Title: Looking for God in Brazil: the progressive Catholic Church in urban Brazil's religious arena
Author: Burdick, John 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Christianity
Publisher's Description: For a generation, the Catholic Church in Brazil has enjoyed international renown as one of the most progressive social forces in Latin America. The Church's creation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs), groups of Catholics who learn to read the Bible as a call for social justice, has been widely hailed. Still, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the CEBs are lagging far behind the explosive growth of Brazil's two other major national religious movements - Pentacostalism and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda .On the basis of his extensive fieldwork in Rio di Janeiro, including detailed life histories of women, blacks, youths, and the marginal poor, John Burdick offers the first in-depth explanation of why the radical Catholic Church is losing, and Pentecostalism and Umbanda winning, the battle for souls in urban Brazil.   [brief]
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Title: Welcoming the undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish question 
Author: Lesser, Jeff
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Jewish Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Jeffrey Lesser's invaluable book tells the poignant and puzzling story of how earlier this century, in spite of the power of anti-Semitic politicians and intellectuals, Jews made their exodus to Brazil, "the land of the future." What motivated the Brazilian government, he asks, to create a secret ban on Jewish entry in 1937 just as Jews desperately sought refuge from Nazism? And why, just one year later, did more Jews enter Brazil legally than ever before? The answers lie in the Brazilian elite's radically contradictory images of Jews and the profound effect of these images on Brazilian national identity and immigration policy.Lesser's work reveals the convoluted workings of Brazil's wartime immigration policy as well as the attempts of desperate refugees to twist the prejudices on which it was based to their advantage. His subtle analysis and telling anecdotes shed light on such pressing issues as race, ethnicity, nativism, and nationalism in postcolonial societies at a time when "ethnic cleansing" in Europe is once again driving increasing numbers of refugees from their homelands.   [brief]
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Title: Family and frontier in colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 
Author: Metcalf, Alida C 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Colonial families in the Brazilian town of Santana de Parnaíba lived on the fringe of settlement in a vast and perilous continent. In her revealing community history, Metcalf tells how these settlers pursued family strategies that adapted European custom to the American environment. Turning to recorded events such as marriages, baptisms, and especially inheritances, she discovers that as the newcomers transformed the wilderness into a settled agricultural community, they laid the foundation for a class society of planters, peasants, and slaves. With an engaging description of family life at all three levels of society, the author shows how the families most successful in exploiting and controlling the resources of the wilderness gained wealth, power, and social dominance.Metcalf challenges accepted views by contending that not only external economic forces but also colonial family strategies paved the way for an inegalitarian society in Brazil. Her portrayal of frontier survival and coping, together with the heedless exploitation of wilderness resources, brings a historical perspective to the consideration of Brazil's last frontier, the Amazon.   [brief]
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Title: Vale of tears: revisiting the Canudos massacre in northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897
Author: Levine, Robert M
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization.In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World , Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither. Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil's attempts to "whiten" itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians' self-image over the past century.   [brief]
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Title: Manufacturing militance: workers' movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985
Author: Seidman, G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | African Studies | Labor Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Challenging prevailing theories of development and labor, Gay Seidman's controversial study explores how highly politicized labor movements could arise simultaneously in Brazil and South Africa, two starkly different societies. Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.   [brief]
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Title: Violence workers: police torturers and murderers reconstruct Brazilian atrocities
Author: Huggins, Martha Knisely 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Of the twenty-three Brazilian policemen interviewed in depth for this landmark study, fourteen were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "violence workers" and the other group of "atrocity facilitators" who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: Why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds - on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?   [brief]
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Title: With broadax and firebrand: the destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic forest
Author: Dean, Warren
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Latin American Studies | Natural History
Publisher's Description: Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants.Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes it up to the 1990s - through the invasion of Europeans in the sixteenth century; the ensuing devastation wrought by such developments as gold and diamond mining, slash-and-burn farming, coffee planting, and industrialization; and the desperate battles between conservationists and developers in the late twentieth century.Based on a great range of documentary and scientific resources, With Broadax and Firebrand is an enormously ambitious book. More than a history of a tropical forest, or of the relationship between forest and humans, it is also a history of Brazil told from an environmental perspective. Dean writes passionately and movingly, in the fierce hope that the story of the Atlantic Forest will serve as a warning of the terrible costs of destroying its great neighbor to the west, the Amazon Forest.   [brief]
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Title: Fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival
Author: Nordstrom, Carolyn 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Fieldwork Under Fire is a path-breaking collection of essays written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. These essays combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often surprising creative strategies people use to survive.In "writing violence," the authors give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, these essays bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.   [brief]
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Title: Cultures in conflict: social movements and the state in Peru
Author: Stokes, Susan Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Anthropology | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: In this vivid ethnography set in contemporary Peru, Susan Stokes provides a compelling analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. Her research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter.This work is a new and vital chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements. It chronicles the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.   [brief]
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Title: Random violence: how we talk about new crimes and new victims
Author: Best, Joel
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | Law | Criminology
Publisher's Description: Random Violence is a deft and thought-provoking exploration of the ways we talk about - and why we worry about - new crimes and new forms of victimization. Focusing on so-called random crimes such as freeway shootings, gang violence, hate crimes, stalking, and wilding, Joel Best shows how new crime problems emerge and how some quickly fade from public attention while others spread and become enduring subjects of concern. Best's original and incisive argument illuminates the fact that while these crimes are in actuality neither new, nor epidemic, nor random, the language used to describe them nonetheless shapes both private fears and public policies.Best scrutinizes the melodramatic quality of the American public's attitudes toward crime, exposing the cultural context for the popularity of "random violence" as a catch-all phrase to describe contemporary crime, and the fallacious belief that violence is steadily rising. He points out that the age, race, and sex of homicide victims reveal that violence is highly patterned.Best also details the contemporary ideology of victimization, as well as the social arrangements that create and support a victim industry that can label large numbers of victims. He demonstrates why it has become commonplace to "declare war" on social problems, including drugs, crime, poverty, and cancer, and outlines the complementary influence of media, activists, officials, and experts in institutionalizing crime problems. Intrinsic to all these concerns is the way in which policy choices and outcomes are affected by the language used to describe social problems.   [brief]
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Title: Contesting citizenship in urban China: peasant migrants, the state, and the logic of the market
Author: Solinger, Dorothy J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Anthropology | Labor Studies | Demography | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Post-Mao market reforms in China have led to a massive migration of rural peasants toward the cities. Officially denied residency in the cities, the over 80 million members of this "floating population" provide labor for the economic boom in urban areas but are largely denied government benefits that city residents receive. In an incisive and original study that goes against the grain of much of the current discussion on citizenship, Dorothy J. Solinger challenges the notion that markets necessarily promote rights and legal equality in any direct or linear fashion.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking the American race problem 
Author: Brooks, Roy L. (Roy Lavon) 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: American Studies | Law | Politics | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: If the conservative view of the American race problem is frightening, the traditional liberal view seems impotent. Analyzing the race problem from neither right nor left, Brooks sheds a new and clarifying light on America's longest running social and moral dilemma.This incisive book provides a bold new examination of the seemingly intractable racial problems confronting Americans at the end of the twentieth century. In a wide-ranging and probing study, Brooks calls into question the prevailing wisdom about racism, civil rights legislation, and the composition of the Black community, going on to offer a dramatic new approach to the race problem. In Brooks' mind, civil rights laws - laws targeted at racial discrimination - have not only failed to engender racial equality, but have in fact had a negative effect on the standard of living of many Blacks. Brooks defines the American race problem so as to carefully separate racial oppression from (economic) class oppression and explains how civil rights legislation since the 1960s has hurt Black Americans of every class. He offers a strategy for resolving the country's racial inequities, unique in its attentiveness to class division in Black society, that combines governmental remedies and an unprecedented program of Black self-help.While Brooks argues that the government has the means to resolve the race dilemma, he suggests that it lacks the spirit to do so. Thus, it may be time for Black Americans to come to grips with an unpleasant reality - namely, that they can count on the government only for minimal alleviation, and must take on the larger portion of responsibility for resolving the American race problem themselves.Certain to arouse controversy, Rethinking the American Race Problem offers new understandings of issues often clouded by misconceptions and backward notions. It is an important book for anyone concerned about the current state of race relations in America.   [brief]
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Title: War, memory, and the politics of humor: the Canard enchaîné and World War I
Author: Douglas, Allen 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History | European Literature | Print Media
Publisher's Description: War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor features carnage and cannibalism, gender and cross-dressing, drunks and heroes, militarism and memory, all set against the background of World War I France. Allen Douglas shows how a new satiric weekly, the Canard Enchaîné, exploited these topics and others to become one of France's most influential voices of reaction to the Great War. The Canard, still published today, is France's leading satiric newspaper and the most successful periodical of the twentieth century, and Douglas colorfully illuminates the mechanisms of its unique style. Following the Canard from its birth in 1915 to the eve of the Great Depression, the narrative reveals a heady mix of word play, word games, and cartoons. Over the years the journal--generally leftist, specifically antimilitarist and anti-imperialist--aimed its shots in all directions, using some stereotypes the twenty-first century might find unacceptable. But Douglas calls its humor an affirmation of life, and as such the most effective antidote to war.   [brief]
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Title: American urban architecture: catalysts in the design of cities 
Author: Attoe, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Conceiving of urban design in terms of architectural actions and reactions, Attoe and Logan propose a theory of "catalytic architecture" better suited to specifically American circumstances than the largely European models developed in the last thirty years for the remaking of cities.After exploring instances of failed attempts to impose European visions on American cities, the authors examine urban design successes that illustrate the principles and goals of catalytic architecture. With a series of case studies they characterize urban design as a controlled evolution, one that must also be strategic, responding to existing elements and guiding those that follow. The authors argue that the failure of American cities to control and guide the energies released in urban development can be prevented by "design guidance". From their own combined experience as urban architects and scholars, they provide a taxonomy of methods to guide urban design toward higher standards and better results.   [brief]
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Title: Urban design downtown: poetics and politics of form
Author: Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Urban Studies | Economics and Business | Social Science | Architecture | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The corporate downtown, with its multitude of social dilemmas and contradictions, is the focus of this well-illustrated volume. How are downtown projects conceived, scripted, produced, packaged, and used, and how has all this changed during the twentieth century? The authors of Urban Design Downtown offer a critical appraisal of the emerging appearance of downtown urban form. They explore both the poetics of design and the politics and economics of development decisions.Following a historical review of the various phases of downtown transformation, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee turn to contemporary American downtowns. They examine the phenomenon of public-space privatization, arguing that corporate open spaces are the consumer-oriented result of policies that have promoted downtown renovation and restructuring but at the same time have neglected the cities' existing poverty-stricken cores. The book's case studies of individual West Coast downtown projects capture the essence of late twentieth-century urbanism. This analysis of downtown urban America, which offers extensive insight into the design and development process, will interest architects, city planners, developers, and urban designers everywhere.   [brief]
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Title: Showing signs of violence: the cultural politics of a twentieth-century headhunting ritual 
Author: George, Kenneth M 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: Showing Signs of Violence deals with the ceremonies of pangngae, a mock headhunt that lingers stubbornly at the center of political life in a marginal upland community in Sulawesi, Indonesia. No killing takes place in this ritual - no actual heads are taken - but its rhetoric of violence is unmistakable and real.Kenneth M. George vividly details the rites of pangngae, from the headhunters' secret and predatory journey downriver to the week of public festivity that follows their exuberant return. He puts special emphasis on the songs, speeches, and liturgies of the headhunt and shows how this ritual is neither a relic form of primitive violence nor an obsolete discourse on the social horizons of a remote community. In fact, the themes, purposes, and circumstances of pangngae make it the most public and community-defining form of ceremonial violence for this small mountain enclave as it confronts the dilemmas presented by Indonesian modernity and state culture.   [brief]
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Title: No there there: race, class, and political community in Oakland
Author: Rhomberg, Chris 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.   [brief]
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Title: Leveling crowds: ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in South Asia
Author: Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | Politics | Asian History | Religion
Publisher's Description: Ethno-nationalist conflicts are rampant today, causing immense human loss. Stanley J. Tambiah is concerned with the nature of the ethno-nationalist explosions that have disfigured so many regions of the world in recent years. He focuses primarily on collective violence in the form of civilian "riots" in South Asia, using selected instances in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India. He situates these riots in the larger political, economic, and religious contexts in which they took place and also examines the strategic actions and motivations of their principal agents. In applying a wide range of social theory to the problems of ethnic and religious violence, Tambiah pays close attention to the history and culture of the region.On one level this provocative book is a scrupulously detailed anthropological and historical study, but on another it is an attempt to understand the social and political changes needed for a more humane order, not just in South Asia, but throughout the world.   [brief]
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Title: The price of poverty: money, work, and culture in the Mexican-American barrio
Author: Dohan, Daniel 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Latin American Studies | Chicano Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities - one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens - this book provides an invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California's high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families and communities of U.S.-born Mexican Americans manage the social and economic dislocations of persistent poverty. Taking readers into worlds where public assistance, street crime, competition for low-wage jobs, and family, pride, and cross-cultural experiences intermingle, The Price of Poverty offers vivid portraits of everyday life in these Mexican American communities while addressing urgent policy questions such as: What accounts for joblessness? How can we make sense of crime in poor communities? Does welfare hurt or help?   [brief]
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Title: Livable cities?: urban struggles for livelihood and sustainability
Author: Evans, Peter B 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Environmental Studies | Social Problems | Public Policy | Political Theory | Pacific Rim Studies | Urban Studies | Latin American Studies | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The sprawling cities of the developing world are vibrant hubs of economic growth, but they are also increasingly ecologically unsustainable and, for ordinary citizens, increasingly unlivable. Pollution is rising, affordable housing is decreasing, and green space is shrinking. Since three-quarters of those joining the world's population during the next century will live in Third World cities, making these urban areas more livable is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. This book explores the linked issues of livelihood and ecological sustainability in major cities of the developing and transitional world. Livable Cities? identifies important strategies for collective solutions by showing how political alliances among local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and public agencies can help ordinary citizens live better lives.   [brief]
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