Title: Speak, bird, speak again: Palestinian Arab folktales 
Author: Muhawi, Ibrahim 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Literature in Translation | Middle Eastern Studies | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Were it simply a collection of fascinating, previously unpublished folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales would merit praise and attention because of its cultural rather than political approach to Palestinian studies. But it is much more than this. By combining their respective expertise in English literature and anthropology, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana bring to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture.As native Palestinians, the authors are well-suited to their task. Over the course of several years they collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The authors have also provided footnotes, an international typology, a comprehensive motif index, and a thorough analytic guide to parallel tales in the larger Arab tradition in folk narrative. Speak, Bird, Speak Again is an essential guide to Palestinian culture and a must for those who want to deepen their understanding of a troubled, enduring people.   [brief]
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Title: Surviving through the days: translations of Native California stories and songs: a California Indian reader 
Author: Luthin, Herbert W 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Native American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: This anthology of treasures from the oral literature of Native California, assembled by an editor admirably sensitive to language, culture, and history, will delight scholars and general readers alike. Herbert Luthin's generous selection of stories, anecdotes, myths, reminiscences, and songs is drawn from a wide sampling of California's many Native cultures, and although a few pieces are familiar classics, most are published here for the first time, in fresh literary translations. The translators, whether professional linguists or Native scholars and storytellers, are all acknowledged experts in their respective languages, and their introductions to each selection provide welcome cultural and biographical context. Augmenting and enhancing the book are Luthin's engaging, informative essays on topics that range from California's Native languages and oral-literary traditions to critical issues in performance, translation, and the history of California literary ethnography.   [brief]
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Title: Telling lives, telling history: autobiography and historical imagination in modern Indonesia 
Author: Rodgers, Susan 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia | Asian History
Publisher's Description: These two memoirs, superbly rendered into English for the first time, provide unique windows into the Sumatran past, in particular, and the early twentieth-century history of Southeast Asia, in general. Originally published soon after the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1949) liberated the island chain from Dutch control, these unusually insightful narratives recall the authors' boyhoods in rural Toba Batak and Minangkabau villages. In reconstructing their own passage into adulthood, the writers inevitably tell the story of their country's turbulent journey from colonial subjugation through revolution to independence. Susan Rodgers's perceptive introduction illuminates the importance of autobiography in developing historical consciousness and imagining a national future.   [brief]
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Title: Testing testing: social consequences of the examined life 
Author: Hanson, F. Allan 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Medical Anthropology | Psychiatry
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Title: Tribes of India: the struggle for survival 
Author: Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von 1909-
Published: University of California Press,  1982
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies
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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: Wage, trade, and exchange in Melanesia: a Manus society in the modern state 
Author: Carrier, James G
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Ponam Island, a small community in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, is the subject of this innovative study. The authors extend the criticism within anthropology of ethnographies that attempt to analyze village communities without reference to the nations of which they are a part, and that equate the traditional and the exotic with the untouched. They do so by describing the links between a peripheral village society and Papua New Guinea's national economy and institutions, in a way that will interest all those concerned with development and underdevelopment.The analysis focuses on major socioeconomic areas of village life: education, migration, wage employment, and remittance; trade, commerce, and exchange; subsistence fishing; ceremonial exchange. The authors' findings challenge the idea that colonial and Western-oriented encroachment leads to the decay of village societies or to their adopting Western values and practices. Ponam has been under significant Western influence for almost a century, yet the society has not decayed. It remains flourishing and generative, uniquely itself and neither blindly traditional nor mindlessly Western.   [brief]
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Title: Wagering the land: ritual, capital, and environmental degradation in the Cordillera of northern Luzon, 1900-1986 
Author: Lewis, Martin W
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Geography | Anthropology | Asian Studies
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Title: The way the world is: cultural processes and social relations among the Mombasa Swahili 
Author: Swartz, Marc J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Marc Swartz takes us for the first time into the homes and neighborhoods of the Swahili in the East African port of Mombasa. At the same time he develops a new model for the operation and transmission of culture.In asking how cultural elements influence the social behavior of those who do not share them as well as of those who do, Swartz points to the mediation of status. The many types of status available to individuals provide guidelines that help explain, for example, why the broadly shared elements of Swahili culture (Islamic religion or the nuclear family) do not alone translate into behavior. The Way the World Is demonstrates in a highly original way how culture "works."   [brief]
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Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya 
Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African History
Publisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years.   [brief]
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Title: White saris and sweet mangoes: aging, gender, and body in North India 
Author: Lamb, Sarah 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | Aging | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This rich ethnography explores beliefs and practices surrounding aging in a rural Bengali village. Sarah Lamb focuses on how villagers' visions of aging are tied to the making and unmaking of gendered selves and social relations over a lifetime. Lamb uses a focus on age as a means not only to open up new ways of thinking about South Asian social life, but also to contribute to contemporary theories of gender, the body, and culture, which have been hampered, the book argues, by a static focus on youth. Lamb's own experiences in the village are an integral part of her book and ably convey the cultural particularities of rural Bengali life and Bengali notions of modernity. In exploring ideals of family life and the intricate interrelationships between and within generations, she enables us to understand how people in the village construct, and deconstruct, their lives. At the same time her study extends beyond India to contemporary attitudes about aging in the United States. This accessible and engaging book is about deeply human issues and will appeal not only to specialists in South Asian culture, but to anyone interested in families, aging, gender, religion, and the body.   [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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