Title: Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana 
Author: Redfield, Peter 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Geography | French Studies | European Studies | Technology
Publisher's Description: Rockets roar into space - bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites - from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, Redfield connects the myth of Robinson Crusoe, nineteenth-century prison reform, the Dreyfus Affair, tropical medicine, postwar exploration of outer space, satellite technology, development, and ecotourism with a focus on place, and the incorporation of this particular place into greater extended systems. Examining the wider context of the Ariane program, he argues that technology and nature must be understood within a greater ecology of displacement and makes a case for the importance of margins in understanding the trajectories of modern life.   [brief]
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Title: In/different spaces: place and memory in visual culture
Author: Burgin, Victor
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media." Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembéne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle. In/Different Spaces explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of "self" and "us" - in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to "other" and "them" - through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.   [brief]
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Title: Making Muslim space in North America and Europe 
Author: Metcalf, Barbara Daly 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | History | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment.The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit.The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.   [brief]
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Title: The promise of the city: space, identity, and politics in contemporary social thought 
Author: Tajbakhsh, Kian 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Urban Studies | Sociology | Popular Culture | Social Theory | Geography | Politics
Publisher's Description: The Promise of the City proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of cities and urban life. Finding the contemporary urban scene too complex to be captured by radical or conventional approaches, Kian Tajbakhsh offers a threefold, interdisciplinary approach linking agency, space, and structure. First, he says, urban identities cannot be understood through individualistic, communitarian, or class perspectives but rather through the shifting spectrum of cultural, political, and economic influences. Second, the layered, unfinished city spaces we inhabit and within which we create meaning are best represented not by the image of bounded physical spaces but rather by overlapping and shifting boundaries. And third, the macro forces shaping urban society include bureaucratic and governmental interventions not captured by a purely economic paradigm. Tajbakhsh examines these dimensions in the work of three major critical urban theorists of recent decades: Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson. He shows why the answers offered by Marxian urban theory to the questions of identity, space, and structure are unsatisfactory and why the perspectives of other intellectual traditions such as poststructuralism, feminism, Habermasian Critical Theory, and pragmatism can help us better understand the challenges facing contemporary cities.   [brief]
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Title: The fate of place: a philosophical history
Author: Casey, Edward S 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Philosophy | Classical Philosophy | Architecture | Intellectual History | Geography
Publisher's Description: In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century.Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.   [brief]
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Title: Justice and the human genome project 
Author: Murphy, Timothy F 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Biology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Human Genome Project is an expensive, ambitious, and controversial attempt to locate and map every one of the approximately 100,000 genes in the human body. If it works, and we are able, for instance, to identify markers for genetic diseases long before they develop, who will have the right to obtain such information? What will be the consequences for health care, health insurance, employability, and research priorities? And, more broadly, how will attitudes toward human differences be affected, morally and socially, by the setting of a genetic "standard"?The compatibility of individual rights and genetic fairness is challenged by the technological possibilities of the future, making it difficult to create an agenda for a "just genetics." Beginning with an account of the utopian dreams and authoritarian tendencies of historical eugenics movements, this book's nine essays probe the potential social uses and abuses of detailed genetic information. Lucid and wide-ranging, these contributions will provoke discussion among bioethicists, legal scholars, and policy makers.   [brief]
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Title: Globalization and human rights
Author: Brysk, Alison 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | International Relations
Publisher's Description: In this landmark volume, Alison Brysk has assembled an impressive array of scholars to address new questions about globalization and human rights. Is globalization generating both problems and opportunities? Are new problems replacing or intensifying state repression? How effective are new forms of human rights accountability? These essays include theoretical analyses by Richard Falk, Jack Donnelly, and James Rosenau. Chapters on sex tourism, international markets, and communications technology bring new perspectives to emerging issues. The authors investigate places such as the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Philippines. The contemporary world is defined by globalization. While global human rights standards and institutions have been established, assaults on human dignity continue. These essays identify the new challenges to be faced, and suggest new ways to remedy the costs of globalization.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribed landscapes: travel writing from imperial China 
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" ( yu-chi ) and later the "travel diary" ( jih-chi ) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self.The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.   [brief]
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Title: Human rights and reform: changing the face of North African politics 
Author: Waltz, Susan Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | African History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization.This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Mapping early modern Japan: space, place, and culture in the Tokugawa period, 1603-1868
Author: Yonemoto, Marcia 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Geography | Japan
Publisher's Description: This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes - including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias - to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.   [brief]
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Title: Myths in stone: religious dimensions of Washington, D.C
Author: Meyer, Jeffrey F
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | American Studies | Christianity | United States History
Publisher's Description: Washington, D.C., is a city of powerful symbols - from the dominance of the Capitol dome and Washington Monument to the authority of the Smithsonian. This book takes us on a fascinating and informative tour of the nation's capital as Jeffrey F. Meyer unravels the complex symbolism of the city and explores its meaning for our national consciousness. Meyer finds that mythic and religious themes pervade the capital - in its original planning, in its monumental architecture, and in the ritualized events that have taken place over the 200 years the city has been the repository for the symbolism of the nation. As Meyer tours the city's famous axial layout, he discusses many historical figures and events, compares Washington to other great cities of the world such as Beijing and Berlin, and discusses the meaning and history of its architecture and many works of art. Treating Washington, D.C., as a complex religious center, Meyer finds that the city functions as a unifying element in American consciousness. This book will change the way we look at Washington, D.C., and provide a provocative new look at the meaning of religion in America today. It will also be a valuable companion for those traveling to this city that was envisioned from its inception as the center of the world.   [brief]
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Title: Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexican national space
Author: Lomnitz Adler, Claudio
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces - in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico - Exits from the Labyrinth links rich ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.   [brief]
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Title: The Boundaries of humanity: humans, animals, machines 
Author: Sheehan, James J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | History and Philosophy of Science | Biology | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of The Boundaries of Humanity .Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies.   [brief]
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Title: Grateful prey: Rock Cree human-animal relationships 
Author: Brightman, Robert Alain 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Anthropology | United States History | Religion
Publisher's Description: The interaction between religious beliefs and hunting practices among the Asiniskawidiniwak or Rock Crees of northern Manitoba is the focus of Robert Brightman's detailed study. This foraging society, he says, bases aspects of its hunting and trapping largely on what we call "religious" conceptions.Seeking an ideology, however, that incorporates Cree beliefs about human-animal differences and the relationships that should exist between them as hunter and prey, Brightman finds these beliefs to be disordered and unstable rather than systematic. Animals are represented as simultaneously more and less powerful than humans. The hunter-prey relationship is talked about as both collaborative and adversarial. Exploring the influence of these religious representations on technical aspects of subsistence historically, Brightman finds that Crees' attitudes and actions toward animals were, and are, relatively arbitrary with respect to biological and environmental forces. Anthropologists will see in his well-researched discussion a challenge to prevailing ecological and Marxist approaches to foraging societies.   [brief]
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Title: Provincial passages: culture, space, and the origins of Chinese communism
Author: Yeh, Wen-hsin
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian History | China | History
Publisher's Description: Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly evokes the changing landscapes, historical circumstances, and personalities involved. The human dimension of this transformation is captured through the biography of Shi Cuntong (1899-1970), a student from the Neo-Confucian county of Jinhua who became a founding member of the Party. Yeh's in-depth analysis of the dynamics of change is combined with a compelling narrative of the moral dilemmas in the lives of Shi Cuntong and other early leaders. Using sources previously closed to scholars, including recently discovered documents in the archives of the First United Front, Yeh shows the urban Communist movement as an intellectual revolution in social consciousness.The Maoist legacy has often been associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Yeh's historical reconstruction of a pre-Mao, non-organizational dimension of Chinese socialism is thus of vital interest to those seeking to redefine the place of the Communist Party in a post-Mao political order.   [brief]
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Title: What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: apes, people, and their genes
Author: Marks, Jonathan (Jonathan M.) 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Evolution | Physical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Mammalogy
Publisher's Description: The overwhelming similarity of human and ape genes is one of the best-known facts of modern genetic sciencenm. But what does this similarity mean? Does it, as many have suggested, have profound implications for understanding human nature? Well-known molecular anthropologist Jonathan Marks uses the human-versus-ape controversy as a jumping-off point for a radical reassessment of a range of provocative issues--from the role of science in society to racism, animal rights, and cloning. Full of interesting facts, fascinating personalities, and vivid examples that capture times and places, this work explains and demystifies human genetic science--showing ultimately how it has always been subject to social and political influences and teaching us how to think critically about its modern findings. Marks presents the field of molecular anthropology--a synthesis of the holistic approach of anthropology with the reductive approach of molecular genetics--as a way of improving our understanding of the science of human evolution. As he explores the intellectual terrain of this field, he lays out its broad areas of interest with issues ranging from the differences between apes and humans to the biological and behavioral variations expressed in humans as a species. Marks confronts head-on the problems of racial classification in science. He describes current theories about race and uses work in primatology, comparative anatomy, and molecular anthropology to debunk them. He also sheds new light on the controversial Great Ape Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project, and much more. This iconoclastic, witty, and extremely readable book illuminates the deep background of human variation and asks us to reconsider the role of science in modern society.   [brief]
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Title: The travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-Century journey through India 
Author: Mahomet, Sake Deen 1759-1851
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Travel | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole.Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.   [brief]
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Title: The houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250: ritual, space, and decoration
Author: Clarke, John R 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Classics | Art and Architecture | Architectural History | Art History
Publisher's Description: In this richly illustrated book, art historian John R. Clarke helps us see the ancient Roman house "with Roman eyes." Clarke presents a range of houses, from tenements to villas, and shows us how enduring patterns of Roman wall decoration tellingly bear the cultural, religious, and social imprints of the people who lived with them.In case studies of seventeen excavated houses, Clarke guides us through four centuries of Roman wall painting, mosaic, and stucco decoration, from the period of the "Four Styles" (100 B.C. to A.D. 79) to the mid- third century. The First Style Samnite House shows its debt to public architecture in its clear integration of public and private spaces. The Villa of Oplontis asserts the extravagant social and cultural climate of the Second Style. Gemlike Third-Style rooms from the House of Lucretius Fronto reflect the refinement and elegance of Augustan tastes. The Vettii brothers' social climbing helps explain the overburdened Fourth-Style decoration of their famous house. And evidence of remodelling leads Clarke to conclude that the House of Jupiter and Ganymede became a gay hotel in the second century.In his emphasis on social and spiritual dimensions, Clarke offers a contribution to Roman art and architectural history that is both original and accessible to the general reader. The book's superb photographs not only support the author's findings but help to preserve an ancient legacy that is fast succumbing to modern deterioration resulting from pollution and vandalism.   [brief]
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Title: Remaking the modern: space, relocation, and the politics of identity in a global Cairo 
Author: Ghannam, Farha 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In an effort to restyle Cairo into a global capital that would meet the demands of tourists and investors and to achieve President Anwar Sadat's goal to modernize the housing conditions of the urban poor, the Egyptian government relocated residents from what was deemed valuable real estate in downtown Cairo to public housing on the outskirts of the city. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among five thousand working-class families in the neighborhood of al-Zawyia al-Hamra, this study explores how these displaced residents have dealt with the stigma of public housing, the loss of their established community networks, and the diversity of the population in the new location. Until now, few anthropologists have delivered detailed case studies on this recent phenomenon. Ghannam fills this gap in scholarship with an illuminating analysis of urban engineering of populations in Cairo. Drawing on theories of practice, the study traces the various tactics and strategies employed by members of the relocated group to appropriate and transform the state's understanding of "modernity" and hegemonic construction of space. Informed by recent theories of globalization, Ghannam also shows how the growing importance of religious identity is but one of many contradictory ways that global trajectories mold the identities of the relocated residents. Remaking the Modern is a revealing ethnography of a working class community's struggle to appropriate modern facilities and confront the alienation and the dislocation brought on by national policies and the quest to globalize Cairo.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of indigenism: human rights and the politics of identity
Author: Niezen, Ronald
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | International Relations | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: "International indigenism" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. In his fluent and accessible narrative, Ronald Niezen examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity - "indigenous peoples" - intersects with another relatively recent international movement - the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the international organizations of states to resist the political, cultural, and economic incursions of individual states. The concept "indigenous peoples" gained currency in the social reform efforts of the International Labor Organization in the 1950s, was taken up by indigenous nongovernmental organizations, and is now fully integrated into human rights initiatives and international organizations. Those who today call themselves indigenous peoples share significant similarities in their colonial and postcolonial experiences, such as loss of land and subsistence, abrogation of treaties, and the imposition of psychologically and socially destructive assimilation policies. Niezen shows how, from a new position of legitimacy and influence, they are striving for greater recognition of collective rights, in particular their rights to self-determination in international law. These efforts are influencing local politics in turn and encouraging more ambitious goals of autonomy in indigenous communities worldwide.   [brief]
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