This text examines religion as a form of collective memory. This is a memory held in place by Europe's institutional churches, educational systems, and the mass media - all of which are themselves responding to rapid social and economic change Europe's religious memory is approached in the following ways: as vicarious; as a particularly European characteristic; as precarious, especially among young people; and as it is portrayed by the media. The memory may fragment, be disputed, and in extreme cases, disappear. Alternatives may emerge. The challenge for European societies is to affirm healthy mutations in religious memory and discourage others. The book also examines the increasing diversity of Europe's religious life This book is intended for scholars and students of Sociology, Religion, Politics, European Studies, and Philosophy.

Are the relationships between minority groups as significant as those between dominant and minority groups? Phillips argues that they are in this innovative analysis of the relationships between the African American and the Jewish American communities during the last one hundred years. In An Unillustrious Alliance the evolved relations between the African American and the Jewish American communities are examined historically and sociologically. The scope of the work is from 1890 through the 1980s, and the materials are organized largely into decadal periods. The key relationships examined are negotiating, bargaining, cooperating, and conflicting. Two features of Phillips' approach distinguish it from most of the traditional examinations of racial and ethnic or minority group relations. First, there is strict emphasis placed on collective behavior or action. Phillips examines the concerted group actions of these two minority communities for the attainment of their separate as well as their joint purposes. Second, the main concern is the concerted actions or alliances and coalition between two minority communities, not the relationships between a dominant and a subordinate group. Throughout the study implications are drawn for public policy studies as well as for students and scholars of American ethnic and racial studies.

Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers' relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations, the Indonesian workers' experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national "other" in Japan.

A Finalist for the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize in History

"Stearns looks to explain why America is the fattest, and France the thinnest, nation in the West. In his view, 'dieting was ideally suited to an American need for an implicit but vigorous moral counterweight to consumer indulgence.' At the turn of the century, obesity was suddenly regarded as unhealthy and unpatriotic. Good American citizens should be fit, and a generation of fad diet experts sprung up to guide."
"--Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement"

"Offers new, reliable information and insights."
"--The Nation"

"Explores the interaction of weight-control cultures with gender, class, and ethnicity issues. A meaty study of historical facts and fears about fat."
"--Booklist"

The modern struggle against fat cuts deeply and pervasively into American culture, as evidenced by the compulsion to stay thin, or at least to profess a desire to become thin. Dieting, weight consciousness and widespread hostility to obesity form one of the fundamental themes of modern life in countries around the world. Yet, for example, while the French are renowned for their delight in all things gustatory, they are significantly trimmer and less diet-obsessed than Americans.

Fat History explores the meaning of fat and anti-fat in modern Western society, focusing on the uniquely moral component of dieting in America. Tracing how standards of beauty and physical morality have been radically transformed over the past century in the United States and France, Peter N. Stearns illustrates how the contemporary obsession with fat arose in tandem with the dramatic growth in consumer culture, women's increasing equality, andchanges in women's sexual and maternal roles. Contrary to popular belief, fashion and nutrition have played only a secondary role in spurring the American aversion to fat, while the French distaste for obesity can be traced to different origins altogether.

Filled with narrative anecdotes and rooted in Stearns' trademark use of engaging original sources--from "Ebony" and "Gourmet" to "The Journal of the American Medical Association" and popularized accounts of French doctors--Fat History explores fat's transformation from a symbol of health and well-being to a sign of moral, psychological, and physical disorder.

The distinguished Russian archeologist Aleksei P. Okladnikov's study reveals how a field archeologist goes about determining and writing prehistory. Over the course of his career, Okladnikov and his wife Vera Zaporozhskaya travelled across Siberia from the Lena River in the north to the Amur River in the south excavating archaeological sites. During that time Aleksei and Vera found and interpreted the rock art of the vast region from the Paleolithic Era to the present day. Relying on petroglyphs and pictographs left on cliffs and boulders, Okladnikov lays out in detail and straightforward language the prehistory of Siberia by "reading" these artifacts. This book permits the past to be told in its own words: the art portrayed on the cliffs of Siberia.

How can the culturally diverse communities of America live justly and fruitfully together? Not by assimilation into the dominant culture -- nor by fighting for the freedom to pursue our own self-interest at the cost of our repressing both the wounds and the promising potential of our own cultural roots. This book offers a theory and practice of transformation that shows, especially through literature, education, and politics, how we can create a multicultural society that liberates our being as a fulfillment of the story of democracy. Perhaps for the first time in American history we are seeing the personal, political, historical, and sacred faces of women, people of color, and all ethnic groups as they tell their stories. It is this emerging scholarship that constitutes the new multicultural and feminine face of the story of democracy.

Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.

This volume brings together the work of leading film scholars from the UK, France and the US who assess a dominant art form's engagement with expressions of national identity at key moments in French cinematic history, from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century, through the inter-war period, the Occupation, the post-Liberation era, and the New Wave, up to the current state of the industry. The essays go against the grain in their attempts to construct an alternative history of French cinema, whether by bringing to light overlooked films or by examining well-known, indeed even 'over-exposed' films or filmmakers in a new light. In re-evaluating the work of Georges MEliEs, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Diane Kurys, FranAois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Jacques Beineix, the contributors to this volume focus on the paradoxical centrality of the marginal in constructions of national identity. In doing so, they reveal the structure of 'l'exception franAaise', in which French culture makes an exception for itself by suppressing alterity within it. This multi-faceted assessment of French visual culture and identity will be of interest to students and scholars in French studies, media and film studies, cultural studies and French history.

The Ojibwe of Anishinaabe are a native American people who were taught by 19th-century missionaries to sing evangelical hymns translated into the native language both as a means of worship and as a

tool for eradicating the "indianness" of the native people. Rather than Americanizing the people, however, these songs have become emblematic of Anishinaabe identity. In this book, Michael McNally

uses the Ojiwbe's hymn-singing as a lens to examine how this native American people has creatively drawn on the resources of ritual to negotiate identity and survival within the structures of

colonialism. Drawing on both archival research and fieldwork, he traces the historical development of ritualized singing and how this distinctive practice has come into play at various moments in

Ojiwbe history. This important study re-examines the contested nature of "tradition," arguing that despite its origins hymn-singing has now become "traditional" through the agency of today's elders,

who have asserted their role as cultural critics on the reservation through their singing.

Chung-Hee Soh here contributes a unique perspective on women in politics by analyzing the ethnographic materials on the experiences of Korean women in their national legislature. Among the questions she raises are: Who are these women? How did they attain their political positions? What motivated their participation in male-dominated politics? Soh investigates the life histories of twenty-nine women who have been chosen to serve in the South Korean National Assembly. Her study sheds light on the dynamics of sociocultural change in male-female relations and gender role conceptions in a modernizing society.

Soh obtained unique insights into the processes of change in the gender role system by studying the chosen women in male-dominated Korean politics. The experiences of Korean women in politics not only delineate the systematic limits to female life in Korean culture, but also reveal some commonalities in social structural impediments to women in high-level public office. The author provides cross-cultural comparative perspectives on such topics as family backgrounds, gender role socialization, the patterns of recruitment, and the impact of the electoral system on the representation of women in national politics. Soh adds an important new dimension to the study of women in politics by situating her findings in the broader sociohistorical context of a modernizing nation and offers useful insights into the processes of sociohistorical change in the gender-role system. Her book will be welcomed by sociocultural anthropolgists, political scientists, Asian historians, and women's studies scholars.

Awareness of eco-literature has recalled the central ideology of environmentalism - "to think globally and act locally." As this volume shows, various tags of contemporary discourse have emerged, including transnational, cosmopolitan, hybridity, diaspora, and generally cultural. These concerns highlight such global environmental problems as biodiversity, climate change, and developing new forms of interconnectedness with local and regional communities. In this context, contemporary discourse becomes of immediate concern in understanding the environmental crisis. In a way, reading different cultures and experiences can contribute to a contemporary discourse that can facilitate an environmental sensibility and develop a unique ecological approach.

There has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar couples in recent years. This book examines how the romantic relationships of these couples are understood. Based on qualitative research, McKenzie investigates notions of autonomy, relatedness, contradiction, and change in age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love.

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

Increasing interest is being shown in the intersections between literary and cultural history and in the material dimensions of the text. Evelyn B. Tribble argues that far from being extratextual, as many scholars have contended, marginal commentary and text fuse together to form the page's inscribed identity. By tracing the connections between marginal apparatus, authority, and authorship, she demonstrates that changes in book production had profound consequences for the changing relations among readers, writers, and cultural authority in the early modern period. Margins and Marginality is, to date, the only book-length study of the marginal apparatus of Renaissance books.

Through the voices of women activists in the welfare rights movement across the United States, The Price of Progressive Politics exposes the contemporary reality of welfare rights politics, revealing how the language of colorblind racism undermines this multiracial movement. Through in-depth interviews with activists in eight organizations across the United States, Rose Ernst presents an intersectional analysis of how these activists understand the complexities of race, class and gender and how such understandings have affected their approach to their grassroots work. Engaging and accessible, The Price of Progressive Politics offers a refreshing examination of how those working for change grapple with shifting racial dynamics in the United States, arguing that organizations that fail to develop a consciousness that reflects the reality of multiple marginalized identities ultimately reproduce the societal dynamics they seek to change.

O. R. Dathorne pursues the phenomenon of "contact" or "encounter" particularly as it relates to China and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. He looks at how the Chinese have perceived their Other as heathen and exotic, and how the West has in turn similarly perceived the Chinese. The failure of the West to relate to China in human terms is subtly documented, and is contrasted to the European experience in the New World and the African encounter of both China and the West. Dathorne breaks new ground in his analysis of the construct of the Other on the Pacific Islands. Using indigenous oral accounts, early texts of European explorers and castaways, and imaginative accounts, he reconstructs the period of contact from the native viewpoint, of those who acted as translators, pilots, guides, chartmakers and male and female companions. He calls attention to the Western habit of romancing the place while denigrating or mythologizing the people.

This text provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data. Four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa and Jamaica. The author maintains how little attention has traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice. This concise, wide-ranging, contentious and well referenced study provides students of identity politics and miscegenation with an insightful read. The book also contains a glossary.

This book provides a critical sociology of religion in Latin America. Its purpose is to discuss the notion of religion as part of social, cultural, and political processes in capitalist societies, drawing on the classics of sociological thought (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Gramsci). Thus, churches are analyzed as organized institutions of religious mediation intimately linked to the production of social, cultural, and political hegemony in Latin America. The Catholic Church, the dominant church in the region, is analyzed in terms of its different faces, changes, and transformations from conquest and colonization through the changing winds of Vatican II to the revolutionary experiences of the popular church in the 1970s and 1980s.

This work will be of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, politics, religion, culture, and sociology. It also speaks to theologians and philosophers working in Latin America.

Exploring the interactions of the Buddhist world with the dominant cultures of Iran in pre- and post-Islamic times, this book demonstrates that the traces and cross-influences of Buddhism have brought the material and spiritual culture of Iran to its present state. Even after the term 'Buddhism' was eradicated from the literary and popular languages of the region, it has continued to have a significant impact on the culture as a whole. In the course of its history, Iranian culture adopted and assimilated a system of Buddhist art, iconography, religious symbolism, literature, and asceticism due to the open border of eastern Iran with the Buddhist regions, and the resultant intermingling of the two worlds.

Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as "knowledge that counts." It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.

A study of gult from the 13th century to 1910 revealing much about the history of highland Christian Ethiopia. Gult, a system of land tenure encompassing both taxation and tribute, is unique to highland Ethiopia. It was through this that Ethiopian states and their rulers affected the lives of ordinary people. US, Canada & rest of world (exc. UK, Commonwealth & Europe) : University of Illinois Press Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press