This study of an oral tradition in northeast India is the first of its kind in this part of the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis reveals parallel stories in an area stretching from central Arunachal Pradesh into upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. The subject of the volume, the Apatanis, are a small population of Tibeto-Burman speakers who live in a narrow valley halfway between Tibet and Assam. Their origin myths, migration legends, oral histories, trickster tales and ritual chants, as well as performance contexts and genre system, reveal key cultural ideas and social practices, shifts in tribal identity and the reinvention of religion.

Indexes new books and projects that promote diversity and cross-cultural understanding among young people This is an updated and expanded fourth edition of a popular and critically acclaimed reference book, for teachers and librarians to use in planning interesting projects, holiday events to promote diversity and cross-cultural understanding. It indexes 725 new books and features over 1000 indexed projects, building on the previous 3 editions. The book is indexed by subject and author and features indexes to educational games, crafts, activities and more. The book will be particularly useful to educators for use in the social studies curriculum but also valuable to daycare providers and parents. Complete bibliographic information is given for all books indexed.; Builds on critically-acclaimed previous editions; Indexes 725 new books

This encyclopedia provides detailed information about the historical, cultural, social, religious, economic, and scientific significance of gold, across the globe and throughout history. Gold has been an intrinsic part of human culture and society throughout the world, both in ancient times and in the modern era. This precious metal has also played a central role in economics and politics throughout history. In fact, the value of gold remains a topic of debate amid the current upheavals of economic conditions and attendant reevaluations of modern financial principles. Gold: A Cultural Encyclopedia consists of more than 130 entries that encompass every aspect of gold, ranging from the ancient metallurgical arts to contemporary economies. The connections between these interdisciplinary subjects are explored and analyzed to highlight the many ways humankind's fascination with gold reflects historical, cultural, economic, and geographic developments. While the majority of the works related to gold focus on economic theory, this text goes beyond that to take a more sociocultural approach to the subject. Contains more than 130 A-Z entries on the significance of gold worldwide, from antiquity to the present, from an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as sidebar entries Provides unique details and remarkable scope of facts in each entry along with direct references to and examples of primary source materials Photographs and illustrations of the use and significance of gold as varied as Ca' d'Oro in Venice, royal crowns, filigree, Italian florin coin, Hatshepsut, Rumpelstiltskin, Wat Traimit, and modern "bling" Extensive bibliography including monographs, scholarly articles, newspaper and magazine articles, primary source documents, and online resources Detailed subject index as well as list of entries and guide to related topics

Sexual mutilation is a global problem that affects 15. 3 million children and young adults annually. In terms of gender, 13. 3 million boys and 2 million girls are involuntarily subjected to sexual mutilation every year. While it is tempting to quantify and compare the amount of tissue removed from either gender, no ethical justification can be made for removing any amount of flesh from the body of another person. The violation of human rights implicit in sexual mutilation is identical for any gender. The violation occurs with the first cut into another person 's body. Although mutilation is a strong term, it precisely and accurately describes a condi tion denoting "any disfigurement or injury by removal or destruction of any conspicuous or essential part of the body. " While such terms as "circumcision" and "genital cutting" are less threatening to our sensitivities, they ultimately do a disservice by masking the fact of what is actually being done to babies and children. Although the courageous example of the survivors of sexual mutilation indicates that humans can certainly live and even re produce without all of their external sexualorgans, this biological phenomenon does not, however, justify subjecting a person to sexual mutilation. The remarkable resilience of the human body is a testament to the importance nature places on reproduction rather than a vindication for surgical practices that compromise this function."

With studies of China, India, West Africa, South America and Europe, this book provides a global perspective on food consumption in the modern world. Combing ethnographic, historical and comparative analyses, the volume celebrates the contributions of Jack Goody to the anthropology of food.

In this volume Massimo Canevacci draws on ethnographic fieldworkcarried out together with Bororo of the Mato Grosso (Brazil), in particular Kleber Meritororeu, to examine the tensions, conflicts and exchanges between transformation and tradition. The practical as well as political keyword in his approach is self-representation. From this follows the incorporation of Bororo subjectivities into the text, and the focus on the emotional, philosophical and sacred aspects of their famous funeral ritual, in which their status as both performers and the interpreters is emphasized by their use of the digital camera. The book takes its name from the line of dust laid down by a mestre dos cantos (master of chants), Jos Carlos Kuguri, between the anthropologist and himself: both a representation of an immaterial boundary, and a syncretic challenge to understand the transfiguration from a dead individual corpse to a living ancestral skull, an arara. Canevacci's answer is an assemblage of different narratives, in which an 'astonished' methodology of sensorial concepts, emotional photos and innovative logics traverses the entire Bororo funeral. He finds there is no dualism to life and death for the Bororo, but rather a porous, continuous transit and mixing of body and corpse, of humans and animals, of plants and deities; and that their sacred cosmology is time and again created and recreated via their wailing songs and circular dances, skin scarifications and bone painting. Their rituals are no mere repetition of tradition. They are also an attempt to respond to the changes inside and outside their aldeia (village), and to reenact their shifting cultures, subjectivities and identities. Massimo Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Digital Arts and Culture at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of the University S o Paulo (IEA-USP). In 1995 he received 'The National Order of the Cruzeiro do Sul' (Southern Cross) from the President of the Federal Republic of Brazil for his research.

Psychologist Hans Askenasy has put together the first comprehensive history of a subject combining violence, horror, and exotic customs. In Part One of his study, Dr. Askenasy gives a historical and geographic overview of humankind's practice of and attitudes toward cannibalism.
Part Two discusses motivational factors for cannibalism, including famines (natural and man-made), survival in extreme situations, magic, ritual, and madness. Among the people and events covered are the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis; the wreckage of the frigate Medusa; the Donner Party; the notorious nineteenth-century "Colorado Man-Eater," Alferd Packer; the Andes plane crash of 1972; Elizabeth Bathory (b. 1560), the "Vampire Lady of the Carpathians"; and Georg Haarmann, who ground up his victims and sold them as potted meat.
In Part Three, "Cannibalism in Culture and Society," Askenasy addresses our continuing fascination with cannibals, man-eating witches, werewolves, and vampires in literature, myth, and the media, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola's film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles to the blood curdling events surrounding the cases of Issei Sagawa, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Russian schoolteacher-turned torturer, Andrei Romanovitsch Chikatilo.

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An exploration of fashion through the ages that asks what our clothing reveals about ourselves and our society.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressing like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States, and in the 1940s, the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip-flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

In Dress Codes, law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents a “deeply informative and entertaining” (The New York Times Book Review) history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing—rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you’ll never think of fashion as superficial again—and getting dressed will never be the same.

The Persistence of Medievalism seeks to examine the ways medieval genre shapes contemporary public culture. Through an exploration of several contemporary cultural phenomena, this book reveals the narrative underpinnings of public discourse. The ways these particular forms of storytelling shape our assumptions are examined by Angela Jane Weisl through a series of examples that demonstrate the intrinsic ways medievalism persists in the modern world, thus perpetuating archaic ideas of gender, ideology, and doctrine.

Culture Smart guides help travellers have a more meaningful and successful time abroad through a better understanding of the local culture. Chapters on values, attitudes, customs, and daily life will help you make the most of your visit, while tips on etiquette and communication will help you navigate unfamiliar situations and avoid faux pas.

Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images. This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways. Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA. Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English and Asian /Asian American Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

Cameroon, in Central Africa, has been called "Africa in miniature." It is characterized by exceptional social and ethnic diversity, with more than 250 ethnicities now forming five major regional-culture groupings. This volume is the first to encapsulate Cameroon's rich indigenous and modern customs and traditions in depth. The narrative emphasizes those aspects that define its modern nation, its peoples, the unique societies, their institutions, and various lifestyles. The origins of Cameroon's diverse culture are traced back to the various ethnic groups and languages as well as the influence of European colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and other external factors, including globalization. In each topical chapter, examples from ethnic groups are presented to give some sense of the variety of experiences. Cameroon has had a turbulent and eventful modern history with German, English, and French incursions, and students and general readers will be able to understand the current struggle for democracy post independence. The history colors the substantial coverage of the many topics examined, from education, to marriage and women's roles, sports, and holidays, daily life, the arts, and much more. This volume will stand as the definitive, accessible introduction to Cameroon and will be essential for building a well-rounded Africa collection.

More than 125 years ago, a remarkable group of people came together in Cape Town to write down the language and beliefs of the |xam people, a Bushman group that once lived over much of South Africa. The immensely valuable work of Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and their |xam teachers not only preserved a language now no longer spoken, but also provided fascinating insights into |xam cosmology.

First published in 2004, Customs and Beliefs of the |xam reproduces Dorothea Bleek's selection of |xam narratives from the well-known Bleek and Lloyd Collection that was originally published in the journal Bantu Studies during the 1930s. Collated and edited by Jeremy Hollman, the extracts include detailed notes on each of the narratives, as well as Bleek's 'sketch' of |xam grammar.

This substantially revised second edition integrates new scholarship on the Bleek and Lloyd archive, and restores previously omitted material. The introduction to each narrative has been expanded to contextualise it within the archive as a whole and, where relevant, reference it to the Notebook of which it is a part. This includes meticulous cross-referencing with the Bleek and Lloyd Collection catalogue code and the Notebook number and line reference. Each of the texts has also been critically reassessed, with additional editorial notes and commentaries, in particular with respect to the |xam words themselves and the ways in which they have been translated. A synopsis of each narrative is provided in an appendix, with cross references to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks.

Customs and Beliefs of the |xam, second edition, is an in-depth, detailed and authoritative resource that will be invaluable to scholars, heritage workers and activists alike.

This book demonstrates how traditional knowledge can be connected to the modern world. Human knowledge of housing, health and agriculture dates back thousands of years, with old wisdom developing and becoming modern. But in the past few decades, global communities have increasingly become aware that some of this valuable knowledge has fallen by the wayside. This has sparked systematic efforts at the local, national and global levels to connect this neglected knowledge to the modern world. It discusses the origin of the topic, its importance, recent developments in India and abroad, and what is being done and still needs to be done in order to preserve India's traditional knowledge. The discussions address a broad range of fields and organizations: from Basmati rice to Ayurvedic cosmetics; from traditional irrigation and folk music to modern drug discovery and climate change adaptation; and from the Biodiversity Convention to the WHO, WTO and WIPO.

Since ancient times, the most important foods in the Mexican diet have been corn, beans, squash, tomatillos, and chile peppers. The role of these ingredients in Mexican food culture through the centuries is the basis of this volume. In addition, students and general readers will discover the panorama of food traditions in the context of European contact in the sixteenth century--when the Spaniards introduced new foodstuffs, adding variety to the diet--and the profound changes that have occurred in Mexican food culture since the 1950s. Recent improvements in technology, communications, and transportation, changing women's roles, and migration from country to city and to and from the United States have had a much greater impact. Their basic, traditional diet served the Mexican people well, providing them with wholesome nutrition and sufficient energy to live, work, and reproduce, as well as to maintain good health. Chapter 1 traces the origins of the Mexican diet and overviews food history from pre-Hispanic times to recent developments. The principal foods of Mexican cuisine and their origins are explained in the second chapter. Mexican women have always been responsible for everyday cooking, including the intensive preparation of grinding corn, peppers, and spices by hand, and a chapter is devoted to this work and a discussion of how traditional ways are supplemented today with modern conveniences and kitchen aids such as blenders and food processors. Surveys of class and regional differences in typical meals and cuisines present insight into the daily lives of a wide variety of Mexicans. The Mexican way of life is also illuminated in chapters on eating out, whether at the omnipresentstreet stalls or at fondas, and special occasions, including the main fiestas and rites of passage. A final chapter on diet and health discusses current health concerns, particularly malnutrition, anemia, diabetes, and obesity.

How have femininity and masculinity been defined and understood in China from prehistoric times to the present day? Gender History in China presents for the first time in English the work of leading Japanese scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, literature, sociology and law who examine the gender dynamics that have shaped and changed Chinese society over several thousand years. The eighteen chapters and six columns look at the ways gender norms and customary legal practices shaped the family, kinship, and the social order, and how those norms were reflected in work patterns, inheritance, daily life, and literary works. Attention is given to the fundamental principle of qi (material essence) as a building block in cosmology, as well as in legal understandings of family relations. The second part of the volume turns to the dramatic changes in gender patterns from the late nineteenth century, looking at the inflow of new ideas, the struggle for political rights and economic equality, and the institution of new gender norms in socialist and reform-era China. The authors take up such topics as the view of the body in relation to Chinese cosmology, the incorporation of the military man into China's model of hegemonic masculinity, the household registration system as a means of control, the appraisal of "talented women", and the intersection of gender norms and nationalism. Gender History in China enriches our understanding of Chinese history and of contemporary Chinese society.

Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the "Common Riding" is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of "the town" in Western culture.
Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.
Neville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.

The Child's Interests in Conflict addresses one of the most pressing issues of any multicultural society, namely the conflicting demands on children from minority groups or children born to parents of different cultural or religious backgrounds. What the family considers to be in the child's best interests and welfare in the studied situations is not shared by society at large. Each guided by faith, culture and tradition, society views the child to be exposed to a significant harm or risk of harm if certain traditions are followed, whereas in contrast the parents believe that their child is harmed or in harm's way if that tradition is not respected.Focusing primarily on Europe, the contributions in this book, written by internationally leading experts and with a interdisciplinary element, address situations of conflict regarding the child's upbringing and education in general, the shaping of the child's cultural or faith-based identity, underage marriages, circumcision of boys, the role of faith and culture in society's placements of children outside the care of their family, and the role of faith in cross-border child abduction and disputes over parental responsibilities. Attention is paid to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and to less well-known national case law, as well as to recent national legislation, all of which show not only the complexity of the issues discussed but also the differing ways multicultural challenges are dealt with.The authors strive to answer, inter alia, how legal systems should navigate between the competing claims and conflicting interests without forgetting the main person to be protected, namely the child; and how the scope of tolerance, recognition and autonomy should be defined.

Women's football is the fastest growing participation sport in the UK. This book critically explores women's elite football from a sociological perspective, analysing the growth, governance and impact of the FA Women's Super League from its inception onwards.