Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. Promoting a two-child norm, global family planning programs have disseminated the slogan, ""A small family is a happy family,"" throughout the global South. Jan Brunson examines how two generations of Hindu Nepali women negotiate this global message of a two-child family and a more local need to produce a son. Brunson explains that while women did not prefer sons to daughters, they recognized that in the dominant patrilocal family system, their daughters would eventually marry and be lost to other households. As a result, despite recent increases in educational and career opportunities for daughters, mothers still hoped for a son who would bring a daughter-in-law into the family and care for his aging parents. Mothers worried about whether their modern, rebellious sons would fulfill their filial duties, but ultimately those sons demonstrated an enduring commitment to living with their aging parents. In the context of rapid social change related to national politics as well as globalization - a constant influx of new music, clothes, gadgets, and even governments - the sons viewed the multigenerational family as a refuge. Throughout Planning Families in Nepal, Brunson raises important questions about the notion of ""planning"" when applied to family formation, arguing that reproduction is better understood as a set of local and global ideals that involve actors with desires and actions with constraints, wrought with delays, stalling, and improvisation.

Written by four authors, Philip Silverman (PhD, Cornell University), Laura Hecht (PhD, Indiana University), J. Daniel McMillin (PhD, Southern Illinois University), and Shienpei Chang (MA, California State University Bakersfield), this unique book examines how social networks contribute to a sense of well-being and a positive self-identity among older Americans and Taiwanese. Although social network analysis has grown increasingly important in the last several decades, few comparisons are available with Chinese and American samples; this is the first research project that compares a Western and an Asian culture using social network types. This research is also the first ever to use social network types to test hypotheses about values, reciprocity, social capital, and the health status of older adults. The data, gathered through systematic sampling in northeastern Oregon and central Taiwan, are first analyzed for the content of exchanges with network members. Then, the structure of the social network is determined by cluster analysis from which four network types are derived. This innovative, two-part procedure reveals a deeper understanding of the role social networks play in the quality of life among elderly in these two cultures. By comparing two very different cultures, the research reveals important details about the relative impact of broader social changes and social networks on the well-being of older adults. The two societies represent contrasting cultural sensibilities regarding the position and treatment of the aged. Yet, social changes in both countries have had a similar impact on older adults in some respects, but not in others. The data allow a determination of whether theinherent dissimilarities between a Western and an Asian culture, or the differences in the structure of each network type, can best account for the variation in exchange modalities and outcomes related to well-being and self-identity. A final chapter highlights possible future research in light of the theoretical and methodological implications of the findings. This book is a valuable resource for those in cultural anthropology, comparative sociology, gerontology, and Asian studies.

Very few books on the history and culture of the southern New England Native peoples have been written by the Natives themselves. Standard academic books read like a clinical autopsy of a dead culture from many years ago. Contrary to this, A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England provides an understanding of the ways, customs, and language of the southern New England American Indians from the Native's perspective. For the first time, a book written about the Native American peoples of southern New England is written by the Natives themselves. Incorporating voices of modern Elders and other Natives to the historic records of the 1500s and 1600s, everything about the beauty, power, and richness of their culture has been included. Sections of the book cover appearance, language, family and relations, religion, the body and senses, marriage, sickness, war, games, hunting, and much more. The proud and fiercely independent Native American peoples of southern New England once walked tall and proud on this land. With this book, they are now beginning to walk tall again.

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of man: the metrosexual. Overwhelmingly straight, white, and wealthy, these impeccably coiffed urban professionals spend big money on everything from facials to pedicures, all part of a multi-billion-dollar male grooming industry. Yet as this innovative study reveals, even as the industry encourages men to invest more in their appearance, it still relies on women to do much of the work. Styling Masculinity investigates how men's beauty salons have persuaded their clientele to regard them as masculine spaces. To answer this question, sociologist Kristen Barber goes inside Adonis and The Executive, two upscale men's salons in Southern California. Conducting detailed observations and extensive interviews with both customers and employees, she shows how female salon workers not only perform the physical labor of snipping, tweezing, waxing, and exfoliating, but also perform the emotional labor of pampering their clients and pumping up their masculine egos. Letting salon employees tell their own stories, Barber not only documents occasions when these workers are objectified and demeaned, but also explores how their jobs allow for creativity and confer a degree of professional dignity. In the process, she traces the vast network of economic and social relations that undergird the burgeoning male beauty industry.

'When, why, and how did language evolve?' 'Why do only humans have language?' This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a rich diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men.
The authors, drawn from all over the world, are prominent linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, social anthropologists, and specialists in artificial intelligence. As well as explaining what is understood about the evolution of language, they look squarely at the formidable obstacles to knowing more - the absence of direct evidence, for example; the problems of using indirect evidence; the lack of a common conception of language; confusion about the operation of natural selection and other processes of change; the scope for misunderstanding in a multi-disciplinary field, and many more. Despite these difficulties, the authors in their stylish and readable contributions to this book are able to show just how much has been achieved in this most fruitful and fascinating area of research in the social, natural, and cognitive sciences.

Organ Donation in Japan: A Medical Anthropological Study by Maria-Keiko Yasuoka reveals insight into Japan as the country with the most severe organ shortages and the lowest numbers of organ donations among medically advanced countries. The history of organ transplantation in Japan is a unique and troubled one. Many academic hypotheses such as cultural barriers, the Japanese concept of the dead body, traditional beliefs, and so on have been advanced to explain the situation. However, little research has yet revealed the truth behind the world of Japanese organ transplantation. Yasuoka conducts direct interview research with Japanese "concerned parties" in regards to organ transplantation (including transplant surgeons, recipients, and donor families). In this book, she analyzes their narrative responses, considering their distinctive ideas, interpretations, and dilemmas, and sheds light on the real reasons behind the issues. Organ Donation in Japan is the first book to delve into the challenging and taboo Japanese concepts of life and death surrounding organ transplantation by thoroughly presenting and investigating the narratives of concerned parties.

This significant contribution to Cherokee studies examines the tribe's life during the eighteenth century, up to the Removal. By revealing town loyalties and regional alliances, Tyler Boulware uncovers a persistent identification hierarchy among the colonial Cherokee.
Boulware aims to fill the gap in Cherokee historical studies by addressing two significant aspects of Cherokee identity: town and region. Though other factors mattered, these were arguably the most recognizable markers by which Cherokee peoples structured group identity and influenced their interactions with outside groups during the colonial era.
This volume focuses on the understudied importance of social and political ties that gradually connected villages and regions and slowly weakened the localism that dominated in earlier decades. It highlights the importance of borderland interactions to Cherokee political behavior and provides a nuanced investigation of the issue of Native American identity, bringing geographic relevance and distinctions to the topic.

Today we live in what Ulrich Beck has aptly characterized as a "risk society" shaped by intensifying crises outside of our control and seemingly outside of our comprehension. The master narrative that was supposed to lead us to secular salvation-economics-has proved to be a large part of the problem rather than the much anticipated solution. In The Anthropology of Complex Economic Systems, Niccolo Caldararo offers a much more radical and challenging answer: that the fundamental assumptions on which the modern "science" of economics has been erected are false, and that it is through the medium of anthropology, particularly the relatively neglected field of economic anthropology, that an alternative and sound basis for both the understanding of economic behavior and for the shaping of economic futures can be constructed. Caldararo not only challenges the foundational assumptions of conventional economic theory, but situates economic behavior (something quite different and universal amongst human beings) in both a historical and an ecological context. Contemporary discussions of "sustainability," especially in the field of development studies, have oddly neglected to look to anthropology. Economic anthropology, is the repository of a vast store of wisdom both about actual alternative and workable economic systems and about their evolution. By drawing on this source, Caldararo builds a model of the evolution of human economies which stir up substantial debate, shows how economic anthropology provides a tool for the interrogation of economic theory, and ties economics to ecology. It has been the rupture of this fundamental relationship that lies at the basis of much of our present crisis and the unsustainable economic patterns that humans have created. By bringing together in a new configuration economic anthropology, ecology, and culture history, Caldararo not only proposes a new model of human social evolution, but equally importantly creates a methodology for speaking to, and against, our present economic and environmental situation.

Deciding what to eat and how to eat it are two of the most basic acts of everyday life. Yet every choice also implies a value judgement: 'good' foods versus 'bad', 'proper' and 'improper' ways of eating, and 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies. These food decisions are influenced by a range of social, political and economic bioauthorities, and mediated through the individual 'eating body'. This book is unique in the cultural politics of food in its exploration of a range of such bioauthorities and in its examination of the interplay between them and the individual eating body. No matter whether they are accepted or resisted, our eating practices and preferences are shaped by, and shape, these agencies. Abbots places the body, materiality and the non-human at the heart of her analysis, interrogating not only how the individual's embodied eating practices incorporate and reject the bioauthorities of food, but also how such authorities are created by the individual act of eating. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from across the globe, The Agency of Eating provides an important analysis of the power dynamics at play in the contemporary food system and the ways in which agency is expressed and bounded. This book will be of great benefit to any with an interest in food studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

Ethno-aesthetics of Surf in Florida discusses surf and music as glocal sociocultural constructs. Focusing on Florida's unexplored surfing culture, the book illustrates how musical experience begets representations about the world that highlight ways of acting and being of various sociocultural communities. Based on the conceptualization of ethno-aesthetics, this ethnographic study provides an analysis of the Space Coast surfers community's collaborative effort to build social cohesion through their musicking. This transdisciplinary research in American Studies draws upon various theoretical perspectives from both the humanities and social sciences, including ethnomusicology, social psychology, and sociolinguistics, to propose new ways of exploring the links between surfing and musicking. This monograph looks past the myth of iconic 1960s Californian surf music to show how, as a result of the glocalization of surfing, the musicking of Floridian surfers has allowed them to express their subjectivities and to make sense of their world. This book contributes to the debate on the disputed notions of identity and representations by establishing connections between a local expression of the surf lifestyle and its music. It proposes theoretical models that explain cultural hybridization, appropriation, and belonging in surfing. It also develops concepts and notions, such as surfanization, surf strand, lifestyle crossover, and identity marking, to illustrate how global practices, such as surfing, are endowed with various modes of expression exemplified by the emergence of unique regional subcultures of surfing.

Issues of race and ethnicity in Europe have been brought to the fore by the recent electoral successes of extreme right-wing parties, while immigration and refugee policies are exposing deep uncertainties across the political spectrum. The politicization of 'race', ethnicity and immigration is a key feature of contemporary European society. In this important new volume, leading specialists explore the political mediation of racism across western Europe, examining its causes, character and consequences. Racism, Ethnicity and Politics in Contemporary Europe includes an overview of contemporary racism, investigations into its socio-economic and ideological roots, analyses of its role in party politics and studies of multilateral and non-governmental initiatives designed to promote anti-racism. The contributors provide case studies of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. They consider both the experience of racism in specific countries and common issues thrown up by the resurgence of racism at a time of profound socio-economic restructuring and political uncertainty. The rich insights offered by this book will be of interest to students and scholars active in many disciplines ranging from politics and sociology to discourse analysis and social psychology.

Over the past 20 years there has been increased research traction in the anthropology of childhood. However, infancy, the pregnant body and motherhood continue to be marginalised. This book will focus on the mother-infant relationship and the variable constructions of this dyad across cultures, including conceptualisations of the pregnant body, the beginnings of life, and implications for health. This is particularly topical because there is a burgeoning awareness within anthropology regarding the centrality of mother-infant interactions for understanding the evolution of our species, infant and maternal health and care strategies, epigenetic change, and biological and social development. This book will bring together cultural and biological anthropologists and archaeologists to examine the infant-maternal interface in past societies. It will showcase innovative theoretical and methodological approaches towards understanding societal constructions of foetal, infant and maternal bodies. It will emphasise their interconnectivity and will explore the broader significance of the mother/infant nexus for overall population well-being.

Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys's work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author's fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys's fictional discourse lies between "the anxiety of authorship" and "the anxiety of influence" and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a "home" ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.

Dié nuwe, opgedateerde uitgawe van die topverkoper Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika sluit bydraes in deur gerekende nuwe skrywers, wat die storie van ons land en mense reg tot op datum bring.

Onder redaksie van Bill Nasson word nuwe insigte uit die geskiedskrywing en die argeologie ingeweef. Die boek begin by die onstaan van die mensdom, vertel dan die storie van die Khoikhoi, slawe en burgers, die groot migrasies van die pre-koloniale tyd en later trekboere en Voortrekkers. Dan kom die ontdekking van diamante en goud wat die gang van die politiek radikaal verander. Oorlog breek uit in 1899; ook oorloë in 1914 en in 1939 in Europa laat plaaslik nuwe kragte vry. Die boek vertel van segregasie, politieke organisasie en verset, en uiteindelik die oorgang. Hierná val die soeklig op die demokratiese presidentskappe en die onverwagte en onvoorspelbare onlangse geskiedenis, wat staatskaping -- en beurtkrag -- insluit.

Met die nuutste inligting en invalshoeke word die volledige storie van Suid-Afrika en sy mense gesaghebbend dog leesbaar vertel.

This book explores the interrelation between diversity in migrants' internal relations and their experience of inequality in local and global contexts. Taking the case of Hamburg-based Iranians, it traces evaluation processes in ties between professionals - artists and entrepreneurs - since the 1930s, examining migrants' potential to act upon hierarchical structures. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival work, the book centers on differentiation, combining a diversity study with a focus on locality, with a transnational migration study, analysing strategies of capital creation and anthropological value theory. The analysis of migrants' agency tackles questions of independence and cooperation in kinship, associations, transnational entrepreneurship and cultural events within the context of the position of Germany and Iran in the global politico-economic landscape. This material will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, migration, urbanism and Iranian studies, as well as Iranian-Germans and those interested in the entanglement of global and local power relations.

The Irish have a long and proud history in America, and New Jersey is no exception. Beginning with the first Irish immigrants who settled in every corner of the state, this vital ethnic community has left an indelible mark on all facets of life in the Garden State. New Jersey's Irish natives expressed their own discontent over British oppression by battling alongside colonists in the American Revolution. Brave Fenians fought to preserve their new home in the Civil War. New Jersey's Irish also have become professional athletes, United States Representatives, religious leaders, spies and business trailblazers. Author and Irish heritage researcher Tom Fox relays these and other stories that demonstrate the importance of Ireland to the development of New Jersey and the United States.

This book explores the understanding, description, and measurement of the physical, sensory, social, and emotional features of motorcycle and bicycle journey experiences in tourism. Novel insights are presented from an original case study of these forms of tourism in the Sella Pass, a panoramic road close to the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Site. A comprehensive mixed-methods strategy was employed for this research, with concurrent use of quantitative and qualitative methods including documentation and secondary data analysis, mobile video ethnography, and emotion measurement. The aim was to create a holistic knowledge of the features of journey experiences and a new definition of the mobility space as a perceptual space. The book is significant in that it is among the first studies to explore the concept of journey experiences and to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation of mobility spaces. It offers a comprehensive understanding and a benchmarking of the features of motorcycling and cycling journey experiences, a deeper market knowledge on motorcycling and cycling tourists, and a set of tools, techniques, and recommendations for future research on tourist experiences.