Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general.

Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks?

This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents.

Russell W. Ramsey, Ph.D., D. Min., is the nation's longest standing scholar who writes about the Latin American military and security forces. He offers here a compilation of his best published work on this admittedly controversial topic, dating from 1963 to 2002."

In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture-the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children. Antler traces the odyssey of this compelling personality through decades of American culture. She reminds us of a time when Jewish mothers were admired for their tenacity and nurturance, as in the early twentieth-century image of the "Yiddishe Mama," a sentimental figure popularized by entertainers such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker, and especially by Gertrude Berg, whose amazingly successful "Molly Goldberg" ruled American radio and television for over 25 years. Antler explains the transformation of this Jewish Mother into a "brassy-voiced, smothering, and shrewish" scourge (in Irving Howe's words), detailing many variations on this negative theme, from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks to television shows such as "The Nanny," "Seinfeld," and "Will and Grace." But she also uncovers a new counter-narrative, leading feminist scholars and stand-up comediennes to see the Jewish Mother in positive terms. Continually revised and reinvented, the Jewish Mother becomes in Antler's expert hands a unique lens with which to examine vital concerns of American Jews and the culture at large. A joy to read, You Never Call, You Never Write will delight anyone who has ever known or been nurtured by a "Jewish Mother," and it will be a special source of insight for modern parents. As Antler suggests, in many ways "we are all Jewish Mothers" today.

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

The longevity of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that it is possible for a social change organization to simultaneously address racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, environmental justice, and peace-and to succeed. Activism, Alliance Building, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center uses ethnographic research to provide an instructive case study of the importance and challenges of confronting injustice in all of its manifestations. Through building and maintaining alliances, deploying language strategically, and using artistic expression as a central organizing mechanism, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center demonstrates the power of multi-issue organizing and intersectional/coalitional consciousness. Interweaving artistic programming with its social justice agenda, in particular, offers Esperanza a unique forum for creative and political expression, institutional collaborations, and interpersonal relationships, which promote consciousness raising, mobilization, and social change. This study will appeal to scholars of communication, Chicana feminism, and ethnography.

For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. and in and around the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Indian tribe as historical events unfolded. This is a classic ethnography that documents eight years of the author's day-to-day experience as a teacher, bilingual education coordinator, and central office administrator during the socio-political dispute. The author showcases the familial, linguistic, and ancestral place-based strengths of the Crow families that empowered children to succeed in school against the odds, providing a secure foundation for their future leadership within the tribe. In doing this, the author builds strong support for bridging Native and Euro-American philosophies within a bilingual framework. This book is important reading for teachers, administrators, and policy-makers. It provides hope, ideas, and concrete actions for those who would engage in change management to improve learning environments and better serve diverse students.

These case studies explore how competing interests among the keepers of a community's heritage shape how that community both regards itself and reveals itself to others. As editors Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter note in their introduction, such stakeholders are no longer just of the community itself, but are now often ""outsiders""--tourists, the mass media, and even anthropologists and folklorists. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South. Arranged around three themes that have often surfaced in debates about public folklore and anthropology over the last two decades, the studies consider issues of representation, identity, and practice. One study of representation discusses how Appalachian Pentecostal serpent handlers try to reconcile their exotic popular image with their personal religious beliefs. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term ""coonass,"" once widely considered derogatory. Essays on practice look at an Appalachian Virginia coal town and Snee Farm, a National Heritage Site in lowland South Carolina. Both pieces reveal how dynamic and contradictory views of community life can be silenced in favor of producing a more easily consumable vision of a ""past."" Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners offers challenging new insights into some of the roles that the media, tourism, and charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it.

Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India.
How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced.
The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nationstates--in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal--have rarely been covered. "Geographical Diversions" challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change.

At the centre of this study is a shaman's chant performed during a three-week long feast in the eastern Himalayas. The book includes a translation of this 12-hour text chanted in Apatani, a Tibeto-Burman language, and a description of the events that surround it, especially ritual exchanges with ceremonial friends, in which fertility is celebrated. The shaman's social role, performance and ritual language are also described. Although complex feasts, like this one among Apatanis, have been described in northeast India and upland Southeast Asia for more than a century, this is the first book to present a full translation of the accompanying chant and to integrate it into the interpretation of the social significance of the total event.

Race, religion, language, culture, and national character are full of contradictions. Brazil, the largest country in South America, embodies so much paradox that it defies neat description. This book will help students and general readers dispel stereotypes of Brazil and begin to understand what country's "bigness" means in terms of its land, people, history, society, and cultural expressions. This is the only authoritative yet accessible volume on Brazil that surveys a wide range of important topics, from geography, to social customs, art, architecture, and more. Highlights include discussions of the fluid definitions of race, rituals of candomble, the importance of extended family networks, beach culture, and soccer madness. A chronology and glossary supplement the text.

In Personal Religion and Magic in Mamasa, West Sulawesi, Kees Buijs describes the traditional culture of the Toraja's, which is rapidly vanishing. The focus is on personal religion as it has its centre in the kitchen of each house. In the kitchen and also by the use of magical words and stones the gods are sought for their powers of blessing. This book adds important information to Buijs' earlier Powers of Blessing from the Wilderness and from Heaven (Brill, 2006).

At one time there were almost as many different versions of the Quechan creation story as there were Quechan families. Now few people remember them. This volume, presented in the Quechan language with facing-column translation, provides three views of the origins of the Quechan people. One synthesizes narrator George Bryant's childhood memories and later research. The second is based upon J. P. Harrington's A Yuma Account of Origins (1908). The third provides a modern view of the origins of the Quechan, beginning with the migration from Asia to the New World and ending with the settlement of the Yuman tribes at their present locations.

The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides a wide ranging and accessible, as well as ethnographically rich, perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences. This book informs students and seasoned scholars alike about the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centres it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

Winner of the 2014 Diamond Anniversary Book Award Finalist for the 2014 National Communications Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award In 2000, the National Human Genome Research Institute announced the completion of a "draft" of the human genome, the sequence information of nearly all 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Since then, interest in the hereditary basis of disease has increased considerably. In The Material Gene, Kelly E. Happe considers the broad implications of this development by treating "heredity" as both a scientific and political concept. Beginning with the argument that eugenics was an ideological project that recast the problems of industrialization as pathologies of gender, race, and class, the book traces the legacy of this ideology in contemporary practices of genomics. Delving into the discrete and often obscure epistemologies and discursive practices of genomic scientists, Happe maps the ways in which the hereditarian body, one that is also normatively gendered and racialized, is the new site whereby economic injustice, environmental pollution, racism, and sexism are implicitly reinterpreted as pathologies of genes and by extension, the bodies they inhabit. Comparing genomic approaches to medicine and public health with discourses of epidemiology, social movements, and humanistic theories of the body and society, The Material Gene reworks our common assumption of what might count as effective, just, and socially transformative notions of health and disease.

This book aims at offering a broad survey of the encounter between word and image studies and anthropology and to demonstrate the mutual benefits of this dialogue for both disciplines in the three fields of the image (Marin), the social history of writing (Petrucci), and memory (Yates). The themes discussed by the contributors to this volume, all specialists in their field, highlight each in their specific field one or more aspects of the agency of both text and image. Bridging the gap between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin research traditions, this bilingual volume focuses on three major questions: What do we do with texts and images? How do texts and images become active cultural agents? And what do texts and images help us do? Contributions cover a wide range of topics and disciplines (from visual poetry to garden theory and from ekphrasis to new media art), and represent therefore the best possible overview of what cutting-edge analysis in word and image studies stands for today.

While Jews have long had a presence in Ethiopia and the Maghreb, Africa's newest Jewish community of note is in Nigeria, where upwards of twenty thousand Igbos are commonly claimed to have adopted Judaism. Bolstered by customs recalling an Israelite ancestry, but embracing rabbinic Judaism, they are also the world's first "Internet Jews."William Miles has spent over three decades conducting research in West Africa. In /Jews of Nigeria: An Afro-Judaic Odyssey, /he shares life stories from this spiritually passionate community, as well as his own Judaic reflections as he celebrates Hanukka and a bar mitzvah with "Jubos" in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. A concluding encounter with laureate Chinua Achebe reveals unexpected family connections to one of the most intriguing Jewish and African communities to emerge in modern times.

Effectively communicate Christ across Cultures The gospel message transcends cultures, but human communication does not. In Transforming Communication missionary and professor Vee J. D-Davidson provides principles for the intercultural communication of Christ. Using her twenty-five-plus years of experience teaching as a Westerner in Asia as a starting point, Davidson provides transferable principles that encourage awareness of context-specific issues and that see opportunities for intercultural communication as wholly unique opportunities, regardless of any perceived communication barriers. Readers from multiple different cultures will be able to apply the principles presented by use of relevant examples, illustrations, and enlightening insights provided from a wide range of Global South and Global North multicultural and intercultural perspectives. Transforming Communication offers practical principles to encourage and challenge Christian readers to build relationships that might well require engaging with issues that bring them out of their comfort zone but, the book also offers insights and encouraging devotional nuggets that feed into a triad of knowledge-impartation, self-examination and challenge, along with spiritual enrichment for the task.