, and performers as well as effective healers of body and soul.   [brief]
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Title: Translating property: the Maxwell Land Grant and the conflict over land in the American West, 1840-1900
Author: Montoya, María E 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Law | Latino Studies | California and the West | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose. We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed.   [brief]
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Title: Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture 
Author: Modell, Judith Schachter 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Adoption challenges our understanding of the core symbols of kinship in American culture - birth, biology, and blood. Through the lens of anthropological theory, Judith Modell examines these symbols and the way they affect people who experience the "fictive" kinship of adoption. Her findings are timely and profoundly moving and contribute valuable insights to the current debate about removing the veil of secrecy from adoption records and procedures.Modell draws on interviews with birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, some of whom are involved in reforming the adoption process. That reform - the opening of records, the acknowledgment of a biological and a legal parent, the blending of families that are related only through a child - spotlights the very meanings of mother and father, "blood," and identity in this country. Thus her book complements other recent anthropological literature that argues for a radical rethinking of the way we define, and use, those concepts.Certain rhetorical motifs emerge in the language used by members of the adoption triad: "surrender" is the critical motif for birthparents, "telling" for adoptees, "love at first sight" for adopting parents, and "reunion" for the search process. Throughout, we hear the words of those involved in adoption, and we come to understand the ambiguities regarding love and responsibility, nurture and competence, well-being and wealth - concepts that underlie the "transaction in parenthood" in American culture. Modell's findings should have important ramifications for policy, practice, and individual participation in the adoption experience.   [brief]
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Title: Public lands and political meaning: ranchers, the government, and the property between them
Author: Merrill, Karen R
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | United States History | Law
Publisher's Description: The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands. Drawing upon neglected sources from organized ranchers, this is the first book to provide a historically based explanation for why the relationship between ranchers and the federal government became so embattled long before modern environmentalists became involved in the issue. Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, Public Lands and Political Meaning traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies, giving us a new look at the relations of power that made the modern West. Although a majority of organized ranchers supported government control of the range at the turn of the century, by midcentury these same organizations often used a virulently antifederal discourse that fueled many a political fight in Washington and that still runs deep in American politics today. In analyzing this shift, Merrill shows how profoundly people's ideas about property wove their way into the political language of the debates surrounding public range policy. As she unravels the meaning of this language, Merrill demonstrates that different ideas about property played a crucial role in perpetuating antagonism on both sides of the fence. In addition to illuminating the origins of the "sagebrush rebellions" in the American West, this book also persuasively argues that political historians must pay more attention to public land management issues as a way of understanding tensions in American state-building.   [brief]
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Title: Small property versus big government: social origins of the property tax revolt 
Author: Lo, Clarence Y. H
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Public Policy | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Tax reformers, take note. Clarence Lo's investigation of California's Proposition 13 and other tax reduction bills is both a tribute and a warning to people who get "mad as hell" and try to do something about being pushed around by government. Homeowners in California, faced with impossible property tax bills in the 1970s, got mad and pushed back, starting an avalanche that swept tax limitation measures into state after state. What we learn is that, although the property tax was slashed, two-thirds of the benefits went to business owners rather than homeowners.How did a crusade launched by homeowning consumers seeking tax relief end up as a pro-business, supply-side political program? To trace the transformation, Lo uses the firsthand recollections of 120 activists in the movement, going back to the 1950s. He shows how their protests were ignored, until a suburban alliance of upper-middle-class property owners and business owners took charge. It was the program of that latter group, not the plight of the moderate-income homeowner, which inspired tax revolts across the nation and shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration.   [brief]
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Title: The state must be our master of fire: how peasants craft culturally sustainable development in Senegal
Author: Galvan, Dennis Charles
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Politics | Anthropology | African Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Over several centuries, the Serer of the Siin region of Senegal developed a complex system of land tenure that resulted in a stable rural society, productive agriculture, and a well-managed ecosystem. Dennis Galvan tells the story of what happened when French colonial rulers, and later the government of the newly independent Senegal, imposed new systems of land tenure and cultivation on the Serer of Siin. Galvan's book is a painstaking and skillful autopsy of ruinous Western-style "rational" economic development policy forced upon a fragile, yet self-sustaining, society. It is also a disquieting demonstration of the general folly of such an approach and an attempt to articulate a better, more sensitive, and ultimately more productive model for change - a model Galvan calls "institutional syncretism."   [brief]
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Title: Slide Mountain, or, The folly of owning nature 
Author: Steinberg, Theodore 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Law | Environmental Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: The drive to own the natural world in twentieth-century America seems virtually limitless. Signs of this national penchant for possessing nature are everywhere - from suburban picket fences to elaborate schemes to own underground water, clouds, even the ocean floor.Yet, as Theodore Steinberg demonstrates in this compelling, witty look at Americans' attempts to master the environment, nature continually turns these efforts into folly. In a rich, narrative style recalling the work of John McPhee, Steinberg tours America to explore some of the more unusual dilemmas that have arisen in our struggle to possess nature.Beginning along the Missouri River, Steinberg recounts the battle for three thousand acres of land the river carved from a Nebraska Indian reservation and deposited in Iowa. Then he travels to Louisiana, where an army of lawyers butted heads over whether Six Mile Lake was actually a lake or a stream. He continues to Arizona to investigate who owned the underground, then to Pennsylvania's Blue Ridge Mountains to see who claimed the clouds. He ends in crowded New York City with Donald Trump's struggle for air rights.Americans' obsession with owning nature was immortalized by Mark Twain in the tale of Slide Mountain, where a landslide-prone Nevada peak turned the American dream of real estate into dust. In relating these modern-day "Slide Mountain" stories, Steinberg illuminates what it means to live in a culture of property where everything must have an owner.   [brief]
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Title: The vestal and the fasces: Hegel, Lacan, property, and the feminine 
Author: Schroeder, Jeanne Lorraine
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Law | Philosophy | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this feminist exploration of the erotics of the marketplace, Hegel's notion of property and Lacan's idea of the phallus serve parallel functions in creating the subjectivity necessary for self-actualization. Subjectivity requires intersubjective relationships mediated through a regime of possessing, enjoying, and exchanging an object of desire. For Hegel, this regime is property; for Lacan, it is sexuality, symbolized by the Phallus, which we conflate with the male organ and the female body. Property law, in Jeanne Schroeder's account, is implicitly figured by similar anatomical metaphors for that which men wish to possess and that which women try to be and enjoy. This is reflected in imagery taken from ancient Rome - the axe and bundle of sticks known as the Fasces, and the virgin priestess called the Vestal.Schroeder traces the persistence of phallic metaphors in modern jurisprudence. Rejecting the dominant schools of legal feminism, she reconceptualizes property - the legal relationship as well as its not necessarily material object - as a necessary moment in the human struggle for love and recognition. The Feminine, for Schroeder, is the radical negativity at the heart of both Lacan's split subject and Hegel's concept of freedom. Feminine emancipation and private property are, therefore, equally necessary conditions for the actualization of the free individual and the just society. Feminist scholars, social theorists, political scientists, philosophers, and lawyers will find in Schroeder's analysis scintillating new perspectives on property theory and the feminine within the market and the law.   [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: Houses in the rain forest: ethnicity and inequality among farmers and foragers in Central Africa 
Author: Grinker, Roy Richard 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: This is the first ethnographic study of the farmers and foragers of northeastern Zaire since Colin Turnbull's classic works of the 1960s. Roy Richard Grinker lived for nearly two years among the Lese farmers and their long-term partners, the Efe (Pygmies), learned their languages, and gained unique insights into their complex social relations and ethnic identities. By showing how political organization is structured by ethnic and gender relations in the Lese house, Grinker challenges previous views of the Lese and Efe and other farmer-forager societies, as well as the conventional anthropological boundary between domestic and political contexts.   [brief]
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Title: Healing sounds from the Malaysian rainforest: Temiar music and medicine
Author: Roseman, Marina 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | East Asia Other | Ethnomusicology | Asian Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Music and dance play a central role in the "healing arts" of the Senoi Temiar, a group of hunters and horticulturalists dwelling in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. As musicologist and anthropologist, Marina Roseman recorded and transcribed Temiar rituals, while as a member of the community she became a participant and even a patient during the course of her two-year stay. She shows how the sounds and gestures of music and dance acquire a potency that can transform thoughts, emotions, and bodies.   [brief]
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Title: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru 
Author: Smith, Gavin
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Latin American Studies
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Title: Sensory biographies: lives and deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists
Author: Desjarlais, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Buddhism | Aging
Publisher's Description: Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.   [brief]
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Title: Conquests and historical identities in California, 1769-1936
Author: Haas, Lisbeth
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Ethnic Studies | Latino Studies | American Studies | Gender Studies | California and the West | United States History
Publisher's Description: Spanning the period between Spanish colonization and the early twentieth century, this well-argued and convincing study examines the histories of Spanish and American conquests, and of ethnicity, race, and community in southern California. Lisbeth Haas draws on a diverse body of source materials (mission and court archives, oral histories, Spanish language plays, census and tax records) to build a new picture of rural society and social change.A borderlands and Chicano history, Haas's work provides a richly textured study of events that took place in and around San Juan Capistrano and Santa Ana in present-day Orange County. She provides a vivid sense of how and why the past acquires meaning in the lives that make up the historical identities she discusses. The voices of Juaneño and Luiseño Indians, Californios, and Mexicans are heard along the shifting faultlines of economic, social, and political change.This is one of the first truly multiethnic histories of California and of the West. It makes clear that issues of multiculturalism and ethnicity are not recent manifestations in California - they have characterized social and cultural relationships there since the late eighteenth century.   [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 possessed and the dispossessed: spirits, identity, and power in a Madagascar migrant town 
Author: Sharp, Lesley Alexandra
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Indigenous Religions
Publisher's Description: This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba , or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of insiders and outsiders in this community, which draws people from all over the island and abroad.Sharp's study also reveals the contradictions between indigenous healing and Western-derived Protestant healing and psychiatry. Particular attention to the significance of migrant women's and children's experiences in a context of seeking relief from personal and social ills gives Sharp's investigation importance for gender studies as well as for studies in medical anthropology, Africa and Madagascar, the politics of culture, and religion and ritual.   [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: Shaping history: ordinary people in European politics, 1500-1700 
Author: Te Brake, Wayne Ph
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them. Shaping History shows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne te Brake's outstanding synthesis builds on the many studies of popular political action in specific settings and conflicts, locating the interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. But, as Te Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events. Offering a compelling alternative to traditionally elite-centered accounts of territorial state formation in Europe, this book calls attention to the variety of ways ordinary people have molded and shaped their own political histories.   [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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