In recent years, the media has attributed the surge of people eagerly studying family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. New genealogy-themed television series and internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have also flourished, capitalizing on this new popularity and on the mapping of the human genome. But what's really happening here, and what does this mean for sometimes volatile conceptions of race and ethnicity? In Alternate Roots, Christine Scodari engages with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television miniseries Roots, DNA testing for genetic ancestry, Ancestry.com, and genealogy-related television series, including those shows hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. She lays out how family historians can understand intersections and historical and ongoing relations of power related to the ethnicity, race, class, and/or gender of their ancestors as well as to members of other groups. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality make connections not only between and among identities, but also between local findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given the genealogy-related media institutions, tools, texts, practices, and technologies currently available, Scodari's study probes the viability of a critical genealogy based upon race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own Italian and Italian American ancestry, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger contexts. Filling gaps in the research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity, Scodari mobilizes cultural studies, media studies, and her own genealogical practices in a critical pursuit to interrogate key issues bound up in the creation of family history.

Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially-based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources-notably Inquisition records-Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

In order to protect and defend citizens, the foundational concepts of fairness and equality must be adhered to within any criminal justice system. When this is not the case, accountability of authorities should be pursued to maintain the integrity and pursuit of justice. Police Brutality, Racial Profiling, and Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly material on social problems involving victimization of minorities and police accountability. Presenting relevant perspectives on a global and cross-cultural scale, this book is ideally designed for researchers, professionals, upper-level students, and practitioners involved in the fields of criminal justice and corrections.

This edited volume brings together ten compelling ethnographic case studies from a range of global settings to explore how people build metalinguistic communities defined not by use of a language, but primarily by language ideologies and symbolic practices about the language. The authors examine themes of agency, belonging, negotiating hegemony, and combating cultural erasure and genocide in cultivating meaningful metalinguistic communities. Case studies include Spanish and Hebrew in the USA, Kurdish in Japan, Pataxo Hahahae in Brazil, and Gallo in France. The afterword, by Wesley L. Leonard, provides theoretical and on-the-ground context as well as a forward-looking focus on metalinguistic futurities. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary students and scholars in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and migration studies.

Just looking at the Pacific Northwest's many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era. Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history.

This book brings audiences the enchanting melodies passing down from generation to generation in the Zhuang community, which are on the brink of extinction. Specifically, it sheds light on the origin, evolution and artistic features of Zhuang folk song in the first place, and then it shifts to their English translation based on meta-functional equivalence, through which the multi-aesthetics of Zhuang folk song have been represented. At length, forty classic Zhuang folk songs have been selected, and each could be sung bilingually in line with the stave. This book benefits researchers and students who are interested in music translation as well as the Zhuang ethnic music, culture and literature. It also gives readers an insight into musicology, anthropology and intercultural study.

Waris Dirie leads a double life -- by day, she is an international supermodel and human rights ambassador for the United Nations; by night, she dreams of the simplicity of life in her native Somalia and the family she was forced to leave behind. Desert Flower, her intimate and inspiring memoir, is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered about the beauty of African life, the chaotic existence of a supermodel, or the joys of new motherhood.

Waris was born into a traditional Somali family, desert nomads who engaged in such ancient and antiquated customs as genital mutilation and arranged marriage. At twelve, she fled an arranged marriage to an old man and traveled alone across the dangerous Somali desert to Mogadishu -- the first leg of an emotional journey that would take her to London as a house servant, around the world as a fashion model, and eventually to America, where she would find peace in motherhood and humanitarian work for the U.N.

Today, as Special Ambassador for the U.N., she travels the world speaking out against the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation, promoting women's reproductive rights, and educating people about the Africa she fled -- but still deeply loves.

Desert Flower will be published simultaneously in eleven languages throughout the world and is currently being produced as a feature film by Rocket Pictures UK.

In rural Mexico, people often say that Alzheimer's does not exist. ""People do not have Alzheimer's because they don't need to worry,"" said one Oaxacan, explaining that locals lack the stresses that people face ""over there"" - that is, in the modern world. Alzheimer's and related dementias carry a stigma. In contrast to the way elders are revered for remembering local traditions, dementia symbolizes how modern families have forgotten the communal values that bring them together. In Caring for the People of the Clouds, psychologist Jonathan Yahalom provides an emotionally evocative, story-rich analysis of family caregiving for Oaxacan elders living with dementia. Based on his extensive research in a Zapotec community, Yahalom presents the conflicted experience of providing care in a setting where illness is steeped in stigma and locals are concerned about social cohesion. Traditionally, the Zapotec, or ""people of the clouds,"" respected their elders and venerated their ancestors. Dementia reveals the difficulty of upholding those ideals today. Yahalom looks at how dementia is understood in a medically pluralist landscape, how it is treated in a setting marked by social tension, and how caregivers endure challenges among their families and the broader community. Yahalom argues that caregiving involves more than just a response to human dependency; it is central to regenerating local values and family relationships threatened by broader social change. In so doing, the author bridges concepts in mental health with theory from medical anthropology. Unique in its interdisciplinary approach, this book advances theory pertaining to cross-cultural psychology and develops anthropological insights about how aging, dementia, and caregiving disclose the intimacies of family life in Oaxaca.

This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection-the first of its kind-invites us to reconsider the politics and scope of the Roots phenomenon of the 1970s. Alex Haley's 1976 book was a publishing sensation, selling over a million copies in its first year and winning a National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. The 1977 television adaptation was more than a blockbuster miniseries-it was a galvanizing national event, drawing a record-shattering viewership, earning thirty-eight Emmy nominations, and changing overnight the discourse on race, civil rights, and slavery. These essays-from emerging and established scholars in history, sociology, film, and media studies-interrogate Roots, assessing the ways that the book and its dramatization recast representations of slavery, labor, and the black family; reflected on the promise of freedom and civil rights; and engaged discourses of race, gender, violence, and power in the United States and abroad. Taken together, the essays ask us to reconsider the limitations and possibilities of this work, which, although dogged by controversy, must be understood as one of the most extraordinary media events of the late twentieth century, a cultural touchstone of enduring significance.