Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and "stuff," and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.

The content of this volume reflects theoretical and practical discussions on cultural issues influenced by increased adoption of information and communication technologies. The penetration of new forms of communication, such as online social networking, internet video-casting, and massive online multiplayer gaming; the experience and exploration of virtual worlds; and the massive adoption of ever-emergent ICT technologies; are all developments in desperate need of serious examination. It is not surprising that these new realities, and the questions and issues to which they give rise, have drawn increasing attention from academics. Those engaging these issues do so from a wide range of academic fields. Accordingly, the authors contributing to this volume represent an impressive array of academic disciplines and varied perspectives, including philosophy, sociology, religion, anthropology, digital humanities, literature studies, film science, new media studies and still others. Thus, the subsequent chapters offer the reader a multidimensional examination of this volume's unifying theme: the ways and extent to which current and anticipated cybernetic environments have altered, and will continue to shape, our understandings of what it means to be human.

In the eighteenth-century French household, the servant cook held a special place of importance, providing daily meals and managing the kitchen and its finances. In this scrupulously researched and witty history, Sean Takats examines the lives of these cooks as they sought to improve their position in society and reinvent themselves as expert, skilled professionals.

Much has been written about the cuisine of the period, but Takats takes readers down into the kitchen and introduces them to the men and women behind the food. It is only then, Takats argues, that we can fully recover the scientific and cultural significance of the meals they created, and, more importantly, the contributions of ordinary workers to eighteenth-century intellectual life. He shows how cooks, along with decorators, architects, and fashion merchants, drove France's consumer revolution, and how cooks' knowledge about a healthy diet and the medicinal properties of food advanced their professional status by capitalizing on the Enlightenment's new concern for bodily and material happiness.

"The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France" explores a unique intersection of cultural history, labor history, and the history of science and medicine. Relying on an unprecedented range of sources, from printed cookbooks and medical texts to building plans and commercial advertisements, Takats reconstructs the evolving role of the cook in Enlightenment France.

Academics and students alike will enjoy this fascinating study of the invention of the professional chef, of how ordinary workers influenced emerging trends of scientific knowledge, culture-creation, and taste in eighteenth-century France.

What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age." Tells a fascinating true crime story involving murder, juvenile delinquency, secret sexualities, and obscene comic books from a time in American history often portrayed as idyllic and innocent Provides revealing insights into the anxieties of the post-Holocaust Jewish-American community Supplies a new angle on the Great Comic Book Scare and the anti-comics movement Based on original, archival research using materials that have never been published

In Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars, Rachel E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular media implicitly portrays whiteness as credible, trustworthy, familiar, and honest, and that this portrayal is normalized and ubiquitous. Whether on television, film, social media, or in the news, white people are constructed as believable and unrehearsed, from the way they talk to how they look and act. Dubrofsky argues that this way of making white people appear authentic is a strategy of whiteness, requiring attentiveness to the context of white supremacy in which the presentations unfold. The volume details how ideas about what is natural, good, and wholesome are reified in media, showing how these values are implicitly racialized. Additionally, the project details how white women are presented as particularly authentic when they seem to lose agency by expressing affect through emotional and bodily displays. The chapters examine a range of popular media-newspaper articles about Donald J. Trump, a selfie taken at Auschwitz, music videos by Miley Cyrus, the television series UnREAL, the infamous video of Amy Cooper calling the police on an innocent Black man, and the documentary Miss Americana-pinpointing patterns that cut across media to explore the implications for the larger culture in which they exist. At its heart, the book asks: Who gets to be authentic? And what are the implications?

In 1939, Aleksandr Volkov (1891-1977) published Wizard of the Emerald City, a revised version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Only a line on the copyright page explained the book as a "reworking" of the American story. Readers credited Volkov as author rather than translator. Volkov, an unknown and inexperienced author before World War II, tried to break into the politically charged field of Soviet children's literature with an American fairy tale. During the height of Stalin's purges, Volkov adapted and published this fairy tale in the Soviet Union despite enormous, sometimes deadly, obstacles. Marketed as Volkov's original work, Wizard of the Emerald City spawned a series that was translated into more than a dozen languages and became a staple of Soviet popular culture, not unlike Baum's fourteen-volume Oz series in the United States. Volkov's books inspired a television series, plays, films, musicals, animated cartoons, and a museum. Today, children's authors and fans continue to add volumes to the Magic Land series. Several generations of Soviet Russian and Eastern European children grew up with Volkov's writings, yet know little about the author and even less about his American source, L. Frank Baum. Most Americans have never heard of Volkov and know nothing of his impact in the Soviet Union, and those who do know of him regard his efforts as plagiarism. Erika Haber demonstrates how the works of both Baum and Volkov evolved from being popular children's literature and became compelling and enduring cultural icons in both the US and USSR/Russia, despite being dismissed and ignored by critics, scholars, and librarians for many years.

The music industry is going through a period of immense change brought about in part by the digital revolution. What is the role of music in the age of computers and the internet? How has the music industry been transformed by the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and how is it likely to change in the future?

This is the first major study of the music industry in the new millennium. Wikstrom provides an international overview of the music industry and its future prospects in the world of global entertainment. They illuminate the workings of the music industry, and capture the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public.

"The Music Industry" will become a standard work on the music industry at the beginning of the 21st century. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, popular music, sociology and economics. It will also be of great value to professionals in the music industry, policy makers, and to anyone interested in the future of music.

Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology offers a new understanding of the materiality of religion. By drawing on the field of archaeological theory and method, the relationship between religion and material culture is explored. It is argued that the material elements of religious life have been largely neglected by the discipline of religious studies, while at the same time religion has been traditionally seen as problematic for archaeologists. Why do we not talk of the discipline of the archaeology of religion, in the same way we do the anthropology of religion, or the sociology of religion? The volume considers the historical problems of approaching the material elements of religious life and bridges the methodological gap between religious studies and archaeology by proposing a new way of understanding the materiality of religion - as active, engaged and projecting a level of autonomous social agency. Finally, the critical examination of archaeological approaches to the materiality of religion is furthered through the consideration of non-archaeological ways of examining the social roles that material culture plays in human life.

As a way to comment on a person's style or taste, the word "tacky" has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called "tackies" who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity.

New scientific discoveries, technologies and techniques often find their way into the space and equipment of domestic and professional kitchens. Using approaches based on anthropology, archaeology and history, Cooking Technology reveals the impact these and the associated broader socio-cultural, political and economic changes have on everyday culinary practices, explaining why people transform - or, indeed, refuse to change - their kitchens and food habits. Focusing on Mexico and Latin America, the authors look at poor, rural households as well as the kitchens of the well-to-do and professional chefs. Topics range from state subsidies for traditional ingredients, to the promotion of fusion foods, and the meaning of kitchens and cooking in different localities, as a result of people taking their cooking technologies and ingredients with them to recreate their kitchens abroad. What emerges is an image of Latin American kitchens as places where 'traditional' and 'modern' culinary values are constantly being renegotiated. The thirteen chapters feature case studies of areas in Mexico, the American-Mexican border, Cuba, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. With contributions from an international range of leading experts, Cooking Technology fills an important gap in the literature and provides an excellent introduction to the topic for students and researchers working in food studies, anthropology, history, and Latin American studies.

"Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region's dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read."-Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University. "Now in its forty- third edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner."-Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University.

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a 'culture of the sound image', it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

Within literature, history, politics, philosophy and theology, the interpretation of utopian ideals has evolved constantly. Juxtaposing historical views on utopian diagnoses, prescriptions and on the character and value of utopian thought with more modern interpretations, this volume explores how our ideal utopia has transformed over time. Challenging long-held interpretations, the contributors turn a fresh eye to canonical texts, and open them up to a twenty-first century audience. From Moore's Utopia to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Utopian Moments puts forward a lively and accessible debate on the nature and significance of utopian thought and tradition. Each essay focuses on a key passage from the selected work using it to encourage both the specialist and the reader new to the field to read afresh. Written by an international team of leading scholars, the essays range from the sixteenth century to the present day and are designed to be both stimulating and accessible.

The more than 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border is a focus of intense interest today, as immigration, security, and environmental issues dominate the headlines. This is the first A-to-Z encyclopedia to overview the unique and vibrant elements that make up the borderlands. More than 150 essay entries provide students and general readers with a solid sense of the U.S.-Mexico border history, culture, and politics. Coverage runs the gamut from key historical and contemporary figures, art, cuisine, sports, and religion to education, environment, legislation, radio, rhetoric, slavery, tourism, and women in Ciudad Juarez. The more than 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border is a focus of intense interest today, as immigration, security, and environmental issues dominate the headlines. This is the first A-to-Z encyclopedia to overview the unique and vibrant elements that make up the borderlands. More than 150 essay entries provide students and general readers with a solid sense of the U.S.-Mexico border history, culture, and politics. Coverage runs the gamut from key historical and contemporary figures, art, cuisine, sports, and religion to education, environment, legislation, radio, rhetoric, slavery, tourism, and women in Ciudad Juarez. Alphabetical and topical lists of entries in the frontmatter allow readers to find topics of interest quickly, as does the index. Those looking for more in-depth coverage will find many helpful suggestions in the Further Reading section per entry as well as in the Selected Bibliography. A chronology and historical photos also complement the text.

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

aRough Writing is much more than a fascinating account of the little-known relationship between an American president and the immigrant authors whose work he promoted in the service of a new national narrative. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Rough Writing enables us to see a vital period in American literature through new eyes.a
--Laura Browder, author of "Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities"

As the United States struggled to absorb a massive influx of ethnically diverse immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, the question of who and what an American is took on urgent intensity. It seemed more critical than ever to establish a definition by which Americanness could be established, transmitted, maintained, and judged. Americans of all stripes sought to articulate and enforce their visions of the nationas past, present, and future; central to these attempts was President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt fully recognized the narrative component of American identity, and he called upon authors of diverse European backgrounds including Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunne to promote the nation in popular written form. With the swell and shift in immigration, he realized that a more encompassing national literature was needed to aexpress and guide the soul of the nation.a Rough Writing examines the surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Rooseveltas America and American literature.

As timely as the latest tweet, this book tracks the digital revolution as a paradigm shift that is transforming popular culture in as yet unforeseen ways. Bloggerati, Twitterati: How Blogs and Twitter Are Transforming Popular Culture explores the ongoing digital revolution and examines the way it is changing-and will change-the way people live and communicate. Starting from the proposition that the Internet is now the center of popular culture, the book offers descriptions of blogs and Twitter and the online behavior they foster. It looks at the demographics of users and the impact of the Internet on knowledge, thinking, writing, politics, and journalism. A primary focus is on the way blogs and tweets are opening up communication to the people, free from gatekeepers and sanctioned rhetoric. The other side of the coin is the online hijacking of the news and its potential for spreading misinformation and fomenting polarization, topics that are analyzed even as the situation continues to evolve. Finally, the book gathers predictions from cultural critics about the future of digital popular culture and makes a few predictions of its own. Sidebars featuring original and exclusive interviews with media personalities Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart, and others A timeline showing the history of the Internet, blogs, Twitter, and social media Cartoons depicting humorous aspects of Internet culture Snapshot views of blogs A bibliography and listings of selected blogsites

When a devastating earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, 2010, the world reacted with a collective, yet distant, horror. For "Cincinnati Enquirer" reporter Mark Curnutte, hearing the news provoked a far more visceral response. Curnutte had grown to love Haiti and its people as only someone who had lived with Haiti's families could.

"A Promise in Haiti" is Curnutte's story of his time, spanning the last decade, living among several families in Gonaives, a city of 200,000 people a hundred kilometers north of Port-au-Prince. He began traveling to Haiti as a volunteer with the aid organization Hands Together, eventually building trust and credibility with many Haitians. Curnutte introduces the reader to the Cenecharles family, strained by entrenched unemployment and the need to continually travel for work. He is invited into the home of the Henrisma family, and is forced to reconcile journalistic detachment with basic compassion as he contributes financially to help them. The reader is confronted with a complicated, conflicted written and photographic record of a worldview that evolves right on the page. As a reporter, Curnutte found parallels between the lives he encountered in Gonaives and the world of the Great Depression recounted in James Agee and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Agee and Evans loom large as a challenge and inspiration to Curnutte.

The result is equal parts homage to that historic chronicle, on-the-ground reporting, and introspective narrative on the lessons Gonaives taught Curnutte about his own life and family. In late February 2010, Curnutte went back to Haiti on assignment, but conditions made it impossible for him to return to Gonaives. The resulting frustration provoked a meditation on the monumental challenges that face Haiti -- and on the destructive cycle of international attention that constantly moves on to "The Next Big Story."

Extreme metal--one step beyond heavy metal--can appear bizarre or terrifying to the uninitiated. Musicians of this genre have developed an often impenetrable sound that teeters on the edge of screaming, incomprehensible noise. Extreme metal circulates on the edge of mainstream culture within the confines of an obscure 'scene', in which members explore dangerous themes such as death, war and the occult, sometimes embracing violence, neo-fascism and Satanism. In the first book-length study of extreme metal, Keith Kahn-Harris draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene. He shows how the scene is a space in which members creatively explore destructive themes, but also a space in which members experience the everyday pleasures of community and friendship. Including interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form.