Title: Flesh wounds: the culture of cosmetic surgery
Author: Blum, Virginia L 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Gender Studies | Film | Psychology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Sociology | Anthropology | Television and Radio | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.   [brief]
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Title: Monster/beauty: building the body of love
Author: Frueh, Joanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | Art Theory | Gender Studies | Art Theory | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being. A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in Erotic Faculties. Monster/Beauty examines these issues using a provocative, often explicit, set of examples. Frueh admiringly looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders, rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on female sensuality with contemporary theory. These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.   [brief]
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Title: Reconcilable differences: confronting beauty, pornography, and the future of feminism 
Author: Chancer, Lynn S 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Women's Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This volume examines controversial faultlines in contemporary feminism - pornography, the beauty myth, sadomasochism, prostitution, and the issue of rape - from an original and provocative perspective. Lynn Chancer focuses on how, among many feminists, the concepts of sex and sexism became fragmented and mutually exclusive. Exploring the dichotomy between sex and sexism as it has developed through five current feminist debates, Chancer seeks to forge positions that bridge oppositions between unnecessary (and sometimes unwitting) "either/or" binaries. Chancer's book attempts to incorporate both the need for sexual freedom and the depth of sexist subordination into feminist thought and politics.   [brief]
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Title: The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and national identity
Author: Banet-Weiser, Sarah 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study.Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.   [brief]
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Title: Framing the bride: globalizing beauty and romance in Taiwan's bridal industry
Author: Adrian, Bonnie 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Asian Studies | Cultural Anthropology | East Asia Other | Gender Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV. An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan's hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the "West" and "Western" cultural images of beauty. Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage - one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery - how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalization into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images.   [brief]
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Title: The myth of the noble savage
Author: Ellingson, Terry Jay
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Intellectual History | European History | American Studies | European Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: In this important and original study, the myth of the Noble Savage is an altogether different myth from the one defended or debunked by others over the years. That the concept of the Noble Savage was first invented by Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century in order to glorify the "natural" life is easily refuted. The myth that persists is that there was ever, at any time, widespread belief in the nobility of savages. The fact is, as Ter Ellingson shows, the humanist eighteenth century actually avoided the term because of its association with the feudalist-colonialist mentality that had spawned it 150 years earlier. The Noble Savage reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century, however, when the "myth" was deliberately used to fuel anthropology's oldest and most successful hoax. Ellingson's narrative follows the career of anthropologist John Crawfurd, whose political ambition and racist agenda were well served by his construction of what was manifestly a myth of savage nobility. Generations of anthropologists have accepted the existence of the myth as fact, and Ellingson makes clear the extent to which the misdirection implicit in this circumstance can enter into struggles over human rights and racial equality. His examination of the myth's influence in the late twentieth century, ranging from the World Wide Web to anthropological debates and political confrontations, rounds out this fascinating study.   [brief]
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Title: The Myth of the Independent voter 
Author: Keith, Bruce E
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Few events in American politics over the past two decades have generated more attention than the increasing number of voters calling themselves Independent. By the early 1970s Independents outnumbered Republicans, according to many eminent experts on voting behavior. Yet the authors of this incisive new commentary on American politics claim that most of this widespread speculation on declining party affiliation is simply wrong. They contend that most so-called Independents lean strongly toward one of the two parties and resemble - in all important respects - either Democrats or Republicans. Contrary to expert opinion, only a small segment of voters are truly "independent" of either major party.Based on the most up-to-date 1990 data, The Myth of the Independent Voter provides a roadmap of the political arena for the general reader and scholar alike. Debunking conventional wisdom about voting patterns and allaying recent concerns about electoral stability and possible third party movements, the authors uncover faulty polling practices that have resulted in a skewed sense of the American voting population.Demonstrating that most of what has been written about Independents for more than thirty years is myth, this challenging book offers a trenchant new understanding of the party system, voting behavior, and public opinion.   [brief]
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Title: Myth, meaning, and memory on Roman sarcophagi 
Author: Koortbojian, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | Art | Art History | Art and Architecture
Publisher's Description: Michael Koortbojian brings a novel approach to his study of the role of Greek mythology in Roman funerary art. He looks at two myths - Aphrodite and Adonis and Selene and Endymion - not only with respect to their appearance on Roman sarcophagi, but also with regard to the myths' significance in the greater fabric of Roman life. Moving beyond the examination of these sarcophagi as artistic achievements, he sets them in their broader historical and social contexts.Remembrance was an important factor in ancient social life and fueled the need for memorials. In helping us to understand the powerful allusions that Greek myths presented for the Romans, and the role of those allusions in preserving the memory of the dead, Koortbojian effectively widens our vision of the ancient world.   [brief]
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Title: The persistence of memory: organism, myth, text 
Author: Kuberski, Philip
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: While memory is one of the most fascinating faculties of consciousness, it is also one of the most mysterious. Is it memory - our own marvelous personal computer or data base - that brings us the intense feelings prompted by a certain object or situation?Drawing on an expansive array of sources, from microbiology to cosmology, Ovid to Proust, Egyptology to the cinema, Philip Kuberski leads us on a brave and beguiling exploration of memory. He enables us to see it as a worldly process in which individuals both remember and are remembered, all in a network of associations that join our bodies, personal and cultural myths, and aesthetic and literary experiences. His essays will provide a tantalizing and thoughtful read for those interested in literature, psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: Echo and Narcissus: women's voices in classical Hollywood cinema 
Author: Lawrence, Amy
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In Echo and Narcissus , Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a "problem," an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films.Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase , Sorry,Wrong Number , Notorious , Sunset Boulevard (1950) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence illustrates how women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles and how their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are foregrounded, called upon to silence women and to restore the primacy of the image.Unlike the usage of "voice" by feminist and literary critics to discuss broad issues of authorship and point of view, in film studies the physical voice itself is a primary focus. Echo and Narcissus shows how assumptions about the "deficiencies" of women's voices and speech are embedded in sound's history, technology, uses, and marketing. Moreover, the construction of the woman's voice is inserted into the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film.   [brief]
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Title: Off with her head!: the denial of women's identity in myth, religion, and culture
Author: Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Religion | Women's Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Classical Religions | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Whereas many books look at how women's bodies are represented in different religions and cultures around the world, this work explores the site of a woman's voice and identity, her head . The female head threatens to disrupt the classic gender distinctions that link men to speech, identity, and mind while relegating women to silence, anonymity, and flesh. The contributors to this collection argue that the objectification of women as sexual and reproductive bodies results in their symbolic beheading. Decapitation occurs symbolically in myths as well as in actual practices such as veiling, head covering, and cosmetic highlighting, which by sexualizing a woman's face turns it into an extension of her body.The essays explore how similar treatments of the female head find their unique articulation in diverse religious traditions and cultures: in Hindu myths of beheading, in Buddhist and Tantric practices and poetry about the hair of female nuns, in the resistance to veiling by early Christian women at Corinth, in contemporary veiling practices in a Turkish village, in the eroticization of the female mouth in ancient Judaism, and in Greek and Roman cosmetic practices.Together these essays show how the depiction of the female head is critical for an understanding of gender and its influence on other fundamental religious and cultural issues.   [brief]
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Title: Bodies out of bounds: fatness and transgression
Author: Braziel, Jana Evans 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Ethnic Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Since World War II, when the diet and fitness industries promoted mass obsession with weight and body shape, fat has been a dirty word. In the United States, fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose. Bodies Out of Bounds challenges these dominant perceptions by examining social representations of the fat body. The contributors to this collection show that what counts as fat and how it is valued are far from universal; the variety of meanings attributed to body size in other times and places demonstrates that perceptions of corpulence are infused with cultural, historical, political, and economic biases. The exceptionally rich and engaging essays collected in this volume question discursive constructions of fatness while analyzing the politics and power of corpulence and addressing the absence of fat people in media representations of the body. The essays are widely interdisciplinary; they explore their subject with insight, originality, and humor. The contributors examine the intersections of fat with ethnicity, race, queerness, class, and minority cultures, as well as with historical variations in the signification of fat. They also consider ways in which "objective" medical and psychological discourses about fat people and food hide larger agendas. By illustrating how fat is a malleable construct that can be used to serve dominant economic and cultural interests, Bodies Out of Bounds stakes new claims for those whose body size does not adhere to society's confining standards.   [brief]
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Title: Unbound voices: a documentary history of Chinese women in San Francisco
Author: Yung, Judy
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | Women's Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents - letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories - detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II.The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives.This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.   [brief]
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Title: The spiritual quest: transcendence in myth, religion, and science 
Author: Torrance, Robert M. (Robert Mitchell) 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Religion | Indigenous Religions | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Language and Linguistics | Philosophy | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Publisher's Description: Robert Torrance's wide-ranging, innovative study argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The quest is not, as most have believed, a rare mystical experience, but a frequent expression of our most basic human impulses. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world.Yet Torrance is not trying to reduce the quest to an "archetype" or "monomyth." Instead, he presents the full diversity of the quest in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and especially the Americas. In theorizing about the quest, Torrance draws on thinkers as diverse as Bergson and Piaget, van Gennep and Turner, Pierce and Popper, Freud, Darwin, and Chomsky. This is a book that will expand our knowledge - and awareness - of a fundamental human activity in all its fascinating complexity.   [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: China's new voices: popular music, ethnicity, gender, and politics, 1978-1997
Author: Baranovitch, Nimrod 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | China | Popular Music | Ethnomusicology | Politics | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the most comprehensive study to date of the rich popular music scene in contemporary China. Focusing on the city of Beijing and drawing upon extensive fieldwork, China's New Voices shows that during the 1980s and 1990s, rock and pop music, combined with new technologies and the new market economy, have enabled marginalized groups to achieve a new public voice that is often independent of the state. Nimrod Baranovitch analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on three important contexts: ethnicity, gender, and state politics. His study is a fascinating look at the relationship between popular music in China and broad cultural, social, and political changes that are taking place there. Baranovitch's sources include formal interviews and conversations conducted with some of China's most prominent rock and pop musicians and music critics, with ordinary people who provide lay perspectives on popular music culture, and with others involved in the music industry and in academia. Baranovitch also observed recording sessions, concerts, and dance parties, and draws upon TV broadcasts and many publications in Chinese about popular music. keywords: Ethnicity   [brief]
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Title: The voice in the margin: Native American literature and the canon 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international - a "cosmopolitan" - literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Voices of the song lyric in China/ 
Author: Yu, Pauline 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | China
Publisher's Description: This collection is the first comprehensive treatment of the song lyric ( tz'u ) in China from its origins through the nineteenth century. Engaging issues of form, language, voice, and transmission, these essays explore the changing and frequently problematic situation of the tz'u over centuries of l . . . [more]
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Title: Himalayan voices: an introduction to modern Nepali literature 
Author: Hutt, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | South Asia
Publisher's Description: While the natural splendor of Nepal has been celebrated in many books, very little of the substantial body of Nepali literature has appeared in English translation. Himalayan Voices provides admirers of Nepal and lovers of literature with their first glimpse of the vibrant literary scene in Nepal today.An introduction to the two most developed genres of modern Nepali literature - poetry and the short story - this work profiles eleven of Nepal's most distinguished poets and offers translations of more than eighty poems written from 1916 to 1986. Twenty of the most interesting and best-known examples of the Nepali short story are translated into English for the first time by Michael Hutt. All provide vivid descriptions of life in twentieth-century Nepal.Although the days when Nepali poets were regularly jailed for their writings have passed, until 1990 the strictures of various laws governing public security and partisan political activity still required writers and publishers to exercise a certain caution. In spite of these conditions, poetry in Nepal remained the most vital and innovative genre, in which sentiments and opinions on contemporary social and political issues were frequently expressed.While the Nepali short story adapted its present form only during the early 1930s, it has rapidly developed a surprisingly high degree of sophistication. These stories offer insights into the workings of Nepali society: into caste, agrarian relations, social change, the status of women, and so on. Such insights are more immediate than those offered by scholarly works and are conveyed by implication and assumption rather than analysis and exposition.This book should appeal not only to admirers of Nepal, but to all readers with an interest in non-Western literatures. Himalayan Voices establishes for the first time the existence of a sophisticated literary tradition in Nepal and the eastern Himalaya.   [brief]
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Title: Public faces, private voices: community and individuality in South India 
Author: Mines, Mattison 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Individuality is often viewed as an exclusively Western value. In non-Western societies, collective identities seem to eclipse those of individuals. These generalities, however, have overlooked the importance of personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement in these cultures. As an anthropologist in Tamil Nadu, South India, Mattison Mines found private and public expressions of self in all sectors of society. Based on his twenty-five years of field research, Public Faces, Private Voices weaves together personal life stories, historical description, and theoretical analysis to define individuality in South Asia and to distinguish it from its Western counterpart.This engaging and controversial book will be of great interest to scholars and students working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, South Asian history, urban studies, and political science.   [brief]
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