Title: Traditional oral epic: the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian return song 
Author: Foley, John Miles
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European Literature | Folklore and Mythology | Religion | Language and Linguistics | Classics | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: John Miles Foley offers an innovative and straightforward approach to the structural analysis of oral and oral-derived traditional texts. Professor Foley argues that to give the vast and complex body of oral "literature" its due, we must first come to terms with the endemic heterogeneity of traditional oral epics, with their individual histories, genres, and documents, as well as both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of their poetics.Until now, the emphasis in studies of oral traditional works has been placed on addressing the correspondences among traditions - shared structures of "formula," "theme," and "story-pattern." Traditional Oral Epic explores the incongruencies among traditions and focuses on the qualities specific to certain oral and oral-derived works. It is certain to inspire further research in this field.   [brief]
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Title: The poetics of military occupation: Mzeina allegories of Bedouin identity under Israeli and Egyptian rule
Author: Lavie, Smadar
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Military History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin . . . [more]
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Title: Survivors: an oral history of the Armenian genocide
Author: Miller, Donald E. (Donald Earl) 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: Between 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation. Yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the "forgotten genocide" the hearing it deserves. Survivors raise important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit.   [brief]
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Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya 
Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African History
Publisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years.   [brief]
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Title: Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
Author: Veer, Peter van der
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Religious nationalism is a subject of critical importance in much of the world today. Peter van der Veer's timely study on the relationship between religion and politics in India goes well beyond other books on this subject. He brings together several disciplines - anthropology, history, social theory, literary studies - to show how Indian religious identities have been shaped by pilgrimage, migration, language development, and more recently, print and visual media.Van der Veer's central focus is the lengthy dispute over the Babari mosque in Ayodhya, site of a bloody confrontation between Hindus and Muslims in December 1992. A thought-provoking range of other examples describes the historical construction of religious identities: cow protection societies and Sufi tombs, purdah and the political appropriation of images of the female body, Salman Rushdie and the role of the novel in nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, the Khalsa movement among Sikhs, and nationalist archaeology and the televised Ramayana .Van der Veer offers a new perspective on the importance of religious organization and the role of ritual in the formation of nationalism. His work advances our understanding of contemporary India while also offering significant theoretical insights into one of the most troubling issues of this century.   [brief]
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Title: China's new nationalism: pride, politics, and diplomacy
Author: Gries, Peter Hays 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Politics | Asian Studies | China | International Relations
Publisher's Description: Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a "barbaric" and intentional "criminal act," the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China. In this book, Peter Hays Gries explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, Gries offers a rare, in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations - two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century. Through recent Chinese books and magazines, movies, television shows, posters, and cartoons, Gries traces the emergence of this new nationalism. Anti-Western sentiment, once created and encouraged by China's ruling PRC, has been taken up independently by a new generation of Chinese. Deeply rooted in narratives about past "humiliations" at the hands of the West and impassioned notions of Chinese identity, popular nationalism is now undermining the Communist Party's monopoly on political discourse, threatening the regime's stability. As readable as it is closely researched and reasoned, this timely book analyzes the impact that popular nationalism will have on twenty-first century China and the world.   [brief]
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Title: Divided loyalties: nationalism and mass politics in Syria at the close of Empire
Author: Gelvin, James L 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Politics
Publisher's Description: James L. Gelvin brings a new and distinctive perspective to the perennially fascinating topic of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. Unlike previous historians who have focused on the activities and ideas of a small group of elites, Gelvin details the role played by non-elites in nationalist politics during the early part of the twentieth century. Drawing from previously untapped sources, he documents the appearance of a new form of political organization - the popular committee - that sprang up in cities and villages throughout greater Syria in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. These committees empowered a new type of nationalist leadership, made nationalist politics a mass phenomenon for the first time, and articulated a view of nation and nationalism that continues to inform the politics of the region today.Gelvin does more than recount an episode in the history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. His examination of leaflets, graffiti, speeches, rumors, and editorials offers fresh insights into the symbolic construction of national communities. His analysis of ceremonies - national celebrations, demonstrations, theater - contributes to our understanding of the emergence of mass politics. By situating his study within a broader historical context, Gelvin has written a book that will be of interest to all who wish to understand nationalism in the region and beyond.   [brief]
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Title: The comparative imagination: on the history of racism, nationalism, and social movements 
Author: Fredrickson, George M 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this collection of essays, an eminent American historian of race relations discusses issues central to our understanding of the history of racism, the role of racism, and the possibilites for justice in contemporary society. George M. Fredrickson provides an eloquent and vigorous examination of race relations in the United States and South Africa and at the same time illuminates the emerging field of comparative history - history that is explicitly cross-cultural in its comparisons of nations, eras, or social structures. Taken together, these thought-provoking, accessible essays - several never before published - bring new precision and depth to our understanding of racism and justice, both historically and for society today.The first group of essays in The Comparative Imagination summarizes and evaluates the cross-national comparative history written in the past fifty years. These essays pay particular attention to comparative work on slavery and race relations, frontiers, nation-building and the growth of modern welfare states, and class and gender relations. The second group of essays represents some of Fredrickson's own explorations into the cross-cultural study of race and racism. Included are new essays covering such topics as the theoretical and cross-cultural meaning of racism, the problem of race in liberal thought, and the complex relationship between racism and state-based nationalism. The third group contains Fredrickson's recent work on anti-racist and black liberation movements in the United States and South Africa, especially in the period since World War II.In addition, Fredrickson's provocative introduction breaks significant new intellectual ground, outlining a justification for the methods of comparative history in light of such contemporary intellectual trends as the revival of narrative history and the predominance of postmodern thought.   [brief]
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Title: The new Cold War?: religious nationalism confronts the secular state
Author: Juergensmeyer, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Asian Studies | Religion | Social Problems | Middle Eastern Studies | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Will the religious confrontations with secular authorities around the world lead to a new Cold War? Mark Juergensmeyer paints a provocative picture of the new religious revolutionaries altering the political landscape in the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. Impassioned Muslim leaders in Egypt, Palestine, and Algeria, political rabbis in Israel, militant Sikhs in India, and triumphant Catholic clergy in Eastern Europe are all players in Juergensmeyer's study of the explosive growth of religious movements that decisively reject Western ideas of secular nationalism.Juergensmeyer revises our notions of religious revolutions. Instead of viewing religious nationalists as wild-eyed, anti-American fanatics, he reveals them as modern activists pursuing a legitimate form of politics. He explores the positive role religion can play in the political life of modern nations, even while acknowledging some religious nationalists' proclivity to violence and disregard of Western notions of human rights. Finally, he situates the growth of religious nationalism in the context of the political malaise of the modern West. Noting that the synthesis of traditional religion and secular nationalism yields a religious version of the modern nation-state, Juergensmeyer claims that such a political entity could conceivably embrace democratic values and human rights.   [brief]
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Title: Nationalism and the Nordic imagination: Swedish art of the 1890s
Author: Facos, Michelle
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Art History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: This richly illustrated book is a lucid introduction to a largely neglected manifestation of Modernism that came out of fin-de-siècle Sweden. Michelle Facos presents the first study in English to seriously examine the movement known as Swedish National Romanticism. Her work is especially valuable in showing how the movement's primitivist tendencies were related to, but different from, similar cultural forces in Germany and other parts of Europe at that time. Facos shows how a small group of Swedish artists espoused a politically progressive, culturally conservative form of nationalism. These artists - among them Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, and Hanna Hirsch Pauli - produced a specifically national Swedish art by focusing on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as uniquely Swedish-Nordic values, geography, and ethnography. Their breathtaking images of the Nordic landscape shaped a communal "Folk" identity that accented regionalism, solidarity, and attachment to the past and protested against the perceived dangers of capitalist industrialism and urban expansion. By 1900 Sweden was on its way to realizing a society of social, economic, and political equality, and the National Romantic painters were no longer renegades. Facos's portrayal of their movement will attract readers in the arts, historians, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists.   [brief]
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Title: Black workers remember: an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle
Author: Honey, Michael K
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | United States History | Labor Studies | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.QQ Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.   [brief]
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Title: The Creation of tribalism in Southern Africa 
Author: Vail, Leroy
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | African History | African Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Despite a quarter century of "nation building," most African states are still driven by ethnic particularism - commonly known as "tribalism." The stubborn persistence of tribal ideologies despite the profound changes associated with modernization has puzzled scholars and African leaders alike. The bloody hostilities between the tribally-oriented Zulu Inkhata movement and supporters of the African National Congress are but the most recent example of tribalism's tenacity. The studies in this volume offer a new historical model for the growth and endurance of such ideologies in southern Africa.   [brief]
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Title: The Manchurian myth: nationalism, resistance and collaboration in modern China
Author: Mitter, Rana 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Japan
Publisher's Description: A powerful element in twentieth-century Chinese politics has been the myth of Chinese resistance to Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Investigating the shifting alliances of key players in that event, Rana Mitter traces the development of the narrative of resistance to the occupation and shows how it became part of China's political consciousness, enduring even today. After Japan's September 1931 military strike leading to a takeover of the Northeast, the Chinese responded in three major ways: collaboration, resistance in exile, and resistance on the ground. What motives prompted some Chinese to collaborate, others to resist? What were conditions like under the Japanese? Through careful reading of Chinese and Japanese sources, particularly local government records, newspapers, and journals published both inside and outside occupied Manchuria, Mitter sheds important new light on these questions.   [brief]
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Title: A flowering tree: and other oral tales from India A.K. Ramanujan ; edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes 
Author: Ramanujan, A. K 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Language and Linguistics | Asian Literature | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted.With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could - servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales.With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.   [brief]
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Title: Keeping slug woman alive: a holistic approach to American Indian texts
Author: Sarris, Greg
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Native American Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity | Cultural Anthropology | Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just "what things seem to be." Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down?Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multivalence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory.Sarris's perspective is exceptional: son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay - a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basketweaver and medicine woman - and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.   [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: Tribes and state formation in the Middle East
Author: Khoury, Philip S. (Philip Shukry) 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Tribes and State Formation is the first effort to bring together the disciplines of history, anthropology, and political science around a major topic that none of these alone is adequately equipped to address. How and why did certain tribal societies metamorphose over time into states? Scholars concerned with general questions of theory and methodology and the interaction of anthropology and history, as well as political scientists and sociologists concerned with concepts of the state in the Middle East and other developing regions, will be well served by this innovative work.The articles by an array of distinguished scholars cover a wide range of topics: the relationship of ideology to tribal and state power, comparisons between different regional patterns of tribe-state interaction, historical case studies from North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran extending to the contemporary period; theoretical and methodological inquiries, and systematic reviews of the literature on tribes and states. The articles argue against a unilinear approach to the study of tribes and state formation by emphasizing that states often existed alongside tribes and even created tribes for their own purposes. Some case studies emphasize the incompatibility of states and tribalism, while others illustrate the many areas in which tribes actually enhanced rather than impeded state formation.   [brief]
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Title: A translucent mirror: history and identity in Qing imperial ideology
Author: Crossley, Pamela Kyle
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: In this landmark exploration of the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the ways in which a large, early modern empire of Eurasia, the Qing (1636-1912), incorporated neighboring, but disparate, political traditions into a new style of emperorship. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, including Manchu, Korean, and Chinese archival materials, Crossley argues that distortions introduced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical records have blinded scholars to the actual course of events in the early years of the dynasty. This groundbreaking study examines the relationship between the increasingly abstract ideology of the centralizing emperorship of the Qing and the establishment of concepts of identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the advent of nationalism in China.Concluding with a broad-ranging postscript on the implications of her research for studies of nationalism and nation-building throughout modern Chinese history, A Translucent Mirror combines a readable narrative with a sophisticated, revisionary look at China's history. Crossley's book will alter current understandings of the Qing emperorship, the evolution of concepts of ethnicity, and the legacy of Qing rule for modern Chinese nationalism.   [brief]
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Title: Women in the Chinese enlightenment: oral and textual histories
Author: Wang, Zheng
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | China | Women's Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally.In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.   [brief]
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Title: Mirages of transition: the Peruvian altiplano, 1780-1930 
Author: Jacobsen, Nils 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Anthropology | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: This case study of the Peruvian altiplano, the vast high-altitude plains surrounding Lake Titicaca, combines economic and social analysis with cultural and institutional history. Nils Jacobsen challenges the prevailing view that the rural Andes underwent a successful transition to capitalism between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that although the political, economic, and administrative structures of colonialism were gradually dismantled by the region's advancing market economy, colonial modes of constructing power and social identity have lingered on even to this day.The result of painstaking research in remote rural archives, some of them now made inaccessible by the Shining Path, Mirages of Transition will become the definitive work on the Peruvian highlands.   [brief]
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