Ethnographers have observed Muslims nearly everywhere Islam is practiced. This study analyzes four seminal texts that have been read widely outside anthropology. Two are by distinguished anthropologists on either side of the Atlantic, Islam Observed (by Clifford Geertz in 1968) and Muslim Society (by Ernest Gellner in 1981). Two other texts are by Muslim scholars, Beyond the Veil (Fatima Mernissi in 1975) and Discovering Islam (by Akbar Ahmed in 1988). Varisco argues that each of these four authors approaches Islam as an essentialized organic unity rather than letting 'Islams' found in the field speak to the diversity of practice. The textual truths engendered, and far too often engineered, in these idealized representations of Islam have found their way unscrutinized into an endless stream of scholarly works and textbooks. Varisco's analysis goes beyond the rhetoric over what Islam is to the information from ethnographic research about what Muslims say they do and actually are observed to do. The issues covered include Islam as a cultural phenomenon, representation of 'the other', Muslim gender roles, politics of ethnographic authority, and Orientalist discourse.

Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered 'prey par excellence': the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as 'inua' (owner) and 'tarniq' (shade) over European concepts such as 'spirit 'and 'soul', the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.

Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier's work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature-culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapters demonstrate both the diversity of anthropological topics and the opportunity for constructive dialogue around shared methodological and theoretical models.

Based on one of the most extensive scientific surveys of race ever conducted, this book investigates the relationship between racial perceptions and policy choices in America. The contributors-leading scholars in the fields of public opinion, race relations, and political behavior-clarify and explore images of African-Americans that white Americans hold and the complex ways that racial stereotypes shape modern political debates about such issues as affirmative action, housing, welfare, and crime. The authors make use of the largest national study of public opinion on racial issues in more than a generation-the Race and Politics Study (RPS) conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of California. The RPS employed methodological improvements made possible by Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, a technique that enables analysts to combine the internal validity of laboratory experiments with the external validity of probability sampling. Taking full advantage of these research methods, the authors offer highly nuanced analyses of subjects ranging from the sources of racial stereotypes to the racial policy preferences of Democrats and Republicans to the reasons for resistance to affirmative action. Their findings indicate that while crude and explicit forms of racial prejudice may have declined in recent decades, racial stereotypes persist among many whites and exert a powerful influence on the ways they view certain public policies.

What is our goal: equal opportunity or equality of result? The debate rages on. The November 5, 1996 decision by voters in California to eliminate most forms of state sanctioned affirmative action ignited a civil rights debate that sent shock waves across the country. The vote had critics celebrating the dawn of a new era of equal rights, while opponents warned of school and workplace discrimination without the protective blanket of affirmative action. The question of racial equality has inspired new debate today, reminiscent of the conflicts of the 1960s. Again we ask ourselves: Is affirmative action necessary to maintain equal labor practices, school desegregation plans, and broad social standards of racial equality? Does affirmative action or laws to roll it back go against the idea of equality itself? Should race play an important role in college admissions and corporate hiring? Is affirmative action a poison instead of a cure? For some, it depends on how the term is defined. These and other questions are debated in this highly charged collection of essays by a distinguished group of politicians, philosophers, educators, and others including Tom Beauchamp, Ward Connerly, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Fish, Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas LeMann, Louis Pojman, George Sher, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Richard Wasserstrom, Cornell West, and Steven Yates. Included also are important legal decisions bearing on affirmative action.

Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

For centuries, Whiteness has been the invisible norm in the West, a transparent, yet ubiquitous frame of reference so pervasive that most Whites consider themselves absolved from race matters. In recent years activists, scholars, and writers have been challenging this cultural and political monolith by investigating Whiteness in its many manifestations. Yet, once it is rendered visible, Whiteness proves to be perilous and paradoxical: we single out Whiteness to expose its status as an unexamined center, yet the more we single it out, the more attention we invariably draw to it, once again at the expense of marginalized cultures. Organized into sections on white politics, white culture, white bodies, and white theory, this anthology collects much of the most important work on Whiteness to date. Such writers as David Roediger, Eric Lott, E. Ann Kaplan, Fred Pfeil, Amitava Kumar, and Henry A. Giroux serve up what is, in essence, a second generation of writing on Whiteness, moving past acknowledgment of its heretofore invisible nature, to in-depth analysis of its resilience and alleged disintegration. Taking on film, literature, music, militias, even Rush Limbaugh, Whiteness: A Critical Reader is a crucial contribution to discussions of race, politics, and culture in the U.S. today.

Read Chapter One.

"Initiate[s] a useful and innovative dialogue. . . . A very important book, especially in its opening up a discussion of methodological issues around current research on racism and racial grouping."
-- "Contemporary Sociology"

"Essential reading for all those whose research explicitly engages racial issues-and for all those who do not realize that their work inevitably engages racial issues."
"-Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters and editor of Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Cultural Criticism"

"Absolutely critical reading. This volume powerfully explores how scholars' own racial background shapes the analytical lens with which they view whiteness, blackness . . . the exoticism and eroticism of racial 'others' and the domain of white privilege."
"-William Darity, Jr., coauthor of Persistent Disparity and Boshamer Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Research Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, Sociology and African American Studies at Duke University"

"Timely and challenging, this innovative book engages questions and dilemmas that researchers on race and racism rarely talk about in public. Refreshingly clear and comparative in scope, it is a must reading in all courses about race and ethnic relations, calling for a fundamental rethinking of research agendas in this field."
"-John Solomos, author of Race and Racism in Britain, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, and Professor of Sociology, South Bank University (London)"

"Points to the ethical dilemmas of researchers researching race among communities that are at once 'victims' ofracism and active in the continued process of racialization."
"-Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?, and Professor of Humanities, York University (Canada)"

"A remarkable collection of essays interrogating the political, methodological and ethical dilemmas of conducting research in racially stratified societies. These theoretically astute and ethnographically rich case studies compellingly demonstrate how the production of knowledge is framed and mediated by the racialized subject positions held by social scientists. Racing Research, Researching Race will no doubt incite a critical and long overdue discussion of the racial politics of ethnographic fieldwork."
"-Steven Gregory, author of Black Corona, and Professor of Africana and American Studies at New York University"

A white woman studies upper-class eighth grade girls at her alma mater on Long Island and finds a culture founded on misinformation about its own racial and class identity. A black American researcher is repeatedly assumed by many Brazilian subjects to be a domestic servant or sex worker.

Racing Race, Researching Race is the first volume of its kind to explore how ideologies of race and racism intersect with nationality and gender to shape the research experience.

Critical work in race studies has not adequately addressed how racial positions in the field--as inflected by nationality, gender, and age--generate numerous methodological dilemmas. Racing Research, Researching Race begins to fill this gap by infusing critical race studies with more empirical work and suggesting how a critical race perspective might improve research methodologies and outcomes.

The contributors to the volume encompassa wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, women=s studies, political science, and Asian American studies.

Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility confronts a central issue in the study of immigration and ethnicity - the opposition between culture and structure - and presents a collection of essays that transcend simplistic either/or approaches to this issue. The contributors explore educational and economic mobility of immigrant groups in Europe and America.

In order to move global society towards a sustainable "ecotopia," solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors-scholar-activists and activist-practitioners- examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures.

This is the first book to look at the quasi-religious aspects of the romantic cult of Shakespeare. Focusing on England, Hungary, and some other European countries, the book explores the latent religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the 1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of 1864. Surveying both the verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Shakespeare cult, the author highlights their analogies with those of traditional religious cults and shows the appropriation of Shakespeare and his texts to be inseparable from quasi-religious acts of reverence such as literary pilgrimages, relic worship, the erection and dedication of monuments, and public celebrations of anniversaries. This cult made use of some important romantic notions (genius, originality, imagination, transcendental analogies of artistic creation), and the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was to be utilized for political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of literature.

Washington provides a detailed guide to the philosophy of Alain Locke, one of the most influential African American thinkers of our time. The work gives special attention to what Washington calls Destiny Studies, an approach which allows a people to concentrate on their past, present, and future possibilities, and to view the experience of a race as a coherent unity, rather than a set of fragmented historical happenings. In providing a broad vision of Locke's ideas, Washington considers the views of Booker T. Washington and his contemporaries, the theories of anthropologists concerning race and ethnicity, and many of the social issues current in our own age. By doing so, Washington affirms the importance of Locke as a philosopher and demonstrates the impact of Locke on the destiny of African Americans.

This volume of essays by scholars and activists focuses on the political and social relations between blacks, Latinos, and Asians in key urban centers. Collectively, the essays examine the particular status of relations between these groups, the reasons for conflict or consensus, and the prospects for future relations. While a number of cities are examined, the book focuses on Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami as particularly instructive case studies. Urban eruptions in these cities are examined in terms of the nature of political relations between blacks, Latinos, and Asians.

These essays provide analyses within a sociohistorical context and offer the kind of political activism that might ensure consensus, rather than conflict, between these groups in urban America. As Luis Fuentes observes, This book should be read by all activists and scholars interested in changing the face of urban and ultimately, national America; for if communities of color can come together for progressive political action, then it will only be a matter of time before America finally begins to look like, and act like, what it has been preaching for generations.

What is the significance of sustainable resource management for the functioning of Mediterranean island societies? How do human-environment relations reflect in a multi-ethnic religious landscape? This book poses these questions in the context of the Ottoman, British, and modern history of Cyprus. It explores the socio-ecological dimension of the Cyprus conflict and considers the role of local environmental practices for historical coexistence and modern division. The book synthesizes theoretical approaches from the research on 'religion and ecology' with the anthropology of Cyprus, with the goal to develop and establish an ecological perspective on coexistence and conflict in the Mediterranean. Religion is seen as the place where local representations of nature and traditions of resource management are generated and maintained. The work takes a comparative look at the impact of Eastern Orthodox and Islamic institutions on the island's landscape, as well as the religious and economic practices of the rural peasant communities. The findings are then spelled out in the context of current discourses on religion, environmental ethics, and social justice.

Mediterranean islands exhibit many similarities in their biotic ecological, physical and environmental characteristics. There are also many differences in terms of their human colonization and current anthropogenic pressures. This book addresses in three sections these characteristics and examines the major environmental changes that the islands experienced during the Quaternary period. The first section provides details on natural and cultural factors which have shaped island landscapes. It describes the environmental and cultural changes of the Holocene and their effects on biota, as well as on the current human pressures that are now threats to the sustainability of the island communities. The second section focuses on the landscapes of the largest islands namely Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Cyprus, Crete, Malta and the Balearics. Each island chapter includes a special topic reflecting a particular characteristic of the island. Part three presents strategies for action towards sustainability in Mediterranean islands and concludes with a comparison between the largest islands. Despite several published books on Mediterranean ecosystems/landscapes there is no existing book dealing with Mediterranean islands in a collective manner. Students, researchers and university lecturers in environmental science, geography, biology and ecology will find this work invaluable as a cross-disciplinary text while planners and politicians will welcome the succinct summaries as background material to planning decisions.

Why is talk about television forbidden at certain schools? Why does a mother feel guilty about watching Star Trek in front of her four-year-old child? Why would retired men turn to daytime soap operas for entertainment? Cliches about television mask the complexity of our relationship to media technologies. Through case studies, the author explains what audience research tells us about the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere and the classroom, the relationship between gender and genre, and the varied interpretation of media technologies and media forms. Television and New Media Audiences reviews the most important research on television audiences and recommends the use of ethnographic, longitudinal methods for the study of media consumption and computer use at home as well as in the workplace.

This bibliography is a comprehensive record of doctoral dissertations on religion and American society. Included are 4,240 citations for dissertations written through June 1991. Each work discusses the historical dimension of America's religious experience between 1620 and 1900, and the bibliography provides order numbers for all dissertations available from University Microfilms, Inc. In addition to biographical and denominational studies, the volume contains citations on communal societies, fraternal orders, literature, pragmatism, science, slavery, and temperance. Also included are titles pertaining to church-affiliated institutions of higher education. A preface overviews the scope of the work, criteria for inclusion, and research methodology. A section of bibliographic entries for denominations and movements follows. Entries in this section are grouped in clusters for particular movements and denominations, and the clusters are arranged alphabetically for ease of use. The next section contains bibliographic entries arranged in topical clusters, with topics presented in alphabetical order. The volume concludes with detailed author and subject indexes.

Besides the erroneous assumption that tropical fisheries are open access, the cases demonstrate that pre-existing systems (1) are concerned with the community of fishers and ensuring community harmony and continuity; (2) involve flexible, multiple and overlapping rights adapted to changing needs and circumstances; (3) that fisheries are just one component of a community resource assemblage and depend on both the good management of linked upstream ecosystems and risk management to ensure balanced nutritional resources of the community; and (4) pre-existing systems are greatly affected by a constellation of interacting external pressures.

In recent years, the saliency of conflicts pitting different ethnic, racial and religious groups against one another has increased dramatically. The world of nation-states is much more diverse than previously realized; only a small number of the 185 independent countries are truly homogeneous. With the end of the cold war, the relative importance of ethnic conflicts as a threat to international peace and stability is far greater. An international set of scholars collaborate in this volume to explore policy alternatives which can contribute towards the accommodation of cultural diversity.

Many of the vestiges of the Civil Rights movement, including initiatives such as affirmative action, are increasingly under attack by those who assert that the Constitution is explicitly "color-blind." In this argument, the government is not legally permitted to take race into account in a "color conscious" manner. More than 30 years have passed since the landmark Civil Rights Acts became the law of the land. Yet, one of three African American men between the ages of 18 and 27 is in the hands of the criminal justice system, churches are burning in the South, and right-wing militia groups are flourishing. In this provocative and timely book, Leslie G. Carr suggests that the Constitution can be read as "racist," and that the concept of "color-blindness" is in fact the latest in a series of racist ideologies that have been part of the American fabric. "Color-Blind" Racism provides a thorough historical grounding in racist ideologies in the United States, and will be of great interest to anyone teaching or studying race relations, public policy, urban studies, and race and politics.

When, why, and how early humans began to eat meat are three of the most fundamental unresolved questions in the study of human origins. Before 2.5 million years ago the presence and importance of meat in the hominid diet is unkown. After stone tools appear in the fossil record it seems clear that meat was eaten in increasing quantities, but whether it was obtained through hunting or scavenging remains a topic of intense debate. This book takes a novel and strongly interdisciplinary approach to the role of meat in the early hominid diet, inviting well-known researchers who study the human fossil record, modern hunter-gatherers, and nonhuman primates to contribute chapters to a volume that integrates these three perspectives. Stanford's research has been on the ecology of hunting by wild chimpanzees. Bunn is an archaeologist who has worked on both the fossil record and modern foraging people. This will be a reconsideration of the role of hunting, scavening, and the uses of meat in light of recent data and modern evolutionary theory. There is currently no other book, nor has there ever been, that occupies the niche this book will create for itself.