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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
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.
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.
Interdisciplinary research is a rewarding enterprise, but there are
inherent challenges, especially in current anthropological study.
Anthropologists investigate questions concerning health, disease,
and the life course in past and contemporary societies,
necessitating interdisciplinary collaboration. Tackling these 'big
picture' questions related to human health-states requires
understanding and integrating social, historical, environmental,
and biological contexts and uniting qualitative and quantitative
data from divergent sources and technologies. The crucial interplay
between new technologies and traditional approaches to anthropology
necessitates innovative approaches that promote the emergence of
new and alternate views. Beyond the Bones: Engaging with Disparate
Datasets fills an emerging niche, providing a forum in which
anthropology students and scholars wrestle with the fundamental
possibilities and limitations in uniting multiple lines of
evidence. This text demonstrates the importance of a multi-faceted
approach to research design and data collection and provides
concrete examples of research questions, designs, and results that
are produced through the integration of different methods,
providing guidance for future researchers and fostering the
creation of constructive discourse. Contributions from various
experts in the field highlight lines of evidence as varied as
skeletal remains, cemetery reports, hospital records, digital
radiographs, ancient DNA, clinical datasets, linguistic models, and
nutritional interviews, including discussions of the problems,
limitations, and benefits of drawing upon and comparing datasets,
while illuminating the many ways in which anthropologists are using
multiple data sources to unravel larger conceptual questions in
anthropology.
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.
Taste is recognized as one of the most evocative senses. The
flavors of food play an important role in identity, memory,
emotion, desire, and aversion, as well as social, religious and
other occasions. Yet despite its fundamental role, taste is often
mysteriously absent from discussions about food. Now in its second
edition, The Taste Culture Reader examines the sensuous dimensions
of eating and drinking and highlights the centrality of taste in
human experience. Combining both classic and contemporary sources
from anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, science, and
beyond, the book features excerpts from texts by David Hume,
Immanuel Kant, Pierre Bourdieu, Brillat-Savarin, Marcel Proust,
Sidney Mintz, and M.F.K. Fisher as well as original essays by
authors such as David Sutton, Lisa Heldke, David Howes, Constance
Classen, and Amy Trubek. This edition has been revised
substantially throughout to include the latest scholarship on the
senses and features new introductions from the editor as well as 10
new chapters. The perfect introduction to the study of taste, this
is essential reading for students in food studies, anthropology,
sensory studies, philosophy, and culinary arts.
Juarez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s,
and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's
most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon
that traveled from person to person, across rivers and
borders-wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place.
From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the
street, Julian Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the
words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juarez,
creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the
city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries
consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English
definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from
interviews-stories that put the terms in context and provide a
personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters,
and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs's evocative
illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein's famous
Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions
in ABCedario de Juarez both document and interpret the everyday
violence of this vital border city.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected
Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of
the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime
health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis
in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that
crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and
presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl
disaster among the causes contributing to it.
George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most
promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South
Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic
journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name,
Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career
that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the
most prominent archaeologists of his day. By the early 1930s,
however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics.
Writing a series of books attacking international communism and
praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler,
Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In
1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf
Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940
Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on
the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing
his views, effectively ending his academic career. This book traces
the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as
one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead
became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his
professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to
margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy
would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to
the present day.
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