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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South
Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small
community of Liberia, in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met
Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small
African American community still living on land obtained
immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the
story of five generations of the Clarke family and their friends
and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery,
Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the
state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as
well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic
history that allows a largely ignored community to speak and record
their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on
the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall
documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white
oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic
relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying
together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the
documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British
Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections
accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with
the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of
the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time
when the study of artefacts was neglected in university
anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this
second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing
preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the
incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the
importance of close attention to technology and material
assemblages for anthropology. The `economy' fundamentally concerns
the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola
attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to
those of the West, with emphasis on `maker users' and egalitarian
access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and
libertarian principles. The project begun in Made in Niugini, which
necessarily restricted itself to moveable artefacts, is continued
and extended by the newly published companion volume Built in
Niugini, which deals with immoveable structures and buildings. It
argues that the study of material constructions offers an
unparalleled opportunity to address fundamental philosophical
questions about tacit knowledge and the human condition.
The Globalization of Rural Plays in the Twenty-First Century
excavates the neglected ideological substratum of peasant folk
plays. By focusing on northeastern Romania and southwest
Ukraine-two of the most ruralized regions in Europe-this work
reveals the complex landscape of peasant plays and the essential
role they perform in shaping local culture, economy, and social
life. The rapid demise of these practices and the creation of
preservation programs is analyzed in the context of the corrosive
effects of global capitalism and the processes of globalization,
urbanization, mass-mediatization, and heritagization. Just like
peasants in search of better resources, rural plays "migrate" from
their villages of origin into the urban, modern, and more dynamic
world, where they become more visible and are both appreciated and
exploited as forms of transnational, intangible cultural heritage.
Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980
has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier
twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional
southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that
this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years,
challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South
as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal
migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by
Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the
region's relation to the nation and a range of transnational
scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti),
transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and
transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers
under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John
Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha
Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen,
Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate
southern studies by drawing on theories of "scale" that originated
in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in
which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other
scales from the local to the global, making both literature about
the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in
scope.
Jan Ken Po, Ai Kono Sho"" ""Junk An'a Po, I Canna Show"" These
words to a simple child's game brought from Japan and made local,
the property of all of Hawaii's people, symbolize the cultural
transformation experienced by Hawaii's Japanese. It is the story of
this experience that Dennis Ogawa tells so well here.
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