Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America's abundant food--its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer--reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land.

"Hungering for America" tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic "Italian" food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And, East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America's boundless choices.

These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."

In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the Lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flash points in the last ninety years of Congo's troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power. In the 1920s Simon Kimbangu started a Christian prophetic movement based on spirit-induced trembling, which swept through the Lower Congo, subverting Belgian colonial authority. Following independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko required citizens to dance and sing nationalist songs daily as a means of maintaining political control. More recently, embodied performance has again stoked reform, as nationalist groups such as Bundu dia Kongo advocate for a return to precolonial religious practices and non-Western gestures such as traditional greetings. In exploring these embodied expressions of Congolese agency, Covington-Ward provides a framework for understanding how embodied practices transmit social values, identities, and cultural history throughout Africa and the diaspora.

The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the history of the arts and the history of Christianity in Western Culture. This special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration sheds light on the complex relationship between the two broad and difficult terms, genre and ritual, within the cultural history of Europe. This volumea collection of 15 essayswas planned on the basis of the first annual international conference at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen.

'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, bestselling author of Do No Harm 'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction' Times Literary Supplement On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the epicentre. Learning about the lives of those affected through their own personal accounts, he paints a rich picture of the impact the tsunami had on day to day Japanese life. Heart-breaking and hopeful, this intimate account of a tragedy unveils the unique nuances of Japanese culture, the tsunami's impact on Japan's stunning and majestic landscape and the psychology of its people. Ghosts of the Tsunami is an award-winning classic of literary non-fiction. It tells the moving, evocative story of how a nation faced an unimaginable catastrophe and rebuilt to look towards the future. **WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE**

From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China's highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources--gazetteers, literati jottings ("biji"), Chinese "materia medica, " Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more--"Golden-Silk Smoke" not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.

South Asia in Transition is an introductory book on the anthropology of South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, suitable for students at all levels and others interested in this topic. It assumes no prior knowledge of either the region of the discipline of anthropology. The book makes extensive use of existing publications to describe how anthropologists have approached the region and what they have said about it. The first set of chapters deal mostly with India, being successively on caste, class, tribes, religion, kinship and marriage, gender, the body and personhood, politics and political economy. The second set of chapters deal successively with Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

About 150 years ago Lewis Henry Morgan compared relationship terminologies, societal forms and ideas of property to recognize the interdependence of the three domains. From a new perspective, the book re-examines, confirms and criticizes Morgan's findings to conclude that reciprocal affinal relations determine most 'classificatory' terminologies and regulate many non-state societies, their property notions and their rituals. Apart from references to American and Australian features, such holistic socio-cultural constructs are exemplified by elaborate descriptions of little known contemporary Indigenous societies in Highland Middle India, altogether comprising many millions of members.

"Latinx" (pronounced 'La-teen-ex) is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, 17 percent of the country. This is the fastest-growing sector of American society, containing the most immigrants. It is the poorest ethnic group in the country, whose political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. And yet, Latin barely figure in America's racial conversation-the US census does not even have a category for "Latino." In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latin political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje, translatable as "mixedness" or "hybridity", and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America's infamously black/white racial regime. This searching and long-overdue exploration of a crucial development in American life updates Cornel West's bestselling Race Matters with a Latin inflection.

This innovative work of cultural history examines the function of public rituals in colonial Mexico City. Festivals were a defining characteristic of life in the capital. For most of the colonial period, inhabitants could witness as many as 100 religious and civil celebrations in a year. The largest of these events, both civil and religious, were sponsored by the authorities and were crucial means to embody political and social concepts. The first European public rituals were introduced immediately after the conquest of the Aztec capital. Spanish priests seeking to evangelise the native population introduced Catholic festivals, and civil authorities sponsored celebrations designed to glorify the Spanish empire. Spectacle was one tool in an arsenal of colonising agents, and over time the growing diversity of the population made festival statecraft all the more important, as government-sponsored revelry attempted to promote shared histories and values among diverse and potentially dangerous groups. Festivals organisers developed a highly sophisticated message embedded within the celebrations that delineated the principles of leadership and the duties of both rulers and vassals. The pervasiveness of festivals and the power of the political message associated with them created possibilities for individuals to assess and participate in a larger discussion of good governance in the colony.

Performing Zimbabwe presents a transdisciplinary analysis of Zimbabwean music, drawing from different disciplines such as sociology, ethnomusicology, history, journalism, development studies, English, philology and drama. It offers a re-evaluation of Zimbabwean music by Zimbabwean scholars and, in so doing, reconsiders the work of international academics on the subject. It thus highlights the significance of local scholars in the study of Zimbabwean music. Given that this book features a wide range of perspectives, it provides a solid foundation for future studies on Zimbabwean music, either historically in the precolonial and colonial periods, or in the contemporary postcolonial period.

On the History of Rock Music follows the development of rock music from its origins up to the present time. It focuses on the relationship between the sound, improvisations and rhythms in particular styles, and gives specific attention to the development of rhythm. The beat-offbeat principle, polyrhythms and polymetrics are fundamental to rock rhythm patterns, which serve as archetypes for specific rhythms. An archetype is a prototype, a model, or an innate experience of a species. Using more than 250 score examples, the author identifies the characteristic rhythmic patterns in rock styles, ranging from rock and roll, hard rock and punk rock to alternative rock, indie rock and grind core.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, North Americans have become increasingly interested in understanding and reclaiming the rites that mark significant life passages. In the absence of meaningful rites of passage, we speed through the dangerous intersections of life and often come to regret missing an opportunity to contemplate a child's birth, mark the arrival of maturity, or meditate on the loss of a loved one. Providing a personal, informed, and cross-cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this book illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions.;The text instigates a conversation in which readers can reflect on their own experiences of passage. Covering the significant life events of birth, initiation, marriage, and death, chapters include first-person stories told by individuals who have undergone rites of passage, accounts of practices from around the world, brief histories of selected ritual traditions, and critical reflections probing popular assumptions about ritual. The book also explores innovative rites for other important events such as beginning school, same-sex commitment ceremonies, abortion, serious

Dieses Buch gibt Orientierung in einem Forschungsfeld, das angesichts von fachlicher Diversitat und theoretischer Pluralitat heute kaum noch zu uberblicken ist. Indem es Organisationen als soziale Systeme beschreibt und erlautert, nimmt es zwar nur eine unter vielen moeglichen Theorieperspektiven der Soziologie ein, es beschreibt den Gegenstand damit aber entlang eines Konzepts, das schon fur die Herausbildung der Soziologie der Organisation massgeblich war und das heute eine der leistungsfahigsten Theorien der Organisation begrundet. Aber nicht nur das: Die soziologische Systemtheorie, die damit angesprochen ist, erlaubt uberdies, organisationsbezogene Perspektiven ins Verhaltnis zu gesellschaftsbezogenen Perspektiven zu setzen. Es ist derGesellschaftsbezug, der die soziologische Befassung mit Organisationen von Organisationsforschungen in anderen Fachern unterscheidet.

Der vorliegende Sammelband stellt am Beispiel der mittelalterlich gepragten Stadt Ravensburg die Methode der Kulturkonzeption vor. Ausgewiesene Experten im Bereich Stadt(teil)entwicklung und Kulturentwicklungsplanung sowie Studierende zeigen das Vorgehen am realen Fall. Bei der Kulturkonzeption steht ein offenes, eher qualitatives Vorgehen im Vordergrund, das insbesondere die 'weichen' Parameter der Kulturarbeit integriert und so das bisher bekannte schematisierenden Vorgehen der Kulturentwicklungsplanung erweitert.

AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK Geisha: the mystique never dies. Available again, this classic bestsel ler offers an intimate glimpse into a unique female community. In her account of her experience as the Kyoto geisha Ichigiku, Liza Dalby - t he only non-Japanese ever to have trained as a geisha - reveals the re alities of a world that has long been the subject of rumour and fantas y, and that continues to fascinate Japanese and Westerners alike.

Der Band widmet sich aus interdisziplinarer Perspektive den vielfaltigen Funktion und Bedeutung von Wissen in der Fantastik: Ob geheim, spezifisch oder allgemein, lassen sich zentrale Motive des Wissens und der Wissensinhalte bestimmen? Worin bestehen Formen und Strukturen des Wissens - nach welchen Regeln wird es definiert, organisiert und kommuniziert? Welchen Stellenwert schliesslich hat Wissen als Kapital, als Machtgrundlage, als Konfliktursache?