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: 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: The courtier and the King: Ruy Gómez de Silva, Philip II, and the court of Spain 
Author: Boyden, James M 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Ruy Gómez de Silva, or the prince of Eboli, was one of the central figures at the court of Spain in the sixteenth century. Thanks to his oily affability, social grace, and an uncanny knack for anticipating and catering to the desires of his prince, he rose from obscurity to become the favorite and chief minister of Philip II.From the scattered surviving sources James Boyden weaves a vivid, compelling narrative: one that breathes life not only into Ruy Gómez, but into the court, the era, and the enigmatic character of Phillip II as well. Elegantly written and highly readable, this book discovers in the career of Gómez the techniques, aspirations, and mentality of an accomplished courtier in the age of Castiglione.   [brief]
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Title: Between craft and class: skilled workers and factory politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 
Author: Haydu, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | United States History | European History | Labor Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Between Craft and Class provides an incisive new look at workers' responses to the momentous economic changes surrounding them in the early years of the twentieth century. In this work, Haydu focuses on the reaction of skilled metal workers to new production methods that threatened time-honored craft traditions. He finds that the workers' responses to industrial change varied - some defended the status quo, while others agreed to trade customary rules for economic rewards. Under some conditions class protest arose, as workers of diverse skills and trades joined to demand a greater voice in the management of industry. Between Craft and Class explores how broadly based movements for workers' control developed during this critical period, and why they ultimately failed.Comparing workers in the United States and Britain, Haydu's scholarship is distinguished by extensive primary source research and provocative theoretical insights. In its scope and depth, this book will revise current notions of craft politics and working-class radicalism during this period.   [brief]
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Title: Respectable lives: social standing in rural New Zealand 
Author: Hatch, Elvin
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy.Hatch describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of Hatch's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time.The concept of occupation is central to Hatch's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. He focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares his New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive "shape" that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.   [brief]
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Title: The wrestler's body: identity and ideology in north India 
Author: Alter, Joseph S
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: The Wrestler's Body tells the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the insights of anthropology, Joseph Alter writes an ethnography of the wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of the wrestler's identity and ideology.Young men in North India may choose to join an akhara, or gymnasium, where they subject themselves to a complex program of physical and moral fitness. Alter's first-hand description of each detail of the wrestler's regimen offers a unique perspective on South Asian culture and society. Wrestlers feel that moral reform of Indian national character is essential and advocate their way of life as an ideology of national health. Everyone is called on to become a wrestler and build collective strength through self-discipline.   [brief]
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Title: State and intellectual in imperial Japan: the public man in crisis 
Author: Barshay, Andrew E
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: In this superbly written and eminently readable narrative, Andrew E. Barshay presents the contrasting lives of Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974) and Hasegawa Nyoze-kan (1875-1969), illuminating the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to state and society.Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a powerful modern state began to emerge in Japan, and with it, the idea of a "public" sphere of action. This sphere brought with it a new type of intellectual - a "public man" whose role was to interpret and nationalize "universal" (and largely foreign) ideas and ideologies.Activity within the public sphere took many forms as Japanese intellectuals sought to define their changing roles. At no time was such public activity as intense as during the crisis years of later imperial and early postwar Japan. In contrasting case studies, Andrew E. Barshay presents the lives of two modern Japanese intellectuals, Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974), professor of Western political thought at Tokyo Imperial University, and Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), a versatile independent journalist. Through their writings and experiences, Barshay examines the power of the idea of "national community" in public life. He treats Nanbara's and Hasegawa's ideas and actions as they developed within the contexts of Western intellectual tradition and modern Japanese history. The result is a superbly written narrative that illuminates the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to the state and society. Barshay's work is ultimately a study of intellectual mobilization in a modern state, and of the price of national identity in the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Toward a new poetics: contemporary writing in France: interviews, with an introduction and translated texts 
Author: Gavronsky, Serge
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Writing | French Studies
Publisher's Description: A quiet revolution is taking place in avant-garde French poetry and prose. In this collection of twelve interviews with some of France's most important poets and writers, Serge Gavronsky introduces American readers to these exciting new developments.As Gavronsky explains, a neolyricism is now replacing the formalism of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In his substantial introduction, Gavronsky notes how the ideological definition of writing ( écriture ) has given way to more open forms of writing. Human experiences of the most ordinary kinds are finding a place in the text.These interviews offer a view of the poets' and writers' creative processes and range over such topics as current literary theory, the impact of American poetry in France, and the place of feminism in contemporary French writing. Each interview is accompanied by samples of the writer's work in French and in Gavronsky's English translations. Toward a New Poetics provides a highly informative cultural and critical perspective on contemporary writing in France, introducing us to works which are now transforming the idea of literature itself.   [brief]
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Title: The fractious nation?: unity and division in contemporary American life 
Author: Rieder, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Religion | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: What are we to make of the speed with which the new climate of national solidarity emerged after September 11? Does it not look strange against a backdrop of the much-touted divisiveness of American life? In truth, The Fractious Nation? makes clear, the contrast of the time of divisiveness before and the time of unity that followed is much too stark, indeed. Less than a year before two planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the 2000 presidential election produced not just the starkly blue and red electoral map but also the two tribal Americas those totemic colors emblazoned. And from the cultural wars to immigration restriction, from the Christian right to political correctness, recent decades have witnessed much hand-wringing on the left and the right about the fragmentation of American life. The Fractious Nation? enlists the critical intelligence of fourteen distinguished contributors who illuminate the schisms in American life and the often volatile debates they have inspired in the realms of culture, ethnic and racial pluralism, and political life. The collective wisdom of The Fractious Nation? suggests a counterview to all the overheated rhetoric. The authors warn against fixating on flamboyant incidents of racial conflict when black-and-white values overlap considerably. On a range of cultural issues, the gap between our citizens has closed as well. And even as the rivalry between liberalism and conservatism transmutes into new forms, the political center remains vital and democratic. We are tied together not just by shared values but by institutions - the Constitution, the culture of consumption, the etiquette of ethnic respect. In private life and public affairs, our nation has expanded the meaning of democratic citizenship. Still, there's no room for self-congratulations here. Tendencies toward preoccupation with private life encourage indifference to the suffering of the less privileged. This is also one of the main failings of the narrative of fragmentation: In its focus on matters of shared values, it too distracts from issues of poverty and inequality that also fragment the human spirit.   [brief]
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Title: Their sisters' keepers: prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 
Author: Hill, Marilynn Wood
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | United States History | Women's Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This intimate study of prostitutes in New York City during the mid-nineteenth century reveals these women in an entirely new light. Unlike traditional studies, Marilynn Wood Hill's account of prostitution's positive attractions, as well as its negative aspects, gives a fresh perspective to this much-discussed occupation.Using a wealth of primary source material, from tax and court records to brothel guidebooks and personal correspondence, Hill shows the common concerns prostitutes shared with women outside the "profession." As mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives, trapped by circumstances, they sought a way to create a life and work culture for themselves and those they cared about.By the 1830s prostitution in New York was no longer hidden. Though officially outside the law, it was well integrated into the city's urban life. Hill documents the discrimination and legal harassment prostitutes suffered, and shows how they asserted their rights to protect themselves and their property. Although their occupation was frequently degrading and dangerous, it offered economic and social opportunities for many of its practitioners. Women controlled the prostitution business until about 1870, and during this period female employers and their employees often achieved economic goals not generally available to other working women.While examining aspects of prostitution that benefited women, Hill's vivid portrayal also makes evident the hardships that prostitutes endured. What emerges is a fully rounded study that will be welcomed by many readers.   [brief]
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Title: Knights at court: courtliness, chivalry, & courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance 
Author: Scaglione, Aldo D
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Knights at Court is a grand tour and survey of manners, manhood, and court life in the Middle Ages, like no other in print. Composed on an epic canvas, this authoritative work traces the development of court culture and its various manifestations from the latter years of the Holy Roman Empire (ca. A.D. 1000) to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Leading medievalist and Renaissance scholar Aldo Scaglione offers a sweeping sociological view of three geographic areas that reveals a surprising continuity of courtly forms and motifs: German romances; the lyrical and narrative literature of northern and southern France; Italy's chivalric poetry. Scaglione discusses a broad number of texts, from early Norman and Flemish baronial chronicles to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the troubadours and Minnesingers. He delves into the Niebelungenlied, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and an array of treatises on conduct down to Castiglione and his successors.All these works and Scaglione's superior scholarship attest to the enduring power over minds and hearts of a mentality that issued from a small minority of people - the courtiers and knights - in central positions of leadership and power. Knights at Court is for all scholars and students interested in "the civilizing process."   [brief]
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Title: On the edge of America: California modernist art, 1900-1950 
Author: Karlstrom, Paul J
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: To many, California's social and cultural identity has set it apart from the rest of the nation. Identified almost exclusively with Hollywood and popular culture, the entire region has been denied a meaningful relationship to mainstream twentieth-century modernism. This groundbreaking collection emphatically challenges that assumption. In essays about California art during the first half of the century, the contributors evoke a culture, now recognizable as modernist, that reflects the actual circumstances of contemporary West Coast artistic experience in all its richness. The subjects include painting, murals, sculpture, film, photography, and architecture.The issue of regionalism is central to this remarkable collection. How do we build a cultural portrait of an area that reveals its distinctive character while recognizing its participation in the larger art historical framework? Through the essays runs the theme of an alternative culture that transformed modernism to suit its own regional imperatives. Compelled by a sense of distance and the need for reinvention, California artists created traditions for a new cultural landscape and society. On the Edge of America is an enlightening and visually exciting addition to the growing literature on California art and culture. Through its fresh and expanded view of modernism, it is also well suited to the formulation of a truly national cultural narrative, one that embraces the edges as well as the center of American creative life.   [brief]
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Title: China's new business elite: the political consequences of economic reform 
Author: Pearson, Margaret M 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | China
Publisher's Description: The transition from a planned to a market economy that began in China in the late 1970s unleashed an extraordinary series of changes, including increases in private enterprise, foreign investment, the standard of living, and corruption. Another result of economic reform has been the creation of a new class - China's new business elite. Margaret M. Pearson considers the impact that this new class is having on China's politics. She concludes that, contrary to the assumptions of Westerners, these groups are not at the forefront of the emergence of a civil society; rather, they are part of a system shaped deliberately by the Chinese state to ensure that economic development will not lead to democratization.   [brief]
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Title: Small property versus big government: social origins of the property tax revolt 
Author: Lo, Clarence Y. H
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Public Policy | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Tax reformers, take note. Clarence Lo's investigation of California's Proposition 13 and other tax reduction bills is both a tribute and a warning to people who get "mad as hell" and try to do something about being pushed around by government. Homeowners in California, faced with impossible property tax bills in the 1970s, got mad and pushed back, starting an avalanche that swept tax limitation measures into state after state. What we learn is that, although the property tax was slashed, two-thirds of the benefits went to business owners rather than homeowners.How did a crusade launched by homeowning consumers seeking tax relief end up as a pro-business, supply-side political program? To trace the transformation, Lo uses the firsthand recollections of 120 activists in the movement, going back to the 1950s. He shows how their protests were ignored, until a suburban alliance of upper-middle-class property owners and business owners took charge. It was the program of that latter group, not the plight of the moderate-income homeowner, which inspired tax revolts across the nation and shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration.   [brief]
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Title: Wising up the marks: the modern William Burroughs 
Author: Murphy, Timothy S 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: William S. Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs's writings arose.From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs's novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term "amodernism" as a way to describe Burroughs's contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.   [brief]
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Title: Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese portraiture 
Author: Spiro, Audrey
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Architecture | China
Publisher's Description: Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.   [brief]
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Title: The research universities and their patrons 
Author: Rosenzweig, Robert M
Published: University of California Press,  1982
Subjects: Sociology | Sociology
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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 Japanese conspiracy: the Oahu sugar strike of 1920 
Author: Duus, Masayo 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | American Studies | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In early 1920 in Hawaii, Japanese sugar cane workers, faced with spiraling living expenses, defiantly struck for a wage increase to $1.25 per day. The event shook the traditional power structure in Hawaii and, as Masayo Duus demonstrates in this book, had consequences reaching all the way up to the eve of World War II.By the end of World War I, the Hawaiian Islands had become what a Japanese guidebook called a "Japanese village in the Pacific," with Japanese immigrant workers making up nearly half the work force on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Although the strikers eventually capitulated, the Hawaiian territorial government, working closely with the planters, cracked down on the strike leaders, bringing them to trial for an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the house of a plantation official. And to end dependence on Japanese immigrant labor, the planters lobbied hard in Washington to lift restrictions on the immigration of Chinese workers. Placing the event in the context of immigration history as well as diplomatic history, Duus argues that the clash between the immigrant Japanese workers and the Hawaiian oligarchs deepened the mutual suspicion between the Japanese and United States governments. Eventually, she demonstrates, this suspicion led to the passage of the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, an event that cast a long shadow into the future.Drawing on both Japanese- and English-language materials, including important unpublished trial documents, this richly detailed narrative focuses on the key actors in the strike. Its dramatic conclusions will have broad implications for further research in Asian American studies, labor history, and immigration history.   [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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