Title: Listen to the heron's words: reimagining gender and kinship in North India 
Author: Raheja, Gloria Goodwin 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Women's Studies | South Asia
Publisher's Description: In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak, telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The heron's words - and women's expressive genres more generally - criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are compelling and consequential for the women in North India.The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village women.   [brief]
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Title: Foregone conclusions: against apocalyptic history 
Author: Bernstein, Michael André 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Jewish Studies | Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Michael André Bernstein's passionate denunciation of apocalyptic thinking provides a moral, philosophical, and literary challenge to the way most of us make sense of our worlds. In our search for coherence, Bernstein argues, we tend to see our lives as moving toward a predetermined fate. This "foreshadowing" demeans the variety, the richness, and especially the unpredictability of everyday life. Apocalyptic history denies the openness and choice available to its actors.Bernstein chooses the Holocaust as the prime example of our tendency toward foregone conclusions. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who depict the Holocaust as foreordained and its victims as somehow implicated in a fate they should have been able to foresee. But his argument ranges wider. From recent biographies of Kafka to the Israeli-P.L.O. peace accords, from campus cultural diversity debates to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns against our passive acceptance of historical or personal victimization.An essential contribution to Holocaust studies, this book is also a lucid call to transform the way we read and write history and the way we make sense of our lives.   [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: Licensing entertainment: the elevation of novel reading in Britain, 1684-1750 
Author: Warner, William Beatty
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | European History | Print Media | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. William Warner shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety about the effects of new media on consumers.Warner uncovers a buried and neglected history of the way in which the idea of the novel was shaped in response to a newly vigorous market in popular narratives. In order to rein in the sexy and egotistical novel of amorous intrigue, novelists and critics redefined the novel as morally respectable, largely masculine in authorship, national in character, realistic in its claims, and finally, literary. Warner considers early novelists in their role as entertainers and media workers, and shows how the short, erotic, plot-driven novels written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood came to be absorbed and overwritten by the popular novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Considering these novels as entertainment as well as literature, Warner traces a different story - one that redefines the terms within which the British novel is to be understood and replaces the literary history of the rise of the novel with a more inclusive cultural history.   [brief]
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Title: A simple matter of salt: an ethnography of nutritional deficiency in Spain 
Author: Fernandez, Renate Lellep
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
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Title: Judgement in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist century 
Author: Lahav, Pnina 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Law | History
Publisher's Description: Simon Agranat (1906-1992) was the third chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court and a founding father of Israeli law. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Chicago, Agranat brought U.S. progressivism and constitutionalism to Israeli legal soil. Agranat laid the foundation for Israel's bill of rights and took part in nearly every important Israeli legal and political issue of this century. Pnina Lahav's rewarding study of Simon Agranat portrays Israeli history through the lens of judicial opinions. It is based on her extensive interviews with the justice before his death and a close examination of his papers. A major theme in her book is the relationship between Agranat's world view and landmark Israeli Supreme Court opinions, and she tells the compelling story of a visionary jurist and an American pursuing his Zionist dream in Palestine. Here, too, is an illuminating view of Israeli history and legal culture that includes the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Holocaust, the symbiosis between religion and the Jewish state, and the tensions within Zionism itself. Lahav also details the thinking behind Agranat's 1962 decision to convict Adolph Eichmann and the justice's dissent in the "Who Is a Jew?" case in 1970.This is the first biography of the man who made both a geographical and a psychological journey from the United States to Jerusalem. In demonstrating the influences of one culture on another, Judgment in Jerusalem provides important insights into Israeli law and politics and into the complex processes that form a national identity.   [brief]
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Title: California riparian systems: ecology, conservation, and productive management 
Author: Warner, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Environmental Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: This volume presents 135 of the papers presented at the 1981 California Riparian Systems Conference. The papers address all aspects of riparian systems: habitat, wildlife, land management, land use policy planning, conservation and water resource management.
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Title: Out of Eden: essays on modern art 
Author: Di Piero, W. S
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism
Publisher's Description: Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this collection: Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters.Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art.   [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: Discrepant dislocations: feminism, theory, and postcolonial histories 
Author: John, Mary E 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | South Asia | Politics
Publisher's Description: Mary E. John investigates the metaphor of dislocation within and across two specific "locations" - the United States and India - in this epistemological inquiry into the production of theory in general and the grounds of feminist ethnography in particular. She probes a set of distinct but related themes: the lines of tension marking U.S. feminism, especially as foregrounded by women of color; the inescapable complexities of feminist theory and practice in India; and the traffic - in theory, feminists, and women - between the two contexts. Emphasizing the discrepancies in the dislocations articulated by feminists unequally affected by the West and its power, John explores issues of displacement and otherness in contemporary culture. She also raises compelling questions of how location impacts and is impacted by theory.As an Indian scholar schooled in the United States, John works as an "anthropologist in reverse," a "participant-observer" in the world of North American feminist theory. Her argument ranges widely, encompassing profound readings of theorists from Freud to Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers to Aida Hurtado, as well as feminist theorists in India. By focusing on concepts of displacement, travel, and reterritorialization and by reaffirming a politics of location, John visualizes an alternate internationalism in our rapidly globalizing world.   [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: Dedication to hunger: the anorexic aesthetic in modern culture 
Author: Heywood, Leslie
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic - the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine - is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads.In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders.Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity.   [brief]
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Title: Visionaries: the Spanish Republic and the reign of Christ 
Author: Christian, William A 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Popular Culture | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In June 1931, on a hillside in the Spanish Basque country, two children reported seeing the Virgin Mary. Within weeks, hundreds of seers were attracting tens of thousands of onlookers, and the nightly spectacle gave rise to others in dozens of towns across Spain. Visionaries explores the experience and the larger meaning of this wave.Immersing himself in the lives of the visionaries, William Christian retraced their steps and recreated their world. He spoke with hundreds of witnesses, who led him to caches of vision messages, diaries, clandestine publications, and eloquent photographs. He describes two kinds of visionaries and their relation to each other: the seers who had visions of Mary and the saints, and the believers who had a vision for the future, which they hoped Mary and the saints would confirm. Together, these visionaries attempted to convince a skeptical world that heavenly beings were appearing on the Iberian peninsula. By turns intense, poignant, fierce, and funny, this long-hidden history demonstrates the vital role of the extraordinary in giving voice to a society's hope and anguish.   [brief]
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Title: Tijuana: stories on the border 
Author: Campbell, Federico
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Chicano Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: Tijuana is a haunting collection of stories and a novella, all set in the shadowy borderlands between Mexico and the United States. A fresh and evocative voice, Federico Campbell traces many kinds of borders - geographical, psychological, cultural, spiritual - and the "halfway beings" that inhabit them.The novella, "Everything About Seals," is both a passionate love story and a deeply disquieting chronicle of romantic obsession. The narrative voices in Campbell's stories are many-sided, moving from the brash teenager whose gang's symbol is the Mobil Oil flying horse to the confused law student who no longer knows whether his cultural allegiance is to Mexico City or to Los Angeles.Campbell has captured here the ambivalent, fascinating ties between Mexico and the U.S., ties ranging from Hollywood movies to Mexican folklore. The first English-language translation of his work, Tijuana will be welcomed by general readers as well as literary critics, anthropologists, historians, and those interested in the culture of the border.   [brief]
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Title: The private worlds of Marcel Duchamp: desire, liberation, and the self in modern culture 
Author: Seigel, Jerrold
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life.At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle.Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.   [brief]
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Title: Old, alone, and neglected: care of the aged in the United States and Scotland 
Author: Kayser-Jones, Jeanie Schmit
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Aging | Medical Anthropology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: As the median age of the population increases, the care and housing of the elderly in the U.S. are of increasing concern. Jeanie Kayser-Jones compares a typical private institution in the U.S. with a government-owned home in Scotland.Her analysis compels attention to the systematic abuse of the inst . . . [more]
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Title: Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit 
Author: Judovitz, Dalia
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Literature
Publisher's Description: Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production.Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works including The Large Glass , Fountain and Given 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas. Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, occupied himself with issues of genre, gender, and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture, and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens up modernism to more speculative explorations, while clearing the ground for the aesthetic of appropriation central to postmodernism.   [brief]
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Title: Diffusion of distances: dialogues between Chinese and Western poetics 
Author: Yip, Wai-lim
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Asian Studies | Philosophy | China | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: In this collection of passionately argued essays, the internationally acclaimed poet and critic Wai-lim Yip calls Western scholarship to account for its treacherous representation of non-Western literature. Yip moves from Plato to Hans-Georg Gadamer, from Chuang-tzu to Mao Tse-tung, from John Donne to Robert Creeley, as he attempts to create a double consciousness that includes the state of mind of the original author and the expressive potentials of the target language. He aims, first, to expose the types of distortions that have occurred in the process of translation from one language to another and, second, to propose guidelines that will prevent this kind of linguistic violence in the future.   [brief]
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Title: History and tradition in Melanesian anthropology 
Author: Carrier, James G
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: Melanesian societies, like village societies in many parts of the world, are frequently portrayed as existing in a timeless, traditional present. These seven original essays offer an alternative view, one showing that historical evidence can and must inform our understanding of contemporary cultures.This collection brings together anthropologists and historians who maintain that the "timeless-traditionalism" approach of anthropology is inadequate. Life in the existing societies of Melanesia cannot be understood, they say, without examining how these societies are shaped by Western influences. The historical perspective that acknowledges ongoing political, economic, and social change results in less stereotypical descriptions of these traditional cultures. Historians and anthropologists of Melanesia and the Pacific will find here original and enlightening work that is sure to influence the theoretical orientation of Melanesian anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Caught in the act: theatricality in the nineteenth-century English novel 
Author: Litvak, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introdu . . . [more]
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