The Ojibwe of Anishinaabe are a native American people who were taught by 19th-century missionaries to sing evangelical hymns translated into the native language both as a means of worship and as a

tool for eradicating the "indianness" of the native people. Rather than Americanizing the people, however, these songs have become emblematic of Anishinaabe identity. In this book, Michael McNally

uses the Ojiwbe's hymn-singing as a lens to examine how this native American people has creatively drawn on the resources of ritual to negotiate identity and survival within the structures of

colonialism. Drawing on both archival research and fieldwork, he traces the historical development of ritualized singing and how this distinctive practice has come into play at various moments in

Ojiwbe history. This important study re-examines the contested nature of "tradition," arguing that despite its origins hymn-singing has now become "traditional" through the agency of today's elders,

who have asserted their role as cultural critics on the reservation through their singing.

Zito argues that although meanings change with time, at the end of the 20th century we are witnessing not a change in meanings, but the demise of meaning itself. He presents evidence of the ever decreasing use of word language, upon which meaning is predicated, and the increase in iconographic impacts (Macintosh and television, for example); the routinization of ritual; the efforts to control information (as during the Gulf War); and the ideological competition among groups to dominate definitions of social situations by the use of oversimplified rhetorics. Zito pays particular attention to language, employing empirical data with classical and contemporary theoretical perspectives to argue that as the meanings of language change, the relations among persons change, and vice versa. Recommended for scholars of sociology and language.

A Finalist for the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize in History

"Stearns looks to explain why America is the fattest, and France the thinnest, nation in the West. In his view, 'dieting was ideally suited to an American need for an implicit but vigorous moral counterweight to consumer indulgence.' At the turn of the century, obesity was suddenly regarded as unhealthy and unpatriotic. Good American citizens should be fit, and a generation of fad diet experts sprung up to guide."
"--Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement"

"Offers new, reliable information and insights."
"--The Nation"

"Explores the interaction of weight-control cultures with gender, class, and ethnicity issues. A meaty study of historical facts and fears about fat."
"--Booklist"

The modern struggle against fat cuts deeply and pervasively into American culture, as evidenced by the compulsion to stay thin, or at least to profess a desire to become thin. Dieting, weight consciousness and widespread hostility to obesity form one of the fundamental themes of modern life in countries around the world. Yet, for example, while the French are renowned for their delight in all things gustatory, they are significantly trimmer and less diet-obsessed than Americans.

Fat History explores the meaning of fat and anti-fat in modern Western society, focusing on the uniquely moral component of dieting in America. Tracing how standards of beauty and physical morality have been radically transformed over the past century in the United States and France, Peter N. Stearns illustrates how the contemporary obsession with fat arose in tandem with the dramatic growth in consumer culture, women's increasing equality, andchanges in women's sexual and maternal roles. Contrary to popular belief, fashion and nutrition have played only a secondary role in spurring the American aversion to fat, while the French distaste for obesity can be traced to different origins altogether.

Filled with narrative anecdotes and rooted in Stearns' trademark use of engaging original sources--from "Ebony" and "Gourmet" to "The Journal of the American Medical Association" and popularized accounts of French doctors--Fat History explores fat's transformation from a symbol of health and well-being to a sign of moral, psychological, and physical disorder.

Joannis Cornelis Verschueren (1905-1970) worked as a Roman Catholic missionary in southern Irian from 1931 until 1970. In the 1950s he wrote a number of papers on the Yei. These papers, based on older field notes and a research trip through the area, are recapitulated in this volume. Verschueren provides genuine inside information and his data are new and authentic. The four papers in this volume create a picture of a typical lowland culture with a surprising emphasis on headhunting, an uncommon way of segregating the sexes, and a highly elaborated system of phallic symbolism. Topics discussed in this volume are territorial, clan and moiety organization; kinship, marriage and conjugal life; the founding myths of Yei-nan ritual and other rituals; initiation; sickness and healing; death, burial and mortuary feasts; other ceremonies.

Globalization, modernization and colonialism have played a pivotal role in the social transformation of Southeast Asian societies. The essays in this volume examine three aspects of this transformation: social change and development, the role of intellectuals, religion and cultural values. The volume honours the distinguished Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas and his seminal contributions to the sociology of Southeast Asian societies. They have been written by his present and former colleagues, friends and students. Their contributions, reflect, complement and extend the influence of his ideas on contemporary research and social science scholarship.

Increasing interest is being shown in the intersections between literary and cultural history and in the material dimensions of the text. Evelyn B. Tribble argues that far from being extratextual, as many scholars have contended, marginal commentary and text fuse together to form the page's inscribed identity. By tracing the connections between marginal apparatus, authority, and authorship, she demonstrates that changes in book production had profound consequences for the changing relations among readers, writers, and cultural authority in the early modern period. Margins and Marginality is, to date, the only book-length study of the marginal apparatus of Renaissance books.

Chung-Hee Soh here contributes a unique perspective on women in politics by analyzing the ethnographic materials on the experiences of Korean women in their national legislature. Among the questions she raises are: Who are these women? How did they attain their political positions? What motivated their participation in male-dominated politics? Soh investigates the life histories of twenty-nine women who have been chosen to serve in the South Korean National Assembly. Her study sheds light on the dynamics of sociocultural change in male-female relations and gender role conceptions in a modernizing society.

Soh obtained unique insights into the processes of change in the gender role system by studying the chosen women in male-dominated Korean politics. The experiences of Korean women in politics not only delineate the systematic limits to female life in Korean culture, but also reveal some commonalities in social structural impediments to women in high-level public office. The author provides cross-cultural comparative perspectives on such topics as family backgrounds, gender role socialization, the patterns of recruitment, and the impact of the electoral system on the representation of women in national politics. Soh adds an important new dimension to the study of women in politics by situating her findings in the broader sociohistorical context of a modernizing nation and offers useful insights into the processes of sociohistorical change in the gender-role system. Her book will be welcomed by sociocultural anthropolgists, political scientists, Asian historians, and women's studies scholars.

This text provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data. Four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa and Jamaica. The author maintains how little attention has traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice. This concise, wide-ranging, contentious and well referenced study provides students of identity politics and miscegenation with an insightful read. The book also contains a glossary.

Are the relationships between minority groups as significant as those between dominant and minority groups? Phillips argues that they are in this innovative analysis of the relationships between the African American and the Jewish American communities during the last one hundred years. In An Unillustrious Alliance the evolved relations between the African American and the Jewish American communities are examined historically and sociologically. The scope of the work is from 1890 through the 1980s, and the materials are organized largely into decadal periods. The key relationships examined are negotiating, bargaining, cooperating, and conflicting. Two features of Phillips' approach distinguish it from most of the traditional examinations of racial and ethnic or minority group relations. First, there is strict emphasis placed on collective behavior or action. Phillips examines the concerted group actions of these two minority communities for the attainment of their separate as well as their joint purposes. Second, the main concern is the concerted actions or alliances and coalition between two minority communities, not the relationships between a dominant and a subordinate group. Throughout the study implications are drawn for public policy studies as well as for students and scholars of American ethnic and racial studies.

A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies. * Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism * Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

Every day for the next twenty years, more than 10,000 people in the United States will turn 65. With life expectancies increasing as well, many of these Americans will eventually require round-the-clock attention--and we have only begun to prepare for the challenge of caring for them. In Labors of Love, Jason Rodriquez examines the world of the fast-growing elder care industry, providing a nuanced and balanced portrait of the day-to-day lives of the people and organizations that devote their time to supporting America's aging population. Through extensive ethnographic research, interviews with staff and management, and analysis of internal documents, Rodriquez explores the inner workings of two different nursing homes--one for-profit and one non-profit--to understand the connections among the administrative regulations, the professional requirements, and the type of care provided in both types of facilities. He reveals a variety of challenges that nursing home care workers face day to day: battles over the budget; the administrative hurdles of Medicaid and Medicare; the employees' struggle to balance financial stability and compassionate care for residents. Yet, Rodriquez argues, nursing home workers give meaning and dignity to their work by building emotional attachments to residents and their care. An unprecedented study, Labors of Love brings new insight into the underlying structures of a crucial and expanding sector of the American health care system.

A study of gult from the 13th century to 1910 revealing much about the history of highland Christian Ethiopia. Gult, a system of land tenure encompassing both taxation and tribute, is unique to highland Ethiopia. It was through this that Ethiopian states and their rulers affected the lives of ordinary people. US, Canada & rest of world (exc. UK, Commonwealth & Europe) : University of Illinois Press Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press

How can the culturally diverse communities of America live justly and fruitfully together? Not by assimilation into the dominant culture -- nor by fighting for the freedom to pursue our own self-interest at the cost of our repressing both the wounds and the promising potential of our own cultural roots. This book offers a theory and practice of transformation that shows, especially through literature, education, and politics, how we can create a multicultural society that liberates our being as a fulfillment of the story of democracy. Perhaps for the first time in American history we are seeing the personal, political, historical, and sacred faces of women, people of color, and all ethnic groups as they tell their stories. It is this emerging scholarship that constitutes the new multicultural and feminine face of the story of democracy.

This volume brings together the work of leading film scholars from the UK, France and the US who assess a dominant art form's engagement with expressions of national identity at key moments in French cinematic history, from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century, through the inter-war period, the Occupation, the post-Liberation era, and the New Wave, up to the current state of the industry. The essays go against the grain in their attempts to construct an alternative history of French cinema, whether by bringing to light overlooked films or by examining well-known, indeed even 'over-exposed' films or filmmakers in a new light. In re-evaluating the work of Georges MEliEs, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Diane Kurys, FranAois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Jacques Beineix, the contributors to this volume focus on the paradoxical centrality of the marginal in constructions of national identity. In doing so, they reveal the structure of 'l'exception franAaise', in which French culture makes an exception for itself by suppressing alterity within it. This multi-faceted assessment of French visual culture and identity will be of interest to students and scholars in French studies, media and film studies, cultural studies and French history.

Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, culture, and media, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world. These monsters hail from Aboriginal Australia, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt.

This book provides a critical sociology of religion in Latin America. Its purpose is to discuss the notion of religion as part of social, cultural, and political processes in capitalist societies, drawing on the classics of sociological thought (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Gramsci). Thus, churches are analyzed as organized institutions of religious mediation intimately linked to the production of social, cultural, and political hegemony in Latin America. The Catholic Church, the dominant church in the region, is analyzed in terms of its different faces, changes, and transformations from conquest and colonization through the changing winds of Vatican II to the revolutionary experiences of the popular church in the 1970s and 1980s.

This work will be of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, politics, religion, culture, and sociology. It also speaks to theologians and philosophers working in Latin America.

O. R. Dathorne pursues the phenomenon of "contact" or "encounter" particularly as it relates to China and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. He looks at how the Chinese have perceived their Other as heathen and exotic, and how the West has in turn similarly perceived the Chinese. The failure of the West to relate to China in human terms is subtly documented, and is contrasted to the European experience in the New World and the African encounter of both China and the West. Dathorne breaks new ground in his analysis of the construct of the Other on the Pacific Islands. Using indigenous oral accounts, early texts of European explorers and castaways, and imaginative accounts, he reconstructs the period of contact from the native viewpoint, of those who acted as translators, pilots, guides, chartmakers and male and female companions. He calls attention to the Western habit of romancing the place while denigrating or mythologizing the people.

This work is an examination of borderless markets where national boundaries are no longer the relevant criteria in making international marketing, economic planning, and business decisions. Understanding nonpolitical borders is especially important for products and industries that are culture bound and those that require local adaptation. Religion is one critical factor that affects economic development, demographic behavior, and general business policies around the world. Over 26,000 statistics are provided for over 70 religious groups covering a number of social, economic, and business variables. A significant review of literature is also included.

Monasteries are one of the few types of communities that have been able to exist without the family. In this intimate, first-hand study of the daily life in a Trappist monastery, Hillery concludes that what binds this unusual and highly successful community together is its emphases on freedom and agape love. "The Monastery" reintegrates sociology with its allied disciplines in an attempt to understand the monastery on its own terms, and at the same time link that with sociology. Hillery delves into the history, the importance of the Rule of Benedict, the strictness of the Trappist interpretation, and the significance of the Second Vatican Council. Throughout, he uses a holistic anthropological approach.

The work begins with a detailed sociological analysis of freedom, love, and community. Other topics include ways in which candidates enter the monastery, their relation to their families, economic activities, politics, prayer, asceticism, recreation, illness, death, and deviance. Comparisons are made with nine of the other eleven Trappist monasteries in the United States. Anthropologists and sociologists, especially those interested in community, comparative analysis, and religion are challenged by "The Monastery" to move beyond the arbitrary limits they have placed on themselves, which maintain that all knowledge must be capable of being physically perceived and statistically measured.

Kecmanovic deals with the phenomenon of ethnonationalism, both as a broad, worldwide concern and as a key ingredient to the struggles in the former Yugoslavia. As in the former Yugoslavia, the rise of ethnonationalistic sentiments and attitudes coincided with the transition from a state-and party-run affair to a new, post-communist type of government and society. Drawing upon his personal experiences in Sarajevo, Kecmanovic provides a unique view of the conflict.

In a style accessible to students and general readers, he traces the transformations of leading principles, value systems, behavioral patterns, and views of people in times of severe ethnic tensions. At times nearly novelistic, the book examines epidemic ethnonationalism and individual manifestations such as violence toward members of other groups, beliefs that ethnic differences are genetic, a need to aggrandize and even manufacture differences between communities.

Exploring the multiple communities of healing among the Tuareg people of Niger, this work examines the beliefs and practices that surround healing and the quest for medicine. In studying ideals of healing that face challenges from wider political and economic forces, the author enables us to understand these culturally and historically constructed processes. This leads us to comprehend how many Tuareg construct and deconstruct local notions of medicine and healers, how patients cope with current problems in health care, and more broadly, how medical knowledge is constructed in anthropology and ethnography.

Rasmussen reveals new perspectives on healing in systems of power and symbolism, bridging interpretive cultural and political economy approaches. This book explores the consequences and implications of the idea that in order to obtain medicine, one must submit to authority, but proceeds beyond merely demonstrating this idea, already largely a truism in anthropology. The Tuareg data show how local residents are not passive victims, but rather active agents in responding to and resisting authority structures of medicine and medical knowledge.

This work is an examination of borderless markets where national boundaries are no longer the relevant criteria in making international marketing, economic planning, and business decisions. Understanding nonpolitical borders is especially important for products and industries that are culture bound and those that require local adaptation. Ethnic culture is one critical factor that affects economic development, demographic behavior, and general business policies around the world. Over 120,000 statistics are provided for over 400 ethnic groups covering a number of social, economic, and business variables. A significant review of literature is also included.

Over 3,000 years ago, in what would be northern North America, there was a cultural fluorescence. Native Americans were exchanging materials and ideas over long distances, and their shamans were overseeing treatment of the dead and conducting ceremonies to insure entry into the spirit world. The author details how archaeologists discovered their story.

The discovery, excavation, and interpretation of data on one of the most significant ancient Native American archaeological sites in the Northeast is chronicled. Research team leader Alan Leveillee outlines the regional, environmental, and cultural contexts, details the archaeological methodology, and synthesizes the results of analyses of lithics, metals, flora, fauna, and soils, and presents the on-site observations and interpretations of the Native American representative of the team.

Focusing on the discovery and subsequent archaeological approach to the first professionally excavated secondary burial complex in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Leveillee demonstrates that anthropological models enable consideration of how artifacts and features reveal 3,500-year-old ideologies, ceremonies, and social systems--the archaeology of ideas.