Title: A'aisa's gifts: a study of magic and the self
Author: Stephen, Michele
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Indigenous Religions | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Filled with insight, provocative in its conclusions, A'aisa's Gifts is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea and a valuable contribution to anthropological theory. Based on twenty years' fieldwork, this richly detailed study of Mekeo esoteric knowledge, cosmology, and self-conceptualizations recasts accepted notions about magic and selfhood. Drawing on accounts by Mekeo ritual experts and laypersons, this is the first book to demonstrate magic's profound role in creating the self. It also argues convincingly that dream reporting provides a natural context for self-reflection. In presenting its data, the book develops the concept of "autonomous imagination" into a new theoretical framework for exploring subjective imagery processes across cultures.   [brief]
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Title: Aboriginal slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America
Author: Donald, Leland 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Pacific Rim Studies
Publisher's Description: With his investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area. He shows that Northwest Coast servitude, relatively neglected by researchers in the past, fits an appropriate cross-cultural definition of slavery. Arguing that slaves and slavery were central to these hunting-fishing-gathering societies, he points out how important slaves were to the Northwest Coast economies for their labor and for their value as major items of exchange. Slavery also played a major role in more famous and frequently analyzed Northwest Coast cultural forms such as the potlatch and the spectacular art style and ritual systems of elite groups.The book includes detailed chapters on who owned slaves and the relations between masters and slaves; how slaves were procured; transactions in slaves; the nature, use, and value of slave labor; and the role of slaves in rituals. In addition to analyzing all the available data, ethnographic and historic, on slavery in traditional Northwest Coast cultures, Donald compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America.   [brief]
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Title: Above the clouds: status culture of the modern Japanese nobility
Author: Lebra, Takie Sugiyama 1930-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Asian History | Japan | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This latest work from Japanese-born anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra is the first ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. Lebra gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. She has woven together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world.As Lebra explores the culture of the kazoku , she places each subject in its historical context. She analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders.But this book is not simply about the elite. It is also about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.   [brief]
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Title: Abuses 
Author: Lingis, Alphonso 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Literature | Cultural  Anthropology | Social and Political Thought | Psychology | Travel
Publisher's Description: Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today.A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy - aesthetic and sympathetic - which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."   [brief]
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Title: The age of wild ghosts: memory, violence, and place in Southwest China
Author: Mueggler, Erik 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Asian Studies | China | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community - a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.   [brief]
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Title: Ancient Titicaca: the evolution of complex society in southern Peru and northern Bolivia
Author: Stanish, Charles 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Archaeology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish's book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not yet been published. This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. Stanish provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, he discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. He then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of first Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius. The provocative data and interpretations of this book will also make us think anew about the rise and fall of other civilizations throughout history.   [brief]
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Title: An anthropology of the subject: holographic worldview in New Guinea and its meaning and significance for the world of anthropology
Author: Wagner, Roy
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Pacific Rim Studies | Geography | Cultural  Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: An Anthropology of the Subject rounds out the theoretical-philosophical cosmos of one of the twentieth century's most intellectually adventurous anthropologists. Roy Wagner, having turned "culture" and "symbols" inside out (in The Invention of Culture and Symbols That Stand for Themselves, respectively), now does the same for the "subject" and subjectivity. In studying the human subject and the way human culture mirrors itself, Wagner has redefined holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency."   [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: 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: Before Taliban: genealogies of the Afghan jihad 
Author: Edwards, David B
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | South Asia
Publisher's Description: In this powerful book, David B. Edwards traces the lives of three recent Afghan leaders in Afghanistan's history--Nur Muhammad Taraki, Samiullah Safi, and Qazi Amin Waqad--to explain how the promise of progress and prosperity that animated Afghanistan in the 1960s crumbled and became the present tragedy of discord, destruction, and despair. Before Taliban builds on the foundation that Edwards laid in his previous book, Heroes of the Age, in which he examines the lives of three significant figures of the late nineteenth century--a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a prince who became king of the newly created state. In the mid twentieth century, Afghans believed their nation could be a model of economic and social development that would inspire the world. Instead, political conflict, foreign invasion, and civil war have left the country impoverished and politically dysfunctional. Each of the men Edwards profiles were engaged in the political struggles of the country's recent history. They hoped to see Afghanistan become a more just and democratic nation. But their visions for their country were radically different, and in the end, all three failed and were killed or exiled. Now, Afghanistan is associated with international terrorism, drug trafficking, and repression. Before Taliban tells these men's stories and provides a thorough analysis of why their dreams for a progressive nation lie in ruins while the Taliban has succeeded. In Edwards's able hands, this culturally informed biography provides a mesmerizing and revealing look into the social and cultural contexts of political change.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the neon lights: everyday Shanghai in the early twentieth century
Author: Lu, Hanchao
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Sociology | China | Asian History | Urban Studies | Cultural  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals - revolution, war, and again revolution - that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the stream: Islam and society in a West African town 
Author: Launay, Robert 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | African Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Robert Launay has been observing the changing religious practices of the Dyula, a Muslim community in West Africa, for more than a decade. In Beyond the Stream , he examines the ways in which this religious and ethnic minority group living on the fringes of the Muslim world maintains its ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting everyday religious practices to the local context. Through the lens of this specific community, Launay elucidates the interaction between fundamental Islamic beliefs, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East, and the continually changing ways that Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.By focusing on the tension between "particular" and "universal" - on how a given religious morality must function simultaneously within a tightly knit community and a larger global arena - Beyond the Stream addresses issues of broad concern to the anthropology of Islam and to world religions generally.   [brief]
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Title: Birth as an American rite of passage
Author: Davis-Floyd, Robbie
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Cultural  Anthropology | Medicine | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth - routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? And why, in spite of the natural childbirth movement, has hospital birth become even more intensely technologized? Robbie Davis-Floyd argues that these obstetrical procedures are rituals that reflect a cultural belief in the superiority of science over nature. Her interviews with 100 mothers and many health care professionals reveal in detail both the trauma and the satisfaction women derive from childbirth. She also calls for greater cultural and medical tolerance of the alternative beliefs of women who choose to birth at home.   [brief]
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Title: Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India
Author: Van Hollen, Cecilia Coale
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural  Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Asian Studies | South Asia | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?   [brief]
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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: 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: Buddhism in contemporary Tibet: religious revival and cultural identity
Author: Goldstein, Melvyn C
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Cultural  Anthropology | Tibet | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: Following the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China gradually permitted the renewal of religious activity. Tibetans, whose traditional religious and cultural institutions had been decimated during the preceding two decades, took advantage of the decisions of 1978 to begin a Buddhist renewal that is one of the most extensive and dramatic examples of religious revitalization in contemporary China. The nature of that revival is the focus of this book. Four leading specialists in Tibetan anthropology and religion conducted case studies in the Tibet autonomous region and among the Tibetans of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. There they observed the revival of the Buddhist heritage in monastic communities and among laypersons at popular pilgrimages and festivals. Demonstrating how that revival must contend with tensions between the Chinese state and aspirations for greater Tibetan autonomy, the authors discuss ways that Tibetan Buddhists are restructuring their religion through a complex process of social, political, and economic adaptation. Buddhism has long been the main source of Tibetans' pride in their culture and country. These essays reveal the vibrancy of that ancient religion in contemporary Tibet and also the problems that religion and Tibetan culture in general are facing in a radically altered world.   [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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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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