Title: Re-imaging Japanese women
Author: Imamura, Anne E 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural  Anthropology | Women's Studies | Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change.These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.   [brief]
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Title: West of the West: imagining California: an anthology
Author: Michaels, Leonard 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Californian and Western History | American Literature | Cultural  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Conceived as a novelistic journey through the worlds of California, West of the West offers a vivid and diverse collection of writings on the state where extremes of every sort are dramatically evident in the weather, geography, and people. This richly fascinating collection represents the experience of California both physical and metaphysical, in fiction, poetry, essays, travel writing, confessions, reportage, and social criticism. The authors are native Californians, born-again Californians, exiles, émigrés, critics, and visitors of every kind - Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Amy Tan, Simone de Beauvoir, Carey McWilliams, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Octavio Paz, Jean Baudrillard, Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg - to name just a few.   [brief]
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Title: Western music and its others: difference, representation, and appropriation in music
Author: Born, Georgina
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Cultural  Anthropology | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind. The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music. Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.   [brief]
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Title: Gimme some truth: the John Lennon FBI files
Author: Wiener, Jon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Social Problems | Music | Social Theory | Cultural  Anthropology | Law
Publisher's Description: When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld - along with almost 200 other pages - on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available - complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and - in some cases - the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.   [brief]
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Title: The festive state: race, ethnicity, and nationalism as cultural performance
Author: Guss, David M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Sociology | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.   [brief]
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Title: Total confinement: madness and reason in the maximum security prison
Author: Rhodes, Lorna A. (Lorna Amarasingham)
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Medicine | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the "supermaximums" - and the mental health units that complement them - Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an exposé, Total Confinement is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions - from the violent to the tender - among prisoners and staff. Total Confinement offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.   [brief]
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Title: Healing sounds from the Malaysian rainforest: Temiar music and medicine
Author: Roseman, Marina 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | East Asia Other | Ethnomusicology | Asian Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Medicine | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Music and dance play a central role in the "healing arts" of the Senoi Temiar, a group of hunters and horticulturalists dwelling in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. As musicologist and anthropologist, Marina Roseman recorded and transcribed Temiar rituals, while as a member of the community she became a participant and even a patient during the course of her two-year stay. She shows how the sounds and gestures of music and dance acquire a potency that can transform thoughts, emotions, and bodies.   [brief]
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Title: Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Ethics | Sociology | Sociology | Ethics | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. Twice Dead explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country. This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, Twice Dead confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.   [brief]
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Title: As we are now: mixblood essays on race and identity
Author: Penn, W. S 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Native American Studies | American Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Social Problems | United States History
Publisher's Description: The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions - mostly oral - in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular "I" with the communal "we." These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.   [brief]
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Title: Language and colonial power: the appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938
Author: Fabian, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Postcolonial Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Language and Linguistics | African History | African Studies
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Title: National ideology under socialism: identity and cultural politics in Ceauşescu's Romania
Author: Verdery, Katherine
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Cultural  Anthropology | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a re . . . [more]
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Title: The elusive embryo: how women and men approach new reproductive technologies
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medical Anthropology | Medicine | Women's Studies | Science
Publisher's Description: In the first book to examine the industry of reproductive technology from the perspective of the consumer, Gay Becker scrutinizes the staggering array of medical options available to women and men with fertility problems and assesses the toll - both financial and emotional - that the quest for a biological child often exacts from would-be parents. Becker interviewed hundreds of people over a period of years; their stories are presented here in their own words. Absorbing, informative, and in many cases moving, these stories address deep-seated notions about gender, self-worth, and the cultural ideal of biological parenthood. Becker moves beyond people's personal experiences to examine contemporary meanings of technology and the role of consumption in modern life. What emerges is a clear view of technology as culture, with technology the template on which issues such as gender, nature, and the body are being rewritten and continuously altered. The Elusive Embryo chronicles the history and development of reproductive technology, and shows how global forces in consumer culture have contributed to the industry's growth. Becker examines how increasing use of reproductive technology has changed ideas about "natural" pregnancy and birth. Discussing topics such as in vitro fertilization, how men and women "naturalize" the use of a donor, and what happens when new reproductive technologies don't work, Becker shows how the experience of infertility has become increasingly politicized as potential parents confront the powerful forces that shape this industry. The Elusive Embryo is accessible, well written, and well documented. It will be an invaluable resource for people using or considering new reproductive technologies as well as for social scientists and health professionals.   [brief]
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Title: The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon 
Author: Makdisi, Ussama Samir 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Islam | Cultural  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it. Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.   [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: Colonising Egypt 
Author: Mitchell, Timothy 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Intellectual History | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
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Title: Mass mediations: new approaches to popular culture in the Middle East and beyond 
Author: Armbrust, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Media Studies | Music | Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West. The volume will have wide appeal both to Middle Eastern scholars and to readers interested in global and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: The Codex Mendoza
Author: Berdan, Frances
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Native American Studies | Latin American History | Art
Publisher's Description: This book is available in two editions: a four-volume deluxe hardcover edition and a single-volume paperback abridgment. The four-volume hardcover facsimile edition of Codex Mendoza places the most comprehensive, most extensively illustrated document of Aztec civilization within reach of a broad audience. Compiled in Mexico City around 1541 under the supervision of Spanish clerics, the Codex was intended to inform King Charles V about his newly conquered subjects. The manuscript contains pictorial accounts of Aztec emperors' conquests and tribute paid by the conquered, as well as a remarkable ethnographic record of Aztec daily life from cradle to grave. This four-volume publication is an unsurpassed source of information about Aztec history, geography, economy, social and political organization, glyphic writing, costumes, textiles, military attire, and indigenous art styles.Volume 1 contains interpretive essays by the authors and other leading specialists on every aspect of Codex Mendoza . Volume 2 offers a thorough description and discussion of each pictorial page, and Volume 3 is a complete color facsimile of the manuscript itself. Volume 4, a parallel image volume, is the most innovative and in some ways the most useful of the four. It provides an exact duplicate in black and white of the facsimile Volume 3, with the sixteenth-century Spanish text transcribed and then translated into English. In addition, all the glosses are translated and positioned exactly as on the original pictorial pages. The extensive and useful appendices add such things as pictorial charts of costumes and textiles, translations and discussions of all the glyphs in the codex, and a table of comparative chronologies.In making this extraordinary sixteenth-century work accessible (the original manuscript resides in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England), the authors have performed an invaluable service to Mesoamerican scholars and all those interested in pre-Columbian peoples. The abridged paperback edition comprises volumes two and four of the hardcover, augmented by sixteen color images from volume 3.   [brief]
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Title: Ritual ground: Bent's Old Fort, world formation, and the annexation of the Southwest 
Author: Comer, Douglas C
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Cultural  Anthropology | California and the West | United States History
Publisher's Description: From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.   [brief]
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Title: Crime, cultural conflict, and justice in rural Russia, 1856-1914
Author: Frank, Stephen 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Social Problems | European History | Law | Criminology
Publisher's Description: This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality - and of peasants - with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.   [brief]
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Title: Takarazuka: sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Cultural  Anthropology | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | Theatre | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan.The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways. Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.   [brief]
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