Among the Americans who joined the ranks of the Doughboys fighting World War I were thousands of America's newest residents. Good Americans examines the contributions of Italian and Jewish immigrants, both on the homefront and overseas, in the Great War. While residing in strong, insular communities, both groups faced a barrage of demands to participate in a conflict that had been raging in their home countries for nearly three years. Italians and Jews "did their bit" in relief, recruitment, conservation, and war bond campaigns, while immigrants and second-generation ethnic soldiers fought on the Western front. Within a year of the Armistice, they found themselves redefined as foreigners and perceived as a major threat to American life, rather than remembered as participants in its defense. Wartime experiences, Christopher Sterba argues, served to deeply politicize first and second generation immigrants, greatly accelerating their transformation from relatively powerless newcomers to a major political force in the United States during the New Deal and beyond.

Thresholds of Western Culture explores identity, postcoloniality and transnationalism--three closely related issues which redefine contemporary cultural identity.The book opens with an analysis of subjectivity and the cultural meltdown that accompanied fascism in the West. The situation in Africa is then explored which, while recalling modernity's dark side, highlights the intricacy of postcolonial identity. Post-Soviet Eastern Europe presents a separate case of neglected postcoloniality which emphasizes how ethnocentrism and cultural tensions have exposed the fragility of transnationalism. The book concludes with an examination of East Asia, a region which offers transnational options potentially much more fruitful than Balkanization.

The Tamils can be defined in terms of the people who speak Tamil as their mother tongue. The Tamil language is a member of the Dravidian/South Indian family of languages. The four southernmost states of India - Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andra Pradesh - are predominantly linguistically Dravidian, each state is carved out on the basis of predominance of the four major Dravidian languages. South India and Sri Lanka have been homelands of the Tamils from the beginning of recorded history. The region roughly covered by the modern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala is identified as ancient "tamizakam" up to about 10th century AD. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tamils migrated to some British colonies in search of employment and thus there are substantial Tamil populations in Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. These volumes provide an extended introduction to the Tamils by discussing all the important facets that make them so vibrant a society. They are arranged thematically and provide a glimpse into Tamil history, culture, politics, language, literature and social progress.

The first Okinawan immigrants arrived in Honolulu in January 1900 to work as contract laborers on Hawai'i's sugar plantations. Over time Okinawans would continue migrating east to the continental U.S., Canada, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba, Paraguay, New Caledonia, and the islands of Micronesia. The essays in this volume commemorate these diasporic experiences within the geopolitical context of East Asia. Using primary sources and oral history, individual contributors examine how Okinawan identity was constructed in the various countries to which. Okinawans migrated, and how their experiences were shaped by the Japanese nation-building project and by globalization. Essays explore the return to Okinawan sovereignty, or what Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo called an "impossible possibility," and the role of the Okinawan labor diaspora in Japan's imperial expansion into the Philippines and Micronesia.

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes.

Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups.

The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Ranique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.

In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a "new" America. Bost challenges the popular media's notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the "changing" face of America extends throughout American history.

Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the "browning" of America.

Original and ambitious in scope, "Mulattas and Mestizas" measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.

Based on a 500,000 word corpus of early sources collected from ex-slave narratives, ex-slave recordings, and interviews with hoodoo priests, this book reconstructs the English spoken by African Americans between 1830 and 1920. By means of detailed quantitative analyses, three linguistic features (negation patterns, copula usage, and relative marker choice) are interpreted along the lines of temporal change, regional diversity, and variation across gender. Additionally, some 300 non-standard letters written by African Americans in the 19th century are compared to the main corpus in order to identify differences between speech and writing.

Black and white power struggles in segregated Virginia; Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Smith draws on official records, private correspondence, and letters to newspapers from otherwise anonymous Virginians to capture a wide and varied range of black and white voices. African Americans emerge as central characters in the narrative, as Smith chronicles their efforts to obtain access to public schools and libraries, protection under the law, and the equitable distribution of municipal resources. This acceleration of black resistance to white supremacy in the years before World War II precipitated a crisis of confidence among white Virginians, who, despite their overwhelming electoral dominance, felt increasingly insecure about their ability to manage the color line on their own terms. Exploring the everday power struggles that accompanied the erosion of white authority in the political, economic, and educational arenas, Smith uncovers the seeds of white Virginians' resistance to civil rights activism in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums.

Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals.

By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.

Robert Trivers is one of the leading figures pioneering the field of sociobiology. For Natural Selection and Social Theory, he has selected eleven of his most influential papers, including several classic papers from the early 1970s on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflicts and asymmetry in sexual selection, which helped to establish the centrality of sociobiology, as well as some of his later work on deceit in signalling, sex antagonistic genese, and imprinting. Trivers introduces each paper, setting them in their contemporary context, and critically evaluating them in the light of subsequent work and further developments. The result is a unique portrait of the intellectual development of sociobiology, with valuable insights of interest to evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology.

Based on ethnographic research in three communities (Ezhava Hindu, Mappila Muslim, and Syrian Christian) in Kerala, India, which sent large numbers of workers to the Middle East for temporary jobs, Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity explores the factors responsible for the striking differences in the groups' patterns of migration and migration-induced social change. Most broadly, Prema Kurien seeks to understand what ethnicity is and how it affects people's activities and decisions. She argues that, in each case, a community-specific nexus of religion, gender, and status shaped migration, and was, in turn, transformed by it.

The religious background of the three groups determined their social location within colonial and postcolonial Kerala. This social location in turn affected their occupational profiles, family structures, and social networks, as well as their conceptions of gender and honor, and thus was fundamental in shaping migration patterns. The rapid enrichment brought about by international migration resulted in a reinterpretation of religious identity and practice which was manifested by changes in patterns of gendered behavior and status in each of the three communities.

What makes this book unique is its focus on the sociocultural patterns of short-term international migration and its comparative ethnographic approach.

""""In this ethnographic study of the teaching of writing, Karen Surman Paley reveals the social significance of first-person writing and the limitations of a popular taxonomy of composition studies. Paley looks critically at the way social constructionists have created an "Other" in the field of composition studies and named it "expressivist." Paley demonstrates the complexity of approaches to teaching writing through an ethnographic study of two composition faculty at Boston College, a program that some would say is "expressivist." She prompts her colleagues to consider how family experiences shape the way students feel about and treat people of races, religions, genders, and sexual preferences other than their own. Finally, she suggests to the field of composition that practitioners spend less time shoring up taxonomies of the field and more time sharing pedagogies.

In Old New Zealand (1863), F.E. Maning recalls living alongside Maori in "the good old times before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that." His account of the early contact period is widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece of some sort, but the extent to which it is fiction, autobiography, ethnography, history, or satire remains a matter for debate. This is the first scholarly edition of Maning's writings. It includes a revealing selection of Maning's unpublished letters, and Alex Calder contributes an introduction and notes that illuminate the works' historical, ethnographic, and literary contexts, showing how settler colonialism is an incomplete and contested process, the problems of which are enacted in Maning's writings, and repeated in the history of their reception.

From reviews of the first edition: "Ethnographic Film can rightly be considered a film primer for anthropologists." -- Choice "This is an interesting and useful book about what it means to be ethnographic and how this might affect ethnographic filmmaking for the better. It obviously belongs in all departments of anthropology, and most ethnographic filmmakers will want to read it." -- Ethnohistory

Even before Robert Flaherty released Nanook of the North in 1922, anthropologists were producing films about the lifeways of native peoples for a public audience, as well as for research and teaching. Ethnographic Film (1976) was one of the first books to provide a comprehensive introduction to this field of visual anthropology, and it quickly became the standard reference.

In this new edition, Karl G. Heider thoroughly updates Ethnographic Film to reflect developments in the field over the three decades since its publication, focusing on the work of four seminal filmmakers-- Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch. He begins with an introduction to ethnographic film and a history of the medium. He then considers many attributes of ethnographic film, including the crucial need to present "whole acts," "whole bodies," "whole interactions," and "whole people" to preserve the integrity of the cultural context. Heider also discusses numerous aspects of making ethnographic films, from ethics and finances to technical considerations such as film versus video and preserving the filmed record. He concludes with a look at using ethnographic film in teaching.

South Asians in Diaspora is a collection of essays concerning the history, politics, and anthropology of migration in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, as well as in the numerous overseas locations, such as Fiji, Africa, the Caribbean and USA, where South Asians migrated in the colonial period and after. It addresses the connections between migration, problems of identity and ethnic conflict from a comparative perspective, and highlights the role of shared colonial experiences in providing 'communal' solidarities and discord.

Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility confronts a central issue in the study of immigration and ethnicity - the opposition between culture and structure - and presents a collection of essays that transcend simplistic either/or approaches to this issue. The contributors explore educational and economic mobility of immigrant groups in Europe and America.

Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility confronts a central issue in the study of immigration and ethnicity - the opposition between culture and structure - and presents a collection of essays that transcend simplistic either/or approaches to this issue. The contributors explore educational and economic mobility of immigrant groups in Europe and America.

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.

Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and to more than two hundred other locations across the country to attend Scottish Highland Games and Gatherings. There, kilt-wearing participants compete in athletics, Highland dancing, and bagpiping, while others join clan societies in celebration of a Scottish heritage. As Celeste Ray notes, however, the Scottish affiliation that Americans claim today is a Highland Gaelic identity that did not come to characterize that nation until long after the ancestors of many Scottish Americans had left Scotland.

Ray explores how Highland Scottish themes and lore merge with southern regional myths and identities to produce a unique style of commemoration and a complex sense of identity for Scottish Americans in the South. Blending the objectivity of the anthropologist with respect for the people she studies, she asks how and why we use memories of our ancestral pasts to provide a sense of identity and community in the present. In so doing, she offers an original and insightful examination of what it means to be Scottish in America.

The 20th Century has been marked by enormous change in terms of how we define race. In large part, we have thrown out the antiquated notions of the 1800s, giving way to a more realistic, sociocultural view of the world. The United States is, perhaps more than any other industrialized country, distinguished by the size and diversity of its racial and ethnic minority populations. Current trends promise that these features will endure. Fifty years from now, there will most likely be no single majority group in the United States. How will we fare as a nation when race-based issues such as immigration, job opportunities, and affirmative action are already so contentious today? In America Becoming, leading scholars and commentators explore past and current trends among African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in the context of a white majority. This volume presents the most up-to-date findings and analysis on racial and social dynamics, with recommendations for ongoing research. It examines compelling issues in the field of race relations, including: * Race and ethnicity in criminal justice. * Demographic and social trends for Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. * Trends in minority-owned businesses. * Wealth, welfare, and racial stratification. * Residential segregation and the meaning of "neighborhood." * Disparities in educational test scores among races and ethnicities. * Health and development for minority children, adolescents, and adults. * Race and ethnicity in the labor market, including the role of minorities in America's military. * Immigration and the dynamics of race and ethnicity. * The changing meaning of race. * Changing racial attitudes. This collection of papers, compiled and edited by distinguished leaders in the behavioral and social sciences, represents the most current literature in the field. Volume 1 covers demographic trends, immigration, racial attitudes, and the geography of opportunity. Volume 2 deals with the criminal justice system, the labor market, welfare, and health trends. Both books will be of great interest to educators, scholars, researchers, students, social scientists, and policymakers.

The late nineteenth century was a period of tremendous upheaval in American race relations. But while studies abound documenting the changes in relations between whites and African Americans in the northern and southern states during this time, few historians have tackled this topic in the lands of the frontier West or sought to understand how Native Americans figured into the nation's complex racial mix. In Contested Territory, Murray R. Wickett offers the first complete history of the interaction between whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories from the end of the Civil War until Oklahoma statehood in 1907, addressing questions about the nature of American race relations, the answers to which far transcend the territorial boundaries of the region.

By the late 1800s, the Indian and Oklahoma Territories were the only place where the three "founding" cultures of American society coexisted in significant numbers, and the area provides an excellent case study in the contrasting racial policies aimed at separate ethnic groups. Against a backdrop of erratic treatment by Indian tribes and the ongoing trauma of war and Reconstruction, freedmen sought a true promised land in Oklahoma. Many blacks pressed westward, but their exodus was met with resistance from white settlers and mixed-blood Native Americans who tried to enact laws to curtail the civil rights of blacks. As Wickett shows, racial separation versus integration sparked a bitter debate that factionalized both blacks and Indians. While white government officials and humanitarian reformers sought -- and often forced -- the assimilation of Native peoples into Anglo-American society, theystrove, at the same time, to secure the strict segregation of African Americans. As African Americans desperately fought a losing battle to maintain their civil rights, Native Americans, for the most part, rejected the benefits white society encouraged them to accept.

Wickett tells his fascinating and complex story with a mix of sources that includes poems, anecdotes, and particularly well-chosen pictures. Through government records, newspapers, diaries, and oral history interviews, he also allows those who experienced the temper of the times first hand to speak for themselves.

Ironically, whites in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories discouraged in African Americans the very ideals and values they so ardently attempted to instill in Native Americans. As Wickett's groundbreaking study reveals, the battles over what role each of the three racial groups would play in the region truly made it a "contested territory".

This eloquent and profound book, completed by Valerio Valeri shortly before his death in 1998, contends that the ambivalence felt by all humans about sex, death, and eating other animals can be explained by a set of coordinated principles that are expressed in taboos. In elegant prose, Valeri evokes the world of the Huaulu, forest hunters of Indonesia. The hidden attractions of the animal world, which invades the human world in perilous ways, he shows, also delineate that which the Huaulu regard as most human about themselves.

"The Memory of Trade" is an ethnographic study of the people of Aru, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. Central to Patricia Spyer's study is the fraught identification of Aruese people with two imaginary elsewheres--the 'Aru' and the 'Malay'--and the fissured construction of community that has ensued from centuries of active international trade and more recent encroachments of modernity.
Drawing on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research, Spyer examines the dynamics of contact with the Dutch and Europeans, Suharto's postcolonial regime, and with the competing religions of Islam, ""Protestantism, and Catholicism in the context of the recent conversion of pagan Aruese. While arguing that Aru identity and community are defined largely in terms of absence, longing, memory, and desire, she also incorporates present-day realities--such as the ecological destruction wrought by the Aru trade in such luxury goods as pearls and shark fins--without overlooking the mystique and ritual surrounding these activities. Imprinted on the one hand by the archipelago's long engagement with extended networks of commerce and communication and, on the other, by modernity's characteristic repressions and displacements, Aruese make and manage their lives somewhat precariously within what they often seem to construe as a dangerously expanding--if still enticing--world. By documenting not only the particular expectations and strategies Aruese have developed in dealing with this larger world but also the price they pay for participation therein, "The Memory of Trade" speaks to problems commonly faced elsewhere in the frontier spaces of modern nation-states.
Balancing particularly astute analysis with classic ethnography, "The Memory of Trade" will appeal not only to anthropologists and historians but also to students and specialists of Southeast Asia, modernity, and globalization.