Making a living in the Caribbean requires resourcefulness and even a willingness to circumvent the law. Women of color in Jamaica encounter bureaucratic mazes, neighborhood territoriality, and ingrained racial and cultural prejudices. For them, it requires nothing less than a herculean effort to realize their entrepreneurial dreams.

In "Higglers in Kingston," Winnifred Brown-Glaude puts the reader on the ground in frenetic urban Kingston, the capital and largest city in Jamaica. She explores the lives of informal market laborers, called "higglers," across the city as they navigate a corrupt and inaccessible "official" Jamaican economy. But rather than focus merely on the present-day situation, she contextualizes how Jamaica arrived at this point, delving deep into the island's history as a former colony, a home to slaves and masters alike, and an eventual nation of competing and conflicted racial sectors.

"Higglers in Kingston" weaves together contemporary ethnography, economic history, and sociology of race to address a broad audience of readers on a crucial economic and cultural center.

How do we place value on goods - and, importantly, why? Valuation and pricing are core issues in the market economy, but understanding of these concepts and their interrelation is weak. In response, The Worth of Goods takes a sociological approach to the perennial but timely question of what makes a product valuable.
Structured in three parts, it first examines value in the broader sense - moral values and how they are formed, and the relations between economic and non-economic values - discussing such matters as the value of an oil spill, the price of a scientific paper, value in ethical consumption, and imaginative value. The second part discusses the issues surrounding valuation in aesthetic markets, specifically wine, fashion models, art, and the creative industries. The third part analyzes valuation in financial markets - credit rating agencies, stock exchange markets, and industrial production.
This pioneering volume brings together leading social scientists to provide a range of theoretical tools and case studies for understanding price and the creation of value in markets within social and cultural contexts and preconditions. It is an important source for scholars in economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science interested in how markets work, and how value is established.

This work deals with the identification and integration process of immigrants in Australia and the role that religion plays in this process. Viktor Zander investigates the immigrant community of Slavic Baptists in Victoria and analyzes the relationship between ethnic and religious identities as well as their social dynamics. "Identity" and "marginality" are addressed as crucial issues for Slavic immigrants and their Australian-born children. The work is based on the authora (TM)s field-research in the Slavic Baptist community in Victoria. Key Features Second volume in relaunch of the series "Religion and Society" (RS)

Readings in Evolutionary Theory, Genetics, and the Origins of Modern Human Morphology provides students with a collection of readings that explore critical concepts in biological anthropology and human evolution. The text is divided into 10 distinct sections that feature an introduction, relevant readings, and post-reading questions. Opening sections explore creationism versus evolution, the history of evolutionary thought, population genetics and microevolution, and heritability. Students read about natural selection in action, primate behavior, evolutionary systematics, and human evolution and the origins of bipedalism. The final sections examine Neanderthals, the origins of modern humans, and what it is to be human. Concise and accessible, Readings in Evolutionary Theory, Genetics, and the Origins of Modern Human Morphology is an ideal resource for courses in anthropology and human evolution.

Little work has been done to explicate the motivational factors of agency, particularly in cases where an artifact initially deemed ineffective or superfluous becomes an everyday necessity, such as the automobile at the turn of the twentieth century. Farmers saw it as a "devil wagon" but later adopted it for use as an all-around device and power source. What makes a social group change its position about a particular artifact? How did the devil wagon overcome its notoriety to become a prosaic mainstream device? These questions direct the research in this book. While they may have been asked before, author Imes Chiu (PhD, Cornell University) brings a different and refreshing approach to the problem of newness. Preexisting practices and work routines used as explanatory devices have something interesting to say about diffusion strategies and localization measures. This innovative study examines the conversion of users. To understand the motivating factors in mass adoption, the study focuses on perceptions and practices associated with horses and motorcars in three different settings during three different periods. All three cases begin with the motorcar in the periphery: all three end with it achieving ubiquity. This multiple-case design is used for the purpose of theoretical replication. Results in all three cases show that a contrived likeness to its competitor-the horse-contributed to the motorcar's success. The motorcar absorbed the technical, material, structural, and conceptual resources of the technology it displaced. This book, which includes several rare photographs, will be an important resource for those who wish to study the history of transportation and technology adaptation.

Greek ethnography is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with the wider sense of Greek identity that emerged during the Greeks' "encounter with the barbarian"--Achaemenid Persia--during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this meeting, it was thought, caused previous imaginings to crystallise into the diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian" that would ultimately give rise to ethnographic prose. The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of this conventional narrative. Drawing on recent advances in ethnographic and cultural studies and in the material culture-based analyses of the Ancient Mediterranean, Joseph Skinner argues that ethnographic discourse was already ubiquitous throughout the archaic Greek world, not only in the form of texts but also in a wide range of iconographic and archaeological materials. As such, it can be differentiated both on the margins of the Greek world, like in Olbia and Calabria and in its imagined centers, such as Delphi and Olympia. The reconstruction of this "ethnography before ethnography" demonstrates that discourses of identity and difference played a vital role in defining what it meant to be Greek in the first place long before the fifth century BC. The development of ethnographic writing and historiography are shown to be rooted in this wider process of "positioning" that was continually unfurling across time, as groups and individuals scattered the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world sought to locate themselves in relation to the narratives of the past. This shift in perspective provided by The Invention of Greek Ethnography has significant implications for current understanding of the means by which a sense of Greek identity came into being, the manner in which early discourses of identity and difference should be conceptualized, and the way in which so-called "Great Historiography," or narrative history, should ultimately be interpreted.

The volume was inspired by the Children and Anthropology conference at the 14th International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnological Sciences, which was held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in July of 1998. It was there that the contributing researchers/authors presented an argument aimed at changing the face of both anthropology and the study of children. They contend that anthropologists could and should contribute to a revitalized framework for the study of children and that childhood and youth culture are important sites for developing a more innovative and integrated anthropology.

As anthropologists struggle with competing research paradigms and agendas in this post-industrial, post-structural, late-modern world, it is argued here that research on children is an important arena for demonstrating the value of an anthropology that is both integrative (across sub-fields) and comparative. It seems clear that children in the 21st century will confront a range of both new and continuing problems that anthropologists are well-situated to address, such as the exploitation of Third World child labor, AIDS and other epidemics affecting children world-wide, and the impact of immigration as well as forced relocations due to war, natural disasters, and other social and environmental ills.

This book draws together 13 distinctive and original explorations of how dominant cultural mainstreams and margins are formed and resisted, how they stabilize and shift, and how they permeate and define each other. The chapters speak to central problems of cultural politics that represent critical challenges for theory, research, and action in the social world. The authors develop and advance new approaches for interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary cultural issues. Drawing on and extending scholarship in communication, political science, sociology, women's studies, critical cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies, they analyze what happens when marginal groups meet mainstream forces. The chapters will enliven academic debates over what constitutes a cultural mainstream or margin. This volume explores theories, problems, and contemporary struggles over identity and representation, ideology and hegemony, and discourse and action. The essays focus on critical questions covering postcolonial theory, primitivism, feminism, sexuality, the body, art, multiculturalism, the environmental crisis, the mass media, and social movements. The authors examine diverse issues, ranging from the writing of women prisoners to how media policy is embedded in cultural history, to the political implications of cultural representations in cross-cultural contexts. Altogether, the diversity and depth of the text will help us develop new and complementary ways of thinking about critical questions in the politics of culture.

Western medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, has had a virtual monopoly of the health industry. This has led to economic incentives that literally keep people sick. Anthropologists, because of their holistic and comparative base, are in a unique position to apply their knowledge within clinical settings. Written for anthropologists, but useful to all clinicians, Rush's book offers a new model for understanding health and illness, provides a review of techniques found in many cultures for reducing individual and system stress, and offers processes for recovering health and individual and social balance. Rush establishes a model outlining the development of emotional problems and then offers the clinicial tools and techniques for helping individuals, families, and groups reduce stress and retranslate traumatic or distressing events. The reader will discover a very different view of emotional and physical stress; the approach taken is informational and anthropological in nature. From this approach arise numerous techniques designed to help clients achieve stress reduction and enhanced healing.

"Wives of the Leopard" explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions.

Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

People and Change in Australia arose from a conviction that more needs to be done in anthropology to give a fuller sense of the changing lives and circumstances of Australian indigenous communities and people. Much anthropological and public discussion remains embedded in traditionalizing views of indigenous people, and in accounts that seem to underline essential and apparently timeless difference. In this volume the editors and contributors assume that "the person" is socially defined and reconfigured as contexts change, both immediate and historical. Essays in this collection are grounded in Australian locales commonly termed "remote." These indigenous communities were largely established as residential concentrations by Australian governments, some first as missions, most in areas that many of the indigenous people involved consider their homelands. A number of these settlements were located in proximity to settler industries including pastoralism, market-gardening, and mining. These are the locales that many non-indigenous Australians think of as the homes of the most traditional indigenous communities and people. The contributors discuss the changing circumstances of indigenous people who originate from such places. Some remain, while others travel far afield. The accounts reveal a diversity of experiences and histories that involve major dynamics of disembedding from country and home locales, and re-embedding in new contexts, and reconfigurations of relatedness. The essays explore dimensions of change and continuity in childhood experience and socialization in a desert community; the influence of Christianity in fostering both individuation and relatedness in northeast Arnhem Land; the diaspora of Central Australian Warlpiri people to cities and the forms of life and livelihood they make there; adolescent experiences of schooling away from home communities; youth in kin-based heavy metal gangs configuring new identities, and indigenous people of southeast Australia reflecting on whether an "Aboriginal way" can be sustained. The volume takes a step toward understanding the relation between changing circumstances and changing lives of indigenous Australians today and provides a sense of the quality and the feel of those lives.

Beginning with the myth of origin that joins every young Zaramo woman to her origins as she is initiated into the secrets of life and womanhood, the book then provides us with an historical account of the Tanzanian coast around Dar es Salaam as a background to the persistence of the cultural institutions to which the reader is introduced. Statements and narrations by Salome as a representative of the modern educated Zaramo people intersperse the author's descriptions of the rituals of womanhood, of individual and social healing, and of the ways conflict is symbolically manipulated and managed. Rituals are seen in their vibrant role, not as remnants of tradition, but as means of handling encroaching external pressures on the community. These pressures include, commercialization of livelihood, development thrust in the form of villagization, or the ongoing process of losing land rights. The book shows that a people will counteract the threat of social disintegration by overemphasizing their core values in an attempt to create strong communication forces and instruments of power. A good introduction to contemporary African issues, Third World women's studies, and ethnographic anthropology.

La comunidad Latina, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, has long been told that assimilation is the only way to succeed in American society. This book challenges that generally accepted view and concludes instead that transformation as a way of life is the only viable option for the Latino community as a whole, regardless of racial, class, regional, or religious differences. It highlights how in the everyday life of la comunidad Latina the members of the community can recognize the underlying ways of life, the stories, and the patterns of relationships that cripple them, and how to break with these ways of life, stories, and relationships to create fundamentally more loving and compassionate alternatives.

Along with all men and women, Latinos and Latinas face four choices: retaining a blind loyalty to a romanticized past, assimilating, violating each other, or transforming their ethnic and racial group for the better. This examination of the underlying sacred meaning of the stories of the Latino culture attempts to determine whether these stories are destructive or creative. Now coming of age, la comunidad Latina, previously wounded by assimilation, continues to tell its story in art, literature, history, and religion so that the world may, perhaps for the first time, see its personal, political, historical, and sacred faces. The most important story now being lived is that of Latina women and Latino men who are making choices that will determine the ultimate meaning of a new Latino culture in this nation.

The House of Our Ancestors is a study of the Mountain Balinese or Bali Aga, an ethnic group with a distinct history and culture who are thought to be the indigenous people of Bali, Indonesia. In popular ideas of Balinese identity, the highland people feature as the conceptual counterpart to the royal houses established in the southern lowlands of the island. Hidden in shadow of this courtly culture, the world of the highland Balinese has been largely ignored even though Bali counts among the most researched localities in the world. This book explores their social organization and status economy from the perspective of an innovative theory of 'precedence'. Regional domains, villages and origin houses among the Bali Aga are all conceived and ranked in reference to the basic ideas of a sacred origin in the past, and of an order of precedence connecting the past with the present. The analysis of precedence ranking, evident at all levels of Bali Aga social organization, leads to the development of a new theory of status for Austronesian societies that departs radically from the notion of hierarchy as proposed by Louis Dumont in his classic study of the Indian caste system.

In an age when innovative scholarly work is at an all-time high, the academy itself is being rocked by structural change. Funding is plummeting. Tenure increasingly seems a prospect for only the elite few. Ph.D.'s are going begging for even adjunct work. Into this tumult steps Cary Nelson, with a no- holds-barred account of recent developments in higher education.

Eloquent and witty, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical urges academics to apply the theoretical advances of the last twenty years to an analysis of their own practices and standards of behavior. In the process, Nelson offers a devastating critique of current inequities and a detailed proposal for change in the form of A Twelve-Step Program for Academia.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, continues to struggle with socioeconomic and political development. "Culture and Customs of the Congo" provides the full context of traditional culture and modern practices against a backdrop of a turbulent history. The volume opens up a land and peoples little known in the United States. Written expressly to meet the needs of students and the general audience, the work will inform about the geography, economy, political history, and history from the slave trade to dictatorship; ancestral religions and inroads of western faiths; ancestral literary heritage and communication; art, architecture, and housing; diet and dress; marriage, family, and women; lifestyles and life events, and traditional and modern music and dance.

Congolese society comprises hundreds of ethnic groups, such as the Luba, the Kongo, and the Kuba. The countryside is largely based on the hunting and gathering, herding, and farming lifestyles. The city is marked by lifestyles reflecting the prevalence of small business activities and increasing cultural sycretism of customs from different parts of the Congo and Western imports. Mukenge's narrative gives the diverse perspectives of their cultures with their fascinating juxtapositions to our familiar western ways. Examples of this are found in the Religion and Worldview chapter, which discusses ancestral religions, the spirits of the land, and supernatural power practitioners. The Literature chapter covers verbal competition and game songs. Congolese cuisine is based on starches such as the cassava root, the corn, and the plantain; green vegetables, insects, fish and, to a lesser extent, meat. Other chapters cover topics from the distinct Congolese dress and symbolic adornments, all-important family lines, to ceremonial music and dance. A chronology and glossary are added value.

Introduces key terms, research frameworks, debates, and histories for Asian American Studies Born out of the Civil Rights and Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies has grown significantly over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. Characterized by transnational, trans-Pacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class, this multidisciplinary field engages with a set of concepts profoundly shaped by past and present histories of racialization and social formation. The keywords included in this collection are central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and reflect the ways in which Asian American Studies has transformed scholarly discourses, research agendas, and pedagogical frameworks. Spanning multiple histories, numerous migrations, and diverse populations, Keywords for Asian American Studies reconsiders and recalibrates the ever-shifting borders of Asian American studies as a distinctly interdisciplinary field. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

As the 1994 World Cup Finals in the United States clearly demonstrated, football is the quintessential global game. One of the world's most popular arenas for the expression of conflict and emotion, it is virtually unparalleled as a site for cultural analysis. Players, officials, supporters and commentators all have key roles in a social drama incorporating the deeply symbolic and ritualistic. A powerful vehicle for ideals of masculinity, football also offers penetrating insights into the iconography of the body; manifestations of rivalry and conflict; discourses of knowledge; expressions of communitas and geo-social belonging; the celebration and denigration of the Other; and the inversion of power hierarchies through carnival.In bringing these themes together, this accessible and absorbing book by leading scholars of sport and leisure reveals football's differing meanings across cultures. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, anthropology, sports sciences and, more simply, to anyone with a passion for this global game.

This study seeks to explore the myriad forms of representation of the French public as a whole, and of specific socio-cultural groups in French society, by means of collectively-shared myths and metaphors. The book also examines visual, linguistic and textual media, and political participation and practice. It considers diametrical questions of belonging or marginality, social struggle or social cohesion, and explores how the various forms of identity are created and maintained. The approach is multidisciplinary, using recent research in various disciplines from contributors in France and the UK. The book aims to provide a coherent and multi-faceted study of socio-cultural identity and citizenship in France.

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health. While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions--where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, "primitive" life--the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern among many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle.

A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851-1893 is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

John Burris argues that comparative religion was the focal point for early attempts at comparative culture and that both were defined more by the intercultural politics and material exchanges of colonialism than by the spirit of objective intellectual inquiry. Equally a work of American and British religious history and a cultural history of the emerging field of religion, this book offers definitive theoretical insights into the discipline of religious studies in its early formation.

On November 5, 2008, the nation awoke to a New York Times headline that read triumphantly: OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout. But new events quickly muted the exuberant declarations of a postracial era in America: from claims that Obama was born in Kenya and that he is not a true American, to depictions of Obama as a Lyin African and conservative cartoons that showed the new president surrounded by racist stereotypes like watermelons and fried chicken. Despite the utopian proclamations that we are now live in a color-blind, postracial country, the grim reality is that implicit racial biases are more entrenched than ever. In Wrongs of the Right, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks set postracial claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at Obama, his administration, and African Americans. They provide an analysis of the political Right and their opposition to Obama from the vantage point of their rhetoric, a history of the evolution of the two-party system in relation to race, social scientific research on race and political ideology, and how racial fears, coded language, and implicit racism are drawn upon and manipulated by the political Right. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the Right's replaying of the race card remains a potent resource for othering the first black president in a context rife with Nativism, xenophobia, white racial fatigue, and serious racial inequality. And as Hughey and Parks show, race trumps politics and policies when it comes to political conservatives' hostility toward Obama.