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 art and politics of Wana shamanship
Author: Atkinson, Jane Monnig
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia | Religion | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Rituals are valued by students of culture as lenses for bringing facets of social life and meaning into focus. Jane Monnig Atkinson's carefully crafted study offers unique insight into the rich shamanic ritual tradition of the Wana, an upland population of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
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Title: Hidden heritage: the legacy of the Crypto-Jews
Author: Jacobs, Janet Liebman
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Religion | Latin American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Jewish Studies | Sociology | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This study of contemporary crypto-Jews - descendants of European Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition - traces the group's history of clandestinely conducting their faith and their present-day efforts to reclaim their past. Janet Liebman Jacobs masterfully combines h . . . [more]
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Title: Blood politics: race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma
Author: Sturm, Circe 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Native American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: Circe Sturm takes a bold and original approach to one of the most highly charged and important issues in the United States today: race and national identity. Focusing on the Oklahoma Cherokee, she examines how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed, and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race. Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among Cherokee citizens from full blood to 1/256, but today the range is far greater--from full blood to 1/2048. This trend raises questions about the symbolic significance of blood and the degree to which blood connections can stretch and still carry a sense of legitimacy. It also raises questions about how much racial blending can occur before Cherokees cease to be identified as a distinct people and what danger is posed to Cherokee sovereignty if the federal government continues to identify Cherokees and other Native Americans on a racial basis. Combining contemporary ethnography and ethnohistory, Sturm's sophisticated and insightful analysis probes the intersection of race and national identity, the process of nation formation, and the dangers in linking racial and national identities.   [brief]
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Title: The ones that are wanted: communication and the politics of representation in a photographic exhibition
Author: Kratz, Corinne Ann 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Photography | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: The Okiek people of Kenya's forested highlands have a long history of hunting, honey gathering, and trading with their Maasai and Kipsigis neighbors; several decades ago, they also began farming and herding. This book follows a traveling exhibition of anthropologist Corinne Kratz's photographs of the Okiek through showings at seven venues, including the National Museum in Nairobi and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Kratz tells the story of the exhibition--the stereotypes it sought to challenge, how commentaries by Okiek people were incorporated, and different ways that viewers in Kenya and the United States understood it. In addition to presenting wonderful images of a little-known people, this inviting book explores the exhibition medium itself, focusing on the complexities and possibilities of cultural representation. Walking a fine line between the photographic intimacy of a family album and the ethnographic distance of documentary photography, The Ones That Are Wanted reproduces the exhibition in full, with its vibrant color photographs, multilingual captions, and lively commentary. Throughout, Kratz incorporates insightful reflections on her changing involvement with the exhibition as anthropologist, photographer, and curator, and she provides perceptive discussions of such topics as photography in Kenya, stereotypes, and the post-1970s proliferation of the politics of representation.   [brief]
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Title: Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
Author: Veer, Peter van der
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Religious nationalism is a subject of critical importance in much of the world today. Peter van der Veer's timely study on the relationship between religion and politics in India goes well beyond other books on this subject. He brings together several disciplines - anthropology, history, social theory, literary studies - to show how Indian religious identities have been shaped by pilgrimage, migration, language development, and more recently, print and visual media.Van der Veer's central focus is the lengthy dispute over the Babari mosque in Ayodhya, site of a bloody confrontation between Hindus and Muslims in December 1992. A thought-provoking range of other examples describes the historical construction of religious identities: cow protection societies and Sufi tombs, purdah and the political appropriation of images of the female body, Salman Rushdie and the role of the novel in nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, the Khalsa movement among Sikhs, and nationalist archaeology and the televised Ramayana .Van der Veer offers a new perspective on the importance of religious organization and the role of ritual in the formation of nationalism. His work advances our understanding of contemporary India while also offering significant theoretical insights into one of the most troubling issues of this century.   [brief]
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Title: The calligraphic state: textual domination and history in a Muslim society 
Author: Messick, Brinkley Morris
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In this innovative combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory, Brinkley Messick examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present. The creation and interpretation of texts, from sacred scriptures to administrative and legal contracts, are among the fundamental ways that authority is established and maintained in a complex state. Yet few scholars have explored this process and the ways in which it changes, especially outside the Western world.Messick brings together intensive ethnography and textual analysis from a wealth of material: Islamic jurisprudence, Yemeni histories, local documents. In exploring the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen, he raises important issues that are of comparative significance for understanding political life in other Muslim and nonwestern states as well.   [brief]
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Title: A carnival of parting: the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand as sung and told by Madhu Natisar Nath of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan 
Author: Nath, Madhu Natisar
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with him.The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting."   [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: A share of the harvest: kinship, property, and social history among the Malays of Rembau 
Author: Peletz, Michael G
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
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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 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: A nation of empire: the Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity 
Author: Meeker, Michael E
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: This innovative study of modern Turkey is the result of many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research. Michael Meeker expertly combines anthropological and historical methods to examine the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in a major region of the country, the eastern Black Sea coast. His most significant finding is that a state-oriented provincial oligarchy played a key role in successive programs of reform over the course of more than two hundred years of imperial and national history. As Meeker demonstrates, leading individuals backed by interpersonal networks determined the outcome of the modernizing process, first during the westernizing period of the Empire, then during the revolutionary period of the Republic.To understand how such a state-oriented provincial oligarchy was produced and reproduced along the eastern Black Sea coast, Meeker integrates a contemporary ethnographic study of public life in towns and villages with a historical study of official documents, consular reports, and travel narratives. A Nation of Empire provides anthropologists, historians, and students of Eastern Europe and the Middle East with a new understanding of the complexities and contradictions of modern Turkish experience.   [brief]
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Title: Echoes of the past, epics of dissent: a South Korean social movement
Author: Abelmann, Nancy
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Politics | Sociology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent , the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life - a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform.From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Familia: migration and adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800-1975 
Author: Alvarez, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Demography | Latin American History | Latin American Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists will find here a striking challenge to accepted explanations of the northward movement of migrants from Mexico into the United States. Alvarez investigates the life histories of pioneer migrants and their offspring, finding a human dimension to migration which centers on the family. Spanish, American, and English exploits paved the way for exchange between Baja and Alta California. Alvarez shows how cultural stability actually increased as migrants settled in new locations, bringing their common values and memories with them.   [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: Reproduction and social organization in Sub-Saharan Africa 
Author: Lesthaeghe, Ron J 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: African Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Unlike most Asian and Latin American countries, sub-Saharan Africa has seen both an increase in population growth rates and a weakening of traditional patterns of child-spacing since the 1960s. It is tempting to conclude that sub-Saharan countries have simply not reached adequate levels of income, education, and urbanization for a fertility decline to occur. This book argues, however, that such a socioeconomic threshold hypothesis will not provide an adequate basis for comparison. These authors take the view that any reproductive regime is also anchored to a broader pattern of social organization, including the prevailing modes of production, rules of exchange, patterns of religious systems, kinship structure, division of labor, and gender roles. They link the characteristic features of the African reproductive regime with regard to nuptiality, polygyny, breastfeeding, postpartum abstinence, sterility, and child-fostering to other specifically African characteristics of social organization and culture. Substantial attention is paid to the heterogeneity that prevails among sub-Saharan societies and considerable use is made, therefore, of interethnic comparisons. As a result the book goes considerably beyond mere demographic description and builds bridges between demography and anthropology or sociology.   [brief]
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Title: One of the children: gay black men in Harlem 
Author: Hawkeswood, William G d. 1992
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | African American Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Gay black men, a thriving subculture of the black and gay communities, are doubly marginalized. Along with other black men, they are typically portrayed in the media and literature as "street corner men" - unemployed drifters, absentee fathers, substance abusers. In the larger gay community, they are an invisible minority. One of the Children , the first formal cultural study of gay black men in Harlem, not only illuminates this segment of America's gay population but presents a far richer, more diverse portrait of black men's lives than is commonly perceived.Based on two years' intensive research - during which the author lived in Harlem's gay community - including extensive interviews with fifty-seven community members, this book depicts gay black men's lives in all their social, economic, and cultural complexity. William Hawkeswood takes us from the street into the homes and lives of his subjects. He describes the elaborate network of friends, called "family," that supports these men emotionally and financially, and the community's two-tiered economic structure, comprising gay men and "boys," or hustlers.Hawkeswood also explores what it means for these men to be both gay and black. In the process, he makes the surprising discovery that while the AIDS virus looms all around them, it has not yet significantly affected the community of gay blacks who choose their sexual partners exclusively from among Harlem's other gay black men.   [brief]
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Title: Japanese workers in protest: an ethnography of consciousness and experience 
Author: Turner, Christena L 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.   [brief]
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Title: Bureaucracy and race: native administration in South Africa 
Author: Evans, Ivan Thomas 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: African Studies | African History | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Bureaucracy and Race overturns the common assumption that apartheid in South Africa was enforced only through terror and coercion. Without understating the role of violent intervention, Ivan Evans shows that apartheid was sustained by a great and ever-swelling bureaucracy. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which had dwindled during the last years of the segregation regime, unexpectedly revived and became the arrogant, authoritarian fortress of apartheid after 1948. The DNA was a major player in the prolonged exclusion of Africans from citizenship and the establishment of a racially repressive labor market. Exploring the connections between racial domination and bureaucratic growth in South Africa, Evans points out that the DNA's transformation of oppression into "civil administration" institutionalized and, for whites, legitimized a vast, coercive bureaucratic culture, which ensnared millions of Africans in its workings and corrupted the entire state. Evans focuses on certain features of apartheid - the pass system, the "racialization of space" in urban areas, and the cooptation of African chiefs in the Bantustans - in order to make it clear that the state's relentless administration, not its overtly repressive institutions, was the most distinctive feature of South Africa in the 1950s. All observers of South Africa past and present and of totalitarian states in general will follow with interest the story of how the Department of Native Affairs was crucial in transforming "the idea of apartheid" into a persuasive - and all too durable - practice.   [brief]
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