Queer Commoditiesis the first book-length analysis of same-sexuality and consumer capitalism in contemporary US fiction. Moving beyond the critical tendencies to identify gay and lesbian subcultures as either hopelessly immersed in consumer capitalism or heroically resistant to it, Guy Davidson argues that while these subcultures are necessarily commodified, they also provide means of subversively negotiating aspects of life under capitalism.

In this "vital book for these times" (Kirkus Reviews), Don Lemon brings his vast audience and experience as a reporter and a Black man to today's most urgent question: How can we end racism in America in our lifetimes? The host of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon is more popular than ever. As America's only Black prime-time anchor, Lemon and his daily monologues on racism and antiracism, on the failures of the Trump administration and of so many of our leaders, and on America's systemic flaws speak for his millions of fans. Now, in an urgent, deeply personal, riveting plea, he shows us all how deep our problems lie, and what we can do to begin to fix them. Beginning with a letter to one of his Black nephews, he proceeds with reporting and reflections on his slave ancestors, his upbringing in the shadows of segregation, and his adult confrontations with politicians, activists, and scholars. In doing so, Lemon offers a searing and poetic ultimatum to America. He visits the slave port where a direct ancestor was shackled and shipped to America. He recalls a slave uprising in Louisiana, just a few miles from his birthplace. And he takes us to the heart of the 2020 protests in New York City. As he writes to his young nephew: We must resist racism every single day. We must resist it with love.

Babies are not simply born-they are made through cultural and social practices. Based on rich empirical work, this book examines the everyday experiences that mark pregnancy in the US today, such as reading pregnancy advice books, showing ultrasound "baby pictures" to friends and co-workers, and decorating the nursery in anticipation of the new arrival. These ordinary practices of pregnancy, the author argues, are significant and revealing creative activities that produce babies. They are the activities through which babies are made important and meaningful in the lives of the women and men awaiting the child's birth. This book brings into focus a topic that has been overlooked in the scholarship on reproduction and will be of interest to professionals and expectant parents alike.

Just like Scheherazade, undercover agents talk to save their lives. If they put in a poor performance, they don't see the curtain rise again. ART OF DARKNESS pries open the virtuoso identity techniques practiced by undercover operatives, fugitives, disguise artists, pranksters, con artists, and federally protected witnesses. It draws on original interviews with undercover operators in order to show how identity artists on both sides of the law obtain fake ID, develop a disguise, build a cover story, maintain believability in street performances, and deal with threats to their identities-all without formal acting training. ART OF DARKNESS inhabits the grey areas of morality as it exposes identity roleplays at the borders of lawfulness. In it you'll find stories of: law-enforcement workers who adopt the techniques of criminals in order to catch them but somehow get caught up in their own trick identities; self-defined artists whose work also has a criminal dimension; criminal informants who masterfully play sides and roles against each other; and hoaxsters and impersonators who may perform trick identities primarily for gain but do so with tremendous inventiveness and a directorial consciousness. This book may explode any remaining notion you harbor that you are not at some level a member of the intelligence community, discerning who is "for real" and who is presenting a self for personal gain.

Groups: The Evolution of Human Sociality is the product of a collaborative project based at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Researchers primarily involved in three fields-primate sociology and ecology, ecological anthropology, and socio-cultural anthropology-came together to discuss the shape and variations of groups as sympatric entities, and the evolutionary historical foundations that have led to the orientation of groups in present-day human society. To that end, the book turns to non-human primates for comparative purposes to consider the nature of the evolutionary historical foundations of sociality. In place of the past objective of ""reconstructing"" the ecology and society of early humans, the book's contributions instead re-identify the creation and evolution of that which is social and challenge the prevailing theory of groups in socio-cultural anthropology. Specialists on research into human beings and those studying non-human primates develop the debate about groups in the context of their own areas of expertise, at times in ways that extend beyond the boundaries of their fields.

Twenty-first century Cuba is a cultural stew. Tommy Hilfiger and socialism. Nike products and poverty in Africa. The New York Yankees and the meaning of ""blackness."" The quest for American consumer goods and the struggle in Africa for political and cultural independence inform the daily life of Cubans at every cultural level, as anthropologist Paul Ryer argues in Beyond Cuban Waters. Focusing on the everyday world of ordinary Cubans, this book examines Cuban understandings of the world and of Cuba's place in it, especially as illuminated by two contrasting notions: ""La Yuma,"" a distinctly Cuban concept of the American experience, and ""Aacute;frica,"" the ideological understanding of that continent's experience. Ryer takes us into the homes of Cuban families, onto the streets and nightlife of bustling cities, and on boat journeys that reach beyond the typical destinations, all to better understand the nature of the cultural life of a nation. This pursuit of Western status symbols represents a uniquely Cuban experience, set apart from other cultures pursuing the same things. In the Cuban case, this represents neither an acceptance nor rejection of the American cultural influence, but rather a co-opting or ""Yumanizing"" of these influences.

Since 1990, direct sales have attracted over two million recruits in Mexico and are characterized by a belief in the power of positive thinking. Through an ethnographic portrait, Cahn demonstrates that the quasi-religious commission of self-empowerment--more than any economic commission--accounts for the explosive growth of commission-based sales in the developing world.

aThe Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum conveys all the lucidity, passion, dynamism, and insightfulness of the field over several generations of scholars. The book captures the deeply collective character that Chicana/o cultural studies has exemplified since its beginnings.a
--Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work spans the interdisciplinary fields of Chicana/o studies and cultural studies. Editor Angie Chabram-Dernersesian provides an overview of current debates, locating Chicana/o cultural criticism at the intersections of these fields. She then acts as moderator of a virtual roundtable of critics, including Frances Aparicio, Lisa Lowe, George Lipsitz, Wahneema Lubiano, Renato Rosaldo, Jose David Saldivar, and Sonia Saldivar-Hull.

This highly collaborative and deeply interdisciplinary project addresses the questions: What is the relationship between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies? How do we do cultural studies from within Chicana/o cultural studies? How do Chicana/o cultural studies formations (hemispheric, borderland, and feminist) intermingle? The lively conversations documented here attest to the vitality and spirit of Chicana/o cultural studies today and track the movements between disciplines that share an interest in the study of culture, power relations, identity, and representation.

This book offers a unique resource for understanding not just the development of Chicana/o cultural studies, but how new social movements and epistemologies travel and affiliate with progressive forms of social inquiry in the global era.

Since 1994 South Africa has undergone a steady erosion of its indigenous built environment, with a concomitant loss of indigenous building technology and its specialised terminology. This glossary is based on the premise that you cannot understand the culture of a people unless you have a grasp of the nuances and hidden meanings of their language and brings together in one single volume the terminologies that are used by southern Africa's rural builders. It covers the terminology used by indigenous builders as well as subsequent colonial white settlers including buildings of the so-called Cape Dutch, English Georgian, Victorian and Indian Traditions. The text is set out in alphabetical order. It comprises of each term in its original language, its translation where appropriate into isiZulu, and its definition in English and isiZulu. One of the strengths of this book is its visual component of accompanying sketches that expertly illustrate the terms. This book is designed not only to assist in the teaching of architecture, but also to aid others who are interested in the field. Researchers and practitioners in disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, culture studies and building science will find it a valuable addition to their libraries.

The study of dance and movement as cultural phenomena frequently utilizes ethnography as a research strategy, yet no single text draws together the various fields of the social sciences. Written by leading exponents in dance ethnography from the disciplines of anthropology, ethnology, folklore studies and sociology, this international collection of essays addresses theoretical and methodological issues alongside considerations of documentary techniques and matters of politics and ethics.

Folklore has long explored food as a core component of life, linked to identity, aesthetics, and community and connecting individuals to larger contexts of history, culture and power. It recognizes that we gather together to eat, define class, gender, and race by food production, preparation, and consumption, celebrate holidays and religious beliefs with food, attach meaning to the most mundane of foods, and evoke memories and emotions through our food selections and presentations. "The Food and Folklore Reader "is the first comprehensive introduction to folklore methods and concepts relevant to food, spanning the entire discipline with key sources drawn from around the globe. Whilst folklore approaches have long permeated food studies, this is the first dedicated reader to introduce those ideas and to encourage students of food to explore them in their own work.Internationally respected editor Lucy M. Long offers expert commentary and rich learning features to aid teaching. Definitive in scale and scope, the reader covers the history of food in folklore scholarship whilst also highlighting food studies approaches and concepts for folklore readers.From seminal works on identity and aesthetics to innovative scholarship on contemporary food issues such as culinary tourism and food security, this will be an essential resource for food studies, folklore studies and anthropology.

The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists' adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people "make" place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi's engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.

Every company wants their business to have a strong, loyal following, but achieving this feat can be a challenge. Examining the growth of fandom popularity in modern culture can provide insights into consumer trends and patterns. Exploring the Rise of Fandom in Contemporary Consumer Culture is an innovative scholarly resource that offers an in-depth discussion on the soaring popularity of fan communities and how these followers serve a larger purpose in a consumer-driven society. Highlighting applicable topics that include brand loyalty, fan perceptions, social media, and virtual realities, this publication is ideal for business managers, academicians, students, professionals, and researchers that are interested in learning more about how fan behavior can impact the economic environment.

New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America's greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world. Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city's distinctive feature. New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity. Each volume includes a visual essay by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York's Jews from their arrival until today. These illustrated sections, many in color, illuminate Jewish material culture and feature reproductions of early colonial portraits, art, architecture, as well as everyday culture and community. Overseen by noted scholar Deborah Dash Moore, City of Promises offers the largest Jewish city in the world, in the United States, and in Jewish history its first comprehensive account.

In investigating both customary and modern Pacific art, these collected essays present a wide-ranging view across time and space, taking the reader from antiquities to contemporary art and travelling across the region from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand to Samoa. Studies of artefacts and traditions, such as self-portraiture, wood carvings, shields, tapa, dance and masks, use a variety of approaches, some deriving from museum studies while others are based on field investigation. Together they reveal the oppositional tensions between tradition and innovation, and the inspiration this provides for contemporary artistic practice, either through conscious implementation or through rejection of past definitions. Engagement with these cultural performances and objects provide new possibilities for the creation of current identities. The drafting of antiquities legislation, the tortuous journeys objects have taken to find a place in galleries, the use of exhibitions in cultural exchange, framed by the architecture of museums, as well as the role of film and photography in appropriating Pacific art culture for emerging nationalisms, all of these are considered here to enhance our understanding of indigenous art's place in the world today. These historical perspectives provide the framework in which to explore contemporary acquisition and outreach work with Pacific communities that seeks to reconnect people with objects taken away from the places and intentions of their makers. Questions of how identity is maintained and expressed through art are considered for both individuals and groups. What role does the transformations of objects play in this process? What impacts have been made by colonialism, modernism and the great migrations of people between Pacific countries, and from rural to urban environments? Ultimately, how is 'Pacific Islander' defined and by whom? In Repositioning Pacific Art, artists, curators and academics, including Maori and other Islanders, bring fresh approaches to Oceanic Art History and raise questions of relevance not only to scholars of indigenous art in the region but also in other parts of world.

During the last 15 years Latin American governments reformed their constitutions to recognize indigenous rights. The contributors to this book argue that these changes pose fundamental challenges to accepted notions of democracy, citizenship, and development in the region. Using case studies from Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru, they analyze the ways in which new legal frameworks have been implemented, appropriated and contested within a wider context of accelerating economic and legal globalization, highlighting the key implications for social policy, human rights, and social justice.

Galicia, the region in the northwest corner of Spain that is continguous with northern Portugal, is known officially as the Autonomous Community of Galicia. It is recognized as one of the historical nationalities that makes up the Spanish state, as legitimized by the Spanish Constitution of 1978. This study compares the topographic and ethnographic descriptions produced with respect to Galicia and Portugal during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to understand how the integration in different states and the existence of a specific nationalist discourse marked differences in the ways that two bordering regions in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula have been represented. Although Galicia and Portugal each belong to different states, their similarities are frequently alluded to. The author explores the presence and role of the imagination in creating a sense, over the last century and a half, of the national being and becoming of these two related peoples.

To date, there has been no published textbook which takes into account changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication breaks new ground in this arena. The scope of this book ranges from macro-sociolinguistic questions pertaining to language policies and their implementation (or non-implementation) to micro-sociolinguistic observations of actual language-use in verbal interaction, mainly in multilingual contexts of Higher Education (HE). There is a gradual move for the study of language and culture to be taught in the context of (professional) disciplines in which they would be used, for example, Journalism and African languages, Education and African languages, etc. The book caters for this growing market. Because of its multilingual nature, it caters to English and Afrikaans language speakers, as well as the Sotho and Nguni language groups - the largest languages in South Africa [and also increasingly used in the context of South African Higher Education]. It brings together various inter-linked disciplines such as Sociolinguistics and Applied Language Studies, Media Studies and Journalism, History and Education, Social and Natural Sciences, Law, Human Language Technology, Music, Intercultural Communication and Literary Studies. The unique cross-cutting disciplinary features of the book will make it a must-have for twenty-first century South African students and scholars and those interested in applied language issues.

Looking at one's face in the mirror and finding one's self in the mirror are not the same. The former capacity is something we share with other animals; the latter is a skill: something we have to learn. What does it mean and what does it take to find oneself the mirror? This book provides a comparative anthropological enquiry into the unity and diversity of mirror gazing. The reader is encouraged to reflect upon and experiment with different mirror gazes through a range of case studies. Koukouti and Malafouris weave together anthropology with philosophy and draw on examples from literature and experiments from psychopathology in a way that has never been attempted before. The master metaphor is that of the mirror as trap. Mirror gazing is viewed on a par with hunting. Mirroring signifies the hunt for self-knowledge. In a time obsessed with the digital self-image, Koukouti and Malafouris reflect on the structures of consciousness that underpin the different ways of looking at and through the mirror. Combining metaphor, comparison and estrangement, they gesture towards a therapeutic alliance between body and mirroring. This allows us to look in the mirror, and think of our shared humanity differently.

In the early morning hours of May 18, 1944 the Russian army, under orders from Stalin, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from their historical homeland. Given only fifteen minutes to gather their belongings, they were herded into cattle cars bound for Soviet Central Asia. Although the official Soviet record was cleansed of this affair and the name of their ethnic group was erased from all records and official documents, Crimean Tatars did not assimilate with other groups or disappear. This is an ethnographic study of the negotiation of social memory and the role this had in the growth of a national repatriation movement among the Crimean Tatars. It examines the recollections of the Crimean Tatars, the techniques by which they are produced and transmitted and the formation of a remarkably uniform social memory in light of their dispersion throughout Central Asia. Through the lens of social memory, the book covers not only the deportation and life in the diaspora but the process by which the children and grandchildren of the deportees returned and anchored themselves in the Crimean Peninsula, a place they had never visited.

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.

Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.

"Peasants tell tales," one prominent cultural historian tells us (Robert Darnton). Scholars must then determine and analyze what it is they are saying and whether or not to incorporate such tellings into their histories and ethnographies. Challenging the dominant culturalist approach associated with Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins among others, this book presents a critical rethinking of the philosophical anthropologies found in specific histories and ethnographies and thereby bridges the current gap between approaches to studies of peasant society and popular culture. In challenging the methodology and theoretical frameworks currently used by social scientists interested in aspects of popular culture, the author suggests a common discursive ground can be found in an historical anthropology that recognizes how myths, fairytales and histories speak to a universal need for imagining oneself in different timescapes and for linking one's local world with a "known" larger world.

This book contributes to an understanding of the complex relationship of gender and language alongside religion and religious life as experienced by various religious groups around the world. The intention is to put forward current studies in the field of linguistics and explore how gender and various religions intersect with language use. The universal and diverse experience of religion provides for this unique collection of papers concerning the use of language in religious liturgy, in religious communities, and in interaction with identity. As such, the book will attract students and researchers in discourse, gender studies and religious studies.