Title: Chinese families in the post-Mao era 
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.   [brief]
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Title: Ethnographic presents pioneering anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Author: Hays, Terence E
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
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Title: Socialization as cultural communication: development of a theme in the work of Margaret Mead 
Author: Schwartz, Theodore
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
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Title: Conversion to Christianity: historical and anthropological perspectives on a great transformation
Author: Hefner, Robert W 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Christianity | History
Publisher's Description: One of the most striking developments in the history of modern civilizations has been the conversion of tribal peoples to more expansively organized "world" religions. There is little scholarly consensus as to why these religions have endured and why conversion to them has been so widespread. These essays explore the phenomenon of Christian conversion from this world-building perspective. Combining rich case studies with original theoretical insights, this work challenges sociologists, anthropologists and historians of religion to reassess the varieties of religious experience and the convergent processes involved in religious change.   [brief]
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Title: Notes on love in a Tamil family
Author: Trawick, Margaret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia
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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: The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion
Author: Boyer, Pascal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Philosophy | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Why do people have religious ideas? And why those religious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain. Experimental results from developmental psychology, he says, can explain why certain religious representations are more likely to be acquired, stored, and transmitted by human minds. Considering these universal constraints, Boyer proposes an exciting new answer to the question of why similar religious representations are found in so many different cultures. His work will be widely discussed by cultural anthropologists, psychologists, and students of religion, history, and philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: The mystique of dreams: a search for utopia through Senoi dream theory 
Author: Domhoff, G. William
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Psychology | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: A fascinating strand of the human potential movement of the 1960s involved the dream mystique of a previously unknown Malaysian tribe, the Senoi, first brought to the attention of the Western world by adventurer-anthropologist-psychologist Kilton Stewart. Exploring the origin, attraction, and efficacy of the Senoi ideas, G. William Domhoff also investigates current research on dreams and concludes that the story of Senoi dream theory tells us more about certain aspects of American culture than it does about this distant tribe. In analyzing its mystical appeal, he comes to some unexpected conclusions about American spirituality and practicality.   [brief]
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Title: Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexican national space
Author: Lomnitz Adler, Claudio
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces - in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico - Exits from the Labyrinth links rich ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.   [brief]
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Title: The making of rehabilitation: a political economy of medical specialization, 1890-1980
Author: Gritzer, Glenn
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the history of one medical field - rehabilitation medicine - this book provides the first systematic analysis of the underlying forces that shape medical specialization, challenging traditional explanations of occupational specialization.
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Title: Disrupted lives: how people create meaning in a chaotic world
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Our lives are full of disruptions, from the minor - a flat tire, an unexpected phone call - to the fateful - a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States. FROM THE BOOK :"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."   [brief]
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Title: Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt 
Author: Kuhnke, LaVerne
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Lives at Risk describes the introduction of Western medicine into Egypt. The two major innovations undertaken by Muhammad Ali in the mid-nineteenth century were a Western-style school of medicine and an international Quarantine Board. The ways in which these institutions succeeded and failed will greatly interest historians of medicine and of modern Egypt. And because the author relates her narrative to twentieth-century health issues in developing countries, Lives at Risk will also interest medical and social anthropologists.The presence of the quarantine establishment and the medical school in Egypt resulted in a rudimentary public health service. Paramedical personnel were trained to provide primary health care for the peasant population. A vaccination program effectively freed the nation from smallpox. But the disease-oriented, individual-care practice of medicine derived from the urban hospital model of industrializing Europe was totally incompatible with the health care requirements of a largely rural, agrarian population.   [brief]
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Title: Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving
Author: Weiner, Annette B 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
Publisher's Description: Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving."The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.   [brief]
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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: Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide
Author: Goodman, Alan H
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Biology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The so-called science wars pit science against culture, and nowhere is the struggle more contentious - or more fraught with paradox - than in the burgeoning realm of genetics. A constructive response, and a welcome intervention, this volume brings together biological and cultural anthropologists to conduct an interdisciplinary dialogue that provokes and instructs even as it bridges the science/culture divide. Individual essays address issues raised by the science, politics, and history of race, evolution, and identity; genetically modified organisms and genetic diseases; gene work and ethics; and the boundary between humans and animals. The result is an entree to the complicated nexus of questions prompted by the power and importance of genetics and genetic thinking, and the dynamic connections linking culture, biology, nature, and technoscience. The volume offers critical perspectives on science and culture, with contributions that span disciplinary divisions and arguments grounded in both biological perspectives and cultural analysis. An invaluable resource and a provocative introduction to new research and thinking on the uses and study of genetics, Genetic Nature/Culture is a model of fruitful dialogue, presenting the quandaries faced by scholars on both sides of the two-cultures debate.   [brief]
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Title: On the road to tribal extinction: depopulation, deculuration, and adaptive well-being among the Batak of the Philippines 
Author: Eder, James F
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: The cultural and even physical extinction of the world's remaining tribal people is a disturbing phenomenon of our time. In his study of the Batak of the Philippines, James Eder explores the adaptive limits of small human populations facing the ecological changes, social stresses, and cultural disru . . . [more]
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Title: Chinese historical microdemography
Author: Harrell, Stevan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian History | China | Demography
Publisher's Description: Using local studies to answer global questions, this compilation challenges traditional notions concerning historical Chinese population trends. Genealogies, epitaphs, and household registers are some of the local and primary materials used to examine the important issues of fertility, mortality, fa . . . [more]
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Title: Respectable lives: social standing in rural New Zealand 
Author: Hatch, Elvin
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy.Hatch describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of Hatch's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time.The concept of occupation is central to Hatch's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. He focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares his New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive "shape" that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.   [brief]
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Title: Blood saga: hemophilia, AIDS, and the survival of a community
Author: Resnik, Susan 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Medicine | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: For thousands of years boys known as "bleeders" faced an early, painful death from hemophilia. Dubbed "the Royal Disease" because of its identification with Queen Victoria, the world's most renowned carrier, hemophilia is a genetic disease whose sufferers had little recourse until the mid-twentieth century. In the first book to chronicle the emergence and transformation of the hemophilia community, Susan Resnik sets her story within our national political landscape - where the disease is also a social, psychological, and economic experience. Blood Saga includes many players and domains: men with hemophilia and their families, medical personnel, science researchers, and the author herself, who was Director of Education of the National Hemophilia Foundation in the early 1980s. At that time the "miracle treatment" of freeze-dried pooled plasma blood products enabled men with hemophilia to lead full, normal lives. Then the AIDS virus infiltrated the treatment system and over fifty percent of the hemophilia community became HIV-positive. But rather than collapsing, this community refocused its priorities, extended its reach, and helped shape blood safety policies to prevent further tragedy.The hemophilia community includes people from every socioeconomic and ethnic group, and Resnik's narrative and use of oral histories never lose touch with those affected by the disease. Her extensive informant interviewing allows much of this social history to be told by participants on all levels: parents, wives, nurses, doctors, government agency directors, health care providers, and many others.Gene insertion therapy now holds the promise of a cure for hemophilia in the near future. Scientific breakthroughs inevitably become intertwined with the industry and academic medical centers that govern the national health care system. And in that system, says Resnik, costs and safety are sometimes contending issues. She makes clear that the lessons learned in Blood Saga apply to all of us.   [brief]
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Title: Technology and gender: fabrics of power in late imperial China
Author: Bray, Francesca
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were imprisoned in the inner quarters, deprived of freedom and dignity, and so physically and morally deformed by footbinding and the tyrannies of patriarchy that they were incapable of productive work. She proposes a concept of gynotechnics , a set of everyday technologies that define women's roles, as a creative new way to explore how societies translate moral and social principles into a web of material forms and bodily practices.Bray examines three different aspects of domestic life in China, tracing their developments from 1000 to 1800 A.D. She begins with the shell of domesticity, the house, focusing on how domestic space embodied hierarchies of gender. She follows the shift in the textile industry from domestic production to commercial production. Despite increasing emphasis on women's reproductive roles, she argues, this cannot be reduced to childbearing. Female hierarchies within the family reinforced the power of wives, whose responsibilities included ritual activities and financial management as well as the education of children.   [brief]
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