Given the increasing use of English worldwide and in intercultural communication, there is a growing interest in attitudes towards non-native speaker accents in English. Research on attitudes towards non-native English accents is therefore important because of concerns about positive and negative discrimination between people who speak with different accents. This book reveals exactly what types of accent variations trigger positive and negative attitudes towards the speaker. The author argues that certain types of variation in the pronunciation of English can have a significant effect on how listeners identify an accent and explores how this variation affects the development of certain attitudes towards the speaker. Specific sounds that are difficult for many learners to acquire (e.g. the initial sounds in 'this' or 'June') are examined in terms of attitudes towards speakers' pronunciation, including an original comparison of two different kinds of non-native accents (German and Greek). The results of the study provide a basis for further research in second language acquisition and applied linguistics as well as practical information for language instructors at all levels of English education.

How parents approach the task of passing on religious faith and practice to their children How do American parents pass their religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal "spirituality," Religious Parenting investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children's religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo explore American parents' strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one's best self on life's difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals', to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same "cultural models" when passing on religion to their children. Taking an extensive look into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious Parenting uncovers parents' real-life challenges while breaking innovative theoretical ground.

This book explores the unique experiences of African-born educators and students in North American K-12 classrooms, as well as those of education faculty and administrators. It identifies the conflicting attributes that African-born educators and students bring into American schools and the challenges of working in linguistically, racially and culturally regulated educational spaces. The collected essays examine how attributes assigned to immigrant teachers by the host community of students, colleagues and administrators can serve both as conduits and deterrents for effective teaching. In all, Reprocessing Race, Language and Ability uncovers the existence of unavoidable - though not insurmountable - racial, cultural and linguistic dissonance when African and western cultures come in contact.

This book will explore the childbirth process through globally diverse perspectives in order to offer a broader context with which to think about birth. We will address multiple rituals and management models surrounding the labor and birth process from communities across the globe.

Labor and birth are biocultural events that are managed in countless ways. We are particularly interested in the notion of power. Who controls the pregnancy and the birth? Is it the hospital, the doctor, or the in-laws, and in which cultures does the mother have the control? These decisions, regarding place of birth, position, who receives the baby and even how the mother may or may not behave during the actual delivery, are all part of the different ways that birth is conducted.

One chapter of the book will be devoted to midwives and other birth attendants. There will also be chapters on the Evolution of Birth, on Women s Birth Narratives, and on Child Spacing and Breastfeeding.

This book will bring together global research conducted by professional anthropologists, midwives and doctors who work closely with the individuals from the cultures they are writing about, offering a unique perspective direct from the cultural group."

Der Band stellt einerseits Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Auswirkungen eines der spektakularsten Zusammenbruche eines Versicherungskonzerns im 20. Jahrhundert dar und bietet daruber hinaus eine am Beispiel demonstrierte, systematische Analyse der Verflechtung von Misswirtschaft mit Medien, Staat und Gesellschaft. Die Phoenix Lebensversicherung, mit Sitz in Wien und Kunden in 22 Landern, wurde im Jahr 1936 zahlungsunfahig. Sie hatte riesige Verluste aufgeturmt, Bilanzen gefalscht und Schlusselpersonen hofiert. Ihr Sturz drohte eine europaweite Finanzkrise auszuloesen und wurde mit diktatorischen Massnahmen aufgefangen. Das Buch schildert die wirtschaftliche wie politische Rolle des Versicherers vor 1918, wahrend der Weimarer Republik und ab 1933.

Christmas is the favourite time of the year for many of us, with present exchanges, food & drink and socialising with friends & family at the top of the agenda. But what are the true origins and meaning of this seemingly inexhaustible celebration? Although most of our current customs only go back a few hundred years - Father Christmas as we know him dressed in red and white much less - there has been a festival at this time in the year for thousands of years. Although these days it is taken to mean the commemoration of the birth of Jesus, the date of December 25 was that of the winter solstice in Roman times, and other cultures have celebrated the darkest winter night for millennia. This book looks at all aspects of what the festive period means for people all over the world, beginning with a history of Christmas that looks at Yule, Nativity and Christmas as well as pagan celebrations. The embodiment of Christmas, Father Christmas, has a whole chapter, and this jolly character we know and love has a long history, not to mention a big bag of presents! But wait - there's myrrh(!): quotes, jokes, sayings and words of wisdom and fun from around the world, as well as fun facts about how, where, when and why we celebrate - and we look at curious customs from around the world. SAMPLE FACT: The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, has been tracking Santa's journey around the world since 1958.

"A unique look at a unique culture. If you're trying to figure the Japanese out, this book provides another important piece of the puzzle."--Terrie Lloyd, Founder & Publisher, Jap@n Inc.; CEO LINC Media, Tokyo In Japan: A Guide to Traditions, Customs and Etiquette veteran Japanologist Boye Lafayette De Mente unlocks the mysteries of "Kata"--the cultural forms that shape and define Japanese etiquette, character, and world view to this day. These forms are responsible for creating the unique traits and talents which distinguish the Japanese people. Kata governs virtually all interactions in Japan and remains the key to understanding Japanese customs, business etiquette, and daily communication. De Mente's 70 essays include: "The Art of Bowing" "The Importance of the Apology" "The Compulsion for Quality" "Exchanging Name Cards" "The Dangers of Speaking English" "The Ritual of Tea" In these short, clear essays, De Mente unravels the complexities of Japanese culture by exploring the origin, nature, use, and influence of Kata in Japanese life. By delving into Japanese history and the collective Japanese psyche, readers will experience the modern expressions of this ancient culture and specific way of thinking.

Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones is the first full-length account of Ricardo Palma informed by theories of cultural criticism. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela sheds new light on important aspects of Palma's work. She offers a fresh interpretation of the relations between history and literature - perhaps the most discussed aspect of Palma's work - engaging with new critical thinking on historicism and examining the significance of the marginal and the anecdotal in Palma's work. By using the tools of postcolonial cultural criticism, Vera Tudela considers Palma's encounter with modernity, arguing that his recuperation of colonial history plays a crucial part in imagining the modern future. Most innovatively, Vera Tudela examines the multiple and contradictory notions of femininity in nineteenth-century Latin America and in Palma's writing, showing how a historical consideration of the sexual politics of cultural production transforms our understanding of many of the assumptions about this period. Finally, by applying the insights of cultural geography in analysing the racial, sexual and political identity of domestic, urban and national space in Palma's writing, Vera Tudela demonstrates that Palma's literary maps and topographies are uniquely revelatory of questions of power and agency. In its exploration of sexual politics and nationhood, Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones presents Palma as a proto-modernist who paved the way for many of the experiments of twentieth-century Latin American narrative fiction.

"Gift Giving" brings together 21 scholars from a variety of disciplines--including consumer behavior, communications, and sociology--who are dedicated to the understanding of what motivates gift selection, presentation, and incorporation of a gift into a person's life.

Japanese weddings have become thoroughly commercial affairs, with the vast majority now conducted at specialized establishments that offer, at great cost, lavish services for the Shinto ceremony and the ensuring reception. The postwar expansion of the industry providing these services is explained in part by its aggressive promotion, by its promise of 'a story ceremony of love ... wrapped in the warm blessings of loved ones, in harmony and splendor'. This book focuses on Japanese weddings as a window on contemporary values, analyzing the relation between the commercialization of these services and their symbolic content. Weddings mark the attainment of fully adult status in Japan; the commercial industry celebrates this passage with idealized images of the marital state, images whose significance runs deep. To say what it means to be a model husband and wife engages more general ideas about relations between the sexes. To say what it means to be fully adult also of society, thereby touching on fundamental notions about society itself and the individual's place within it. The book begins with historical background on the Japanese wedding and the development of its modern form. We then follow the wedding couple and the events involving them and their parents through their engagement and marriage ceremony. The Japanese continue to distinguish between two types of marriage, the arranged and the love match, and the author examines differences in the two forms. As part of his research, the author worked for ten months in a commercial wedding hall, and he gives a backstage look at the roles played by various personnel in the wedding industry. The author analyzes the symbolic content of the wedding as portraying the basic Japanese concepts of gender, person, and society, and finally summarizes the effects of the wedding's commercialization.

This book is a study of the origins and development of cult practice at Olympia and Delphi. It traces changing patterns of activity through the material record, and challenges many assumptions about the nature and role of the archaeological data. Dr Morgan considers the economics of dedication, technology and the organization of craft production, which provide insights into the behaviour of producers and purchasers of material dedicated at sanctuaries. Her study is exceptional for the emphasis placed upon the two sites in their contemporary local contexts and their changing roles in society. The progression of state formation is discussed through the relationship between changes in dedicatory practice during the eighth century and the changing needs of communities. The book concludes with a detailed study of the wider roles of Olympia and Delphi as two major sanctuaries in Archaic Greece, considering their relationships with other sites and their place in the Greek festival calendar.

As a conquest dynasty, Qing China's new Manchu leaders desperately needed to legitimize their rule. To win the approval of China's native elites, they developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society. Filial piety, the core Confucian value, would once again be upheld by the state, and laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society, would be observed by officials throughout the empire. In this way, the emperor would be following the ancient dictate that he 'govern all-under-heaven with filial piety'. Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state - unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded - quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system. With acute sensitivity to language and its changing meanings, Kutcher sheds light on a wide variety of issues that are of interest to historians of late Imperial China.

Japanese weddings have become thoroughly commercial affairs, with the vast majority now conducted at specialized establishments that offer, at great cost, lavish services for the Shinto ceremony and the ensuring reception. The postwar expansion of the industry providing these services is explained in part by its aggressive promotion, by its promise of 'a story ceremony of love ... wrapped in the warm blessings of loved ones, in harmony and splendor'. This book focuses on Japanese weddings as a window on contemporary values, analyzing the relation between the commercialization of these services and their symbolic content. Weddings mark the attainment of fully adult status in Japan; the commercial industry celebrates this passage with idealized images of the marital state, images whose significance runs deep. To say what it means to be a model husband and wife engages more general ideas about relations between the sexes. To say what it means to be fully adult also of society, thereby touching on fundamental notions about society itself and the individual's place within it. The book begins with historical background on the Japanese wedding and the development of its modern form. We then follow the wedding couple and the events involving them and their parents through their engagement and marriage ceremony. The Japanese continue to distinguish between two types of marriage, the arranged and the love match, and the author examines differences in the two forms. As part of his research, the author worked for ten months in a commercial wedding hall, and he gives a backstage look at the roles played by various personnel in the wedding industry. The author analyzes the symbolic content of the wedding as portraying the basic Japanese concepts of gender, person, and society, and finally summarizes the effects of the wedding's commercialization.

A first edition of The Halloween Encyclopedia was published by McFarland in 2003 (Booklist "a worthy addition to public and school libraries as well as the reference shelves of journalists and leaders of community events"); it was the first encyclopedic reference book on the cultural phenomenon (which also deals with such related holidays as Britain's Guy Fawkes Day, Mexico's Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, and the Celtic celebration Samhain). Now updated to 2010, this second edition includes more than 50 new entries, covering subjects ranging from Folk Art to African American legends. Many existing entries have been expanded and revised, with new entries ("Chronology of Halloween" and "Halloween in Literature and the Arts") in both appendices. Also featured are more than a dozen new illustrations, and an expanded bibliography.

This book offers an ethnographic exploration of three sites of infamous atrocity and their differing memorialization. 'Dark tourism' research has studied the consumerization of spaces associated with death and barbarity, whilst 'difficult heritage' has looked at politicized, national debates that surround the preservation of death. This book contributes to these debates by applying spatial theory on a scalar level, particularly through the work of Henri Lefebvre. It uses escalating case studies to situate memorialization, and the multifarious demands of politics, consumption and community, within a framework that rearticulates 'lived', 'perceived' and 'conceived' aspects of deviant spaces ranging from the small (a bench) to the very large (a city). The first case study, the Tyburn gallows site in York, uses Lefebvre's notion of 'theatrical space' to contextualize the role of performativity in memorialization. The second, Number 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, builds on this by exploring the absence of memorialization through Lefebvre's concept of 'contradictory space' and the impact this has on consumption. The third expands to consider the city as a problematic memorial, here focusing on the political subjectivities of Dresden - rebuilt following the devastation of the Second World War - and its contemporary associations with neo-Nazi and anti-fascist protests. Ultimately, by examining the issue of scale in heritage, the book seeks to develop a new way of unpacking and understanding the heteroglossic nature of deviant space and memorialization.

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition."

Meatless Mondays, Wheatless Wednesdays, vegetable gardens and chickens in every empty lot. When the United States entered World War I, Minnesotans responded to appeals for personal sacrifice and changed the way they cooked and ate in order to conserve food for the boys "over there." Baking with corn and rye, eating simple meals based on locally grown food, consuming fewer calories, and wasting nothing in the kitchen became civic acts. High-energy foods and calories unconsumed on the American home front could help the food-starved, war-torn American Allies eat another day and fight another battle.
Food historian Rae Katherine Eighmey engages readers with wide research and recipes drawn from rarely viewed letters, diaries, recipe books, newspaper accounts, government pamphlets, and public service fliers. She brings alive the unknown but unparalleled efforts to win the war made by ordinary "Citizen Soldiers"--farmers and city dwellers, lumberjacks and homemakers--who rolled up their sleeves to apply "can-do" ingenuity coupled with "must-do" drive. Their remarkable efforts transformed everyday life and set the stage for the United States' postwar economic and political ascendance.
Rae Katherine Eighmey is a food historian who has written several historical recipe books and coauthored "Potluck Paradise: Favorite Fare from Church and Community Cookbooks." An avid foodie, she tested all the recipes in this book for modern kitchens.

This study, a history of the kind of people who are supposed to have one, challenges the fashionable view that so-called primitives live in a timeless present. The conventional wisdom, that such societies are static, is shown by the author to be an artifact of anthropological method. By piecing together extended oral histories and written history records, the author found that headhunting among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon, Philippines, was not an unchanging ancient custom, but a cultural practice that has shifted dramatically over the course of the past century. Headhunting stopped, resumed, and stopped again; its victims at various periods were fellow Ilongots, Japanese soldiers, and lowland Christian Filipinos; it took place as surprise attack, planned vendetta, or distant raid against strangers. Placing headhunting in its social, cultural, and historical contexts requires a novel sense of how to use biography, recorded history, and narrative in the analysis of small-scale, non-literate local communities. This study combines historical and ethnographic method and documents the inherent orchestration of structure, events, time, and consciousness. The book is illustrated with 34 photographs.

Jedrzej Kitowicz was a parish priest in central Poland with a military and worldly past. In his later years, after putting the affairs of his parish in order, he composed a colorful chronicle of all aspects and walks of life under King August III. He seems to have written mostly from memory, creating in the process the most complete record that exists of society in eighteenth-century Poland. A man with omnivorous tastes, a keen sense of observation, and a wry-at times bawdy-sense of humor, Kitowicz's realistic and robust literary technique has been compared in its earthiness and evocativeness to Flemish genre painting. A noteworthy example of eighteenth-century writing and narrative talent, his Opis reveals an astounding visual memory and a modern ethnographer's eye for material culture. The present book consists of fifty-one chapters, including all of the most celebrated ones, from Father Kitowicz's Opis, complete with a comprehensive introduction. Topics include religious beliefs, customs and institutions, child-rearing, education, the judiciary and the military. Particularly vivid are the descriptions of the lives of the nobility, ranging from cooking through men's and women's wear to household entertainments and drinking habits. A commentary by the editor introduces each chapter.

The liturgy of the medieval church has been little studied in its relation to medieval thought and society. It has often been taken for granted that the Latin liturgy was understood by the priest, but to his congregation was only a spectacle of authority. This book begins with the hypothesis that the liturgy was, in some senses, understood by its congregations, and it attempts to discover what this understanding might have been. Through studies of the sermons and writings of Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustine, Bede, Abelard and others, of the practice of infant baptism, and of the art and architecture of the baptistery, the book attempts to rediscover the underlying philosophy of symbol which is the grounds of ritual understanding in both priest and congregation.

'What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well.' Inazo Nitobe's book, the most influential ever written on Bushido, or the samurai Way of the Warrior, argues that the philosophy of Bushido is the true key to understanding 'the soul of Japan'. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

The study of ancestor worship has an eminent pedigree in two disciplines: social anthropology and folklore (Goody 1962: 14-25; Newell 1976; Fortes 1976; Takeda 1976). Despite obvious differences in geographical specialization and intellectual orientation, researchers in both fields have shared a common approach to this subject: both have tried to relate the ancestor cult of a given society to its family and kin-group organization. Such a method is to be expected of social anthropologists, given the nature of their discipline; but even the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio, whose approach to folk culture stems from historical and nationalist concerns, began his work on ancestors with a discussion of Japan's descent system and family structure (Yanagita 1946). Indeed, connections between ancestor cults and social relations are obvious. As we pursue this line of analysis, we shall see that rural Koreans themselves are quite sophisticated about such matters. Many studies of ancestor cults employ a combination of social and psychological approaches to explain the personality traits attributed to the dead by their living kin. Particular attention has long been given to explaining the hostile or punitive character of the deceased in many societies (Freud 1950; Opler 1936; Gough 1958; Fortes 1965). Only recently, however, has the popularity of such beliefs been recognized in China, Korea, and Japan (Ahern 1973; A. Wolf 1974b; Kendall 1977; 1979; Yoshida 1967; Kerner 1976; Lebra 1976). The earliest and most influential studies of ancestor cults in East Asia, produced by native scholars (Hozumi 1913; Yanagita 1946; Hsu 1948), overemphasize the benign and protective qualities of ancestors. Some regional variations notwithstanding, this earlier bias appears to reflect a general East Asian reluctance to acknowledge instances of ancestral affliction. Such reticence is not found in all societies with ancestor cults, however; nor, in Korea, China, and Japan, is it equally prevalent among men and women. Therefore, we seek not only to identify the social experiences that give rise to beliefs in ancestral hostility, but to explain the concomitant reluctance to acknowledge these beliefs and its varying intensity throughout East Asia. In view of the limited amount of ethnographic data available from Korea, we have not attempted a comprehensive assessment of the ancestor cult in Korean society; instead we have kept our focus on a single kin group. We have drawn on data from other communities, however, in order to separate what is apparently true of Korea in general from what may be peculiar to communities like Twisongdwi, a village of about three hundred persons that was the site of our fieldwork. In this task, we benefited substantially from three excellent studies of Korean ancestor worship and lineage organization (Lee Kwang-Kyu 1977a; Choi Jai-seuk 1966a; Kim Taik-Kyoo 1964) and from two recent accounts of Korean folk religion and ideology (Dix 1977; Kendall 1979). Yet we are still a long way from a comprehensive understanding of how Korean beliefs and practices have changed over time, correlate with different levels of class status, or are affected by regional variations in Korean culture and social organization. Because we want to provide a monograph accessible to a rather diverse readership, we avoid using Korean words and disciplinary terminology whenever possible. Where a Korean term is particularly important, we give it in parentheses immediately after its English translation. Korean-alphabet orthographies for these words appear in the Character List, with Chinese-character equivalents for terms of Chinese derivation. As for disciplinary terminology, we have adopted only the anthropological term "lineage," which is of central importance to our study. We use "lineage" to denote an organized group of persons linked through exclusively male ties (agnatically) to an ancestor who lived at least four generations ago. (A married woman could be said to have an informal membership in her husband's lineage until her death.) Thus, the term "Twisongdwi lineage" designates the agnatic kin group located in the village of Twisongdwi. This term does not refer to a line of ancestry. Smaller lineages may collectively constitute a larger lineage; for example, the descendants of two brothers may form two lineages but also ritually observe their common descent from an earlier agnatic forebear.

James Hogg's Jacobite Relics - originally commissioned by the Highland Society of London in 1817 - is an important addition to The Collected Works of James Hogg. It created a canon for the Jacobite song which had an enormous influence on subsequent collections, and was of great importance in defining the relationship between the Scottish song tradition and its Romantic editors and collectors. From the first publication of the Relics in 1819 the majority of scholars have argued about how many of them were authored or at least substantially altered by Hogg. Professor Murray Pittock has conducted extensive research in this area since 1987, and has identified many previously neglected or unknown sources from which Hogg would have worked as he developed his collection. He has identified contemporary 17th- and 18th-century sources for the majority of the songs in the edition. This has implications not only for Hogg's integrity as a writer, but for our understanding of the history of the Scottish song as a whole. The introduction to volume one includes the crucial issue of Hogg's relationship to the Jacobite song tradition, and the place of the Relics within Hogg's career and personal context, facilitating further interpretations of Hogg's range of creative strategies. Considerable annotation accurately communicates the context of the songs and Hogg's relationship to the textuality of Jacobite culture. The introduction to volume two deals with the genesis of the text and Hogg's relationship with the Highland Society. This volume will be available from November 2002.

Elaine Chiew's stories are interlaced with humour, compassion and the importance of food and cooking, and the memories that meals evoke, as her characters negotiate unfamiliar worlds, raise children in another country or introduce parents to partners who don't speak their language. In the title story, four writers find their cultural bonds of friendship tested when a handsome young Asian man joins their group. In other stories, a brother searches for his sister forced to serve as a comfort woman during World War Two; three Singaporean sisters run a French gourmet restaurant in New York; a woman raps about being a Tiger Mother in Belgravia; and a filmmaker struggles to document the lives of samsui women-Singapore's thrifty, hardworking construction workers. Elaine Chiew drills below the surface of her characters' circumstances with exemplary narrative skill and subtlety. Her stories are as varied, worldly and emotionally resonant as the characters themselves. This is a fabulous debut collection and heralds an exciting new literary talent.