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: Behind the label: inequality in the Los Angeles apparel industry
Author: Bonacich, Edna
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Social  Problems | California and the West | Labor Studies | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | American Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study crucial to our understanding of American social inequality, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum investigate the return of sweatshops to the apparel industry, especially in Los Angeles. The "new" sweatshops, they say, need to be understood in terms of the decline in the American welfare state and its strong unions and the rise in global and flexible production. Apparel manufacturers now have the incentive to move production to wherever low-wage labor can be found, while maintaining arm's-length contractual relations that protect them from responsibility. The flight of the industry has led to a huge rise in apparel imports to the United States and to a decline in employment. Los Angeles, however, remains a puzzling exception in that its industry employment has continued to grow, to the point where L.A. is the largest center of apparel production in the nation. Not only the availability of low-wage immigrant (often undocumented) workers but also the focus on moderately priced, fashion-sensitive women's wear makes this possible. Behind the Label examines the players in the L.A. apparel industry, including manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and workers, evaluating the maldistribution of wealth and power. The authors explore government and union efforts to eradicate sweatshops while limiting the flight to Mexico and elsewhere, and they conclude with a description of the growing antisweatshop movement. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000   [brief]
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Title: The caregiving dilemma: work in an American nursing home
Author: Foner, Nancy 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Social  Problems | Medicine | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Along with increasing life expectancy comes the knowledge that many Americans will one day enter nursing homes. Who are the people who will care for us or for our relatives? Nancy Foner provides a major study of institutional care that focuses on nursing aides, who are the backbone of American nursing homes. She examines the strains and paradoxes facing nursing aides - asked, on the one hand, to provide compassionate care and, on the other, to cope with the pressures of the workplace and the institution.Aides are expected to look after patients, who are predominantly older women, with kindness and consideration, but nursing home regulations and bureaucratic forces often hinder even the best efforts to offer consistently supportive care. Positioned at the bottom of the nursing hierarchy, aides must cope with the needs of frail, dependent residents, pressures from patients' relatives and from their own families, and demands of supervisors and coworkers.Foner's detailed description and analysis of caregiving dilemmas, based on intensive field research in a New York facility, brings the perspective of the nursing aides to the fore. This is a timely contribution to the study of work, bureaucracy, and the future of an aging American population.   [brief]
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Title: Caught in the middle: Korean merchants in America's multiethnic cities
Author: Min, Pyong Gap 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies | American Studies | California and the West | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: In this unflinching exploration of one of the most politically charged topics of our time, Pyong Gap Min investigates the racial dynamics that exist between Korean merchants, the African American community, and white society in general. Focusing on hostility toward Korean merchants in New York and Los Angeles, Min explains how the "middleman" economic role Koreans often occupy - between low-income, minority customers on the one hand and large corporate suppliers on the other - leads to conflicts with other groups. Further, Min shows how ethnic conflicts strengthen ties within Korean communities as Koreans organize to protect themselves and their businesses.Min scrutinizes the targeting of Korean businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 African American boycotts of Korean stores in Brooklyn. He explores Korean merchants' relationships with each other as well as with Latin American employees, Jewish suppliers and landlords, and government agencies. In each case, his nuanced analysis reveals how Korean communities respond to general scapegoating through collective action, political mobilization, and other strategies.Fluent in Korean, Min draws from previously unutilized sources, including Korean American newspapers and in-depth interviews with immigrants. His findings belie the media's sensationalistic coverage of African American-Korean conflicts. Instead, Caught in the Middle yields a sophisticated and clear-sighted understanding of the lives and challenges of immigrant merchants in America.   [brief]
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Title: Civic innovation in America: community empowerment, public policy, and the movement for civic renewal
Author: Sirianni, Carmen
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Print Media | Environmental Studies | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: In this book, two leading experts on community action provide the first scholarly examination of the civic renewal movement that has emerged in the United States in recent decades. Sirianni Friedland examine civic innovation since the 1960s as social learning in four arenas (community organizing/development, civic environmentalism, community health, and public journalism), and they link local efforts to broader networks and to the development of "public policy for democracy." They also explore the emergence of a movement for civic renewal that builds upon the civic movements in these four arenas. In contrast to some recent studies that stress broad indicators of civic decline, this study analyzes innovation as a long process of social learning within specific institutional and policy domains with complex challenges and cross-currents. It draws upon analytical frameworks of social capital, policy learning, organizational learning, regulatory culture, democratic theory, and social movement theory. The study is based upon interviews with more than 400 innovative practitioners, as well as extensive field observation, case study, action research, and historical analysis.   [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: Crossing the border: encounters between homeless people and outreach workers
Author: Rowe, Michael 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Psychology | American Studies | Urban Studies | Social  Problems | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The relationship between the homeless and the social service community marks a border where the disenfranchised meet the mainstream of society. Crossing the Border , the first book-length study of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, uses ethnographic tools to examine encounters at this border. Michael Rowe provides a rich picture not only of a particular group of homeless people, but also of the complicated interactions between the marginalized and those who try to help them. As it examines both the dilemmas and opportunities of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, this compelling study asks us to consider the broader questions about how we relate to the poor and other marginal persons at the border of society.The author's personal encounters with the homeless as Director of the New Haven ACCESS outreach project, his interviews with fifty homeless persons for this study, and his numerous interviews with outreach staff, provide an invaluable personal perspective. In this study, Rowe draws a collective portrait of the homeless whom he interviewed and observed, discusses the outreach workers in depth, examines transactions from the perspective of each party, and finally, places these encounters within the social and institutional contexts that shape them.Rowe's writing is accessible and punctuated with many vivid anecdotes. As Crossing the Border shows, encounters between the homeless and outreach workers represent a measure of where we will set our social boundaries and what standard of living we will accept for those who live at that boundary.   [brief]
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Title: Crossing the line: a year in the land of apartheid 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: African Studies | Politics | Social  Problems | Autobiography | Education | African History
Publisher's Description: William Finnegan's compelling account of a year spent teaching in a colored high school, "across the line," in Cape Town, South Africa brings the irrationality and injustice of apartheid into focus for the American reader. A new preface, written after the author's observation of the historic 1994 el . . . [more]
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Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book
Author: Andrews, Jonathan 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social  Problems | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.   [brief]
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Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African Studies | Social  Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
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Title: Emptying beds: the work of an emergency psychiatric unit
Author: Rhodes, Lorna A. (Lorna Amarasingham)
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Psychiatry | Social  Problems | Medicine
Publisher's Description: The work of inner-city emergency psychiatric units might best be described as "medicine under siege." Emptying Beds is the result of the author's two-year immersion in one such unit and its work. It is an account of the strategies developed by a staff of psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and ot . . . [more]
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Title: Ethics in an epidemic: AIDS, morality, and culture 
Author: Murphy, Timothy F 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Sociology | Ethics | Medicine | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: AIDS strikes most heavily at those already marginalized by conventional society. With no immediate prospect of vaccination or cure, how can liberty, dignity, and reasoned hope be preserved in the shadow of an epidemic? In this humane and graceful book, philosopher Timothy Murphy offers insight into our attempts - popular and academic, American and non-American, scientific and political - to make moral sense of pain.Murphy addresses the complex moral questions raised by AIDS for health-care workers, politicians, policy makers, and even people with AIDS themselves. He ranges widely, analyzing contrasting visions of the origin and the future of the epidemic, the moral and political functions of obituaries, the uncertain value of celebrity involvement in anti-AIDS education, the functional uses of AIDS in the discourse of presidential campaigns, the exclusionary function of HIV testing for immigrants, the priority given to AIDS on the national health agenda, and the hypnotic publicity given to "innocent" victims.Murphy's discussions of the many social and political confusions about AIDS are unified by his attempt to articulate the moral assumptions framing our interpretations of the epidemic. By understanding those assumptions, we will be in a better position to resist self-serving and invidious moralizing, reckless political response, and social censure of the sick and the dying.   [brief]
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Title: Evolution's rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people
Author: Roughgarden, Joan
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Gender Studies | EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Anthropology | Evolution | Health Care | Social  Problems | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science - and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality. Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.   [brief]
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Title: Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt
Author: Ferguson, James 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Cultural Anthropology | African History | Postcolonial Studies | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline."Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives - the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies.Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.   [brief]
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Title: Fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival
Author: Nordstrom, Carolyn 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: Fieldwork Under Fire is a path-breaking collection of essays written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. These essays combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often surprising creative strategies people use to survive.In "writing violence," the authors give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, these essays bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.   [brief]
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Title: Gender trials: emotional lives in contemporary law firms
Author: Pierce, Jennifer L 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Law | Sociology | Social  Problems | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This engaging ethnography examines the gendered nature of today's large corporate law firms. Although increasing numbers of women have become lawyers in the past decade, Jennifer Pierce discovers that the double standards and sexist attitudes of legal bureaucracies are a continuing problem for women lawyers and paralegals.Working as a paralegal, Pierce did ethnographic research in two law offices, and her depiction of the legal world is quite unlike the glamorized version seen on television. Pierce tellingly portrays the dilemma that female attorneys face: a woman using tough, aggressive tactics - the ideal combative litigator - is often regarded as brash or even obnoxious by her male colleagues. Yet any lack of toughness would mark her as ineffective.Women paralegals also face a double bind in corporate law firms. While lawyers depend on paralegals for important work, they also expect these women - for most paralegals are women - to nurture them and affirm their superior status in the office hierarchy. Paralegals who mother their bosses experience increasing personal exploitation, while those who do not face criticism and professional sanction. Male paralegals, Pierce finds, do not encounter the same difficulties that female paralegals do.Pierce argues that this gendered division of labor benefits men politically, economically, and personally. However, she finds that women lawyers and paralegals develop creative strategies for resisting and disrupting the male-dominated status quo. Her lively narrative and well-argued analysis will be welcomed by anyone interested in today's gender politics and business culture.   [brief]
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Title: The German worker: working-class autobiographies from the age of industrialization
Author: Kelly, Alfred 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: History | European History | Social  Problems
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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: How the other half works: immigration and the social organization of labor
Author: Waldinger, Roger David
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Labor Studies | Immigration | Chicano Studies | Social  Problems | Urban Studies | California and the West | California and the West
Publisher's Description: How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.   [brief]
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Title: Imperial bedlam: institutions of madness in colonial southwest Nigeria
Author: Sadowsky, Jonathan Hal
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: African Studies | Psychology | African History | Medicine | Social  Problems
Publisher's Description: The colonial government of southern Nigeria began to use asylums to confine the allegedly insane in 1906. These asylums were administered by the British but confined Africans. Yet, as even many in the government recognized, insanity is a condition that shows cultural variation. Who decided the inmates were insane and how? This sophisticated historical study pursues these questions as it examines fascinating source material - writings by African patients in these institutions and the reports of officials, doctors, and others - to discuss the meaning of madness in Nigeria, the development of colonial psychiatry, and the connections between them. Jonathan Sadowsky's well-argued, concise study provides important new insights into the designation of madness across cultural and political frontiers. Imperial Bedlam follows the development of insane asylums from their origins in the nineteenth century to innovative treatment programs developed by Nigerian physicians during the transition to independence. Special attention is given to the writings of those considered "lunatics," a perspective relatively neglected in previous studies of psychiatric institutions in Africa and most other parts of the world. Imperial Bedlam shows how contradictions inherent in colonialism were articulated in both asylum policy and psychiatric theory. It argues that the processes of confinement, the labeling of insanity, and the symptoms of those so labeled reflected not only cultural difference but also political divides embedded in the colonial situation. Imperial Bedlam thus emphasizes not only the cultural background to madness but also its political and experiential dimensions.   [brief]
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