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.

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 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.

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.

Tourism has become the world's largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization; no surprise when one considers that it incorporates the world's oldest profession. In some developing regions, such as the Caribbean or the South Pacific, tourism is the primary sector in which significant economic growth takes place. In other regions, including areas of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and formerly communist eastern Europe, tourism is just beginning to take off. In all of these areas, tourisM's impact has been decidedly mixed. Nowhere is this more visible than in the context of women's roles in tourism. The contributors demonstrate the many ways in which gender determines the roles they play as both tourists and providers of tourism as product and service. A valuable contribution to tourism studies, women's studies, and the literature of economic development.

The premises of this unique collection of research are that women's roles in tourism are gendered, just as are their other roles in gendered societies; that tourism affects women differently than it affects men; and that women themselves are affected in different ways by tourism depending on such factors as race, region, and class (leisured consumer vs. working producer, or guest vs. host). The contributors cover theoretical perspectives, including those provided by feminists and economic development analysts; women's roles in tourism in the mature industries of the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific; women's roles in the less-developed tourist destinations of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and eastern Europe; and implications for the future of economic development policy and of gender relations in tourism.

In ancient China, the preparation of food and the offering up of food as a religious sacrifice were intimately connected with models of sagehood and ideas of self-cultivation and morality. Drawing on received and newly excavated written sources, Roel Sterckx's book explores how this vibrant culture influenced the ways in which the early Chinese explained the workings of the human senses, and the role of sensory experience in communicating with the spirit world. The book, which begins with a survey of dietary culture from the Zhou to the Han and offers some intriguing insights into the ritual preparation of food some butchers and cooks were highly regarded and would rise to positions of influence as a result of their culinary skills and the sacrificial ceremony itself. As a major contribution to the study of early China and to the development of philosophical thought, the book will be essential reading for students of the period, and for anyone interested in ritual and religion in the ancient world."

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.

Inequities still exist in today's society, and this book advances awareness, an equitable mindset, and transformative change toward the goal of eliminating inequities and promoting inclusiveness and social justice. Racialized inequity is injustice or unfairness and exists when prejudice or discrimination based on any aspect of difference precludes access of certain groups to the resources and benefits of society. This volume takes a new look at the psychology of inequity today. Have we progressed or regressed since the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s? Through an examination of the motivations and beliefs behind inequities and injustices, this text aims to answer this question and any others that a scholar or general reader interested in social inequities and multiculturalism may have. Chapters address the motives that sustain inequity and reflect on the beliefs and behaviors linked to implicit responses to threats of change and loss of privilege posed by the inclusion of "others." Includes cutting-edge scholarship addressing racial inequities Provides contemporary examples of racial inequity viewed through new psychological lenses Reviews the intersection of racial, economic, and mental health inequity among BIPOC citizens Addresses contemporary expressions of privilege and their relationships to social inequities Introduces transformational approaches to improving education and health care

Parodi shows that boundary disputes have and continue to play a major role in creating tensions in South America. Of the 25 international territorial boundaries that exist in South America, eight were marked with major wars, eight with lesser wars, and five with some level of violence. As recently as 1995, the armies of Ecuador and Peru were at war to define a boundary. In 1982 Argentina went to war, inspired by the call to restore a piece of its mutilated national territory. Venezuela and Guyana, Guyana and Suriname, and Suriname and French Guiana have not completed boundary demarcation agreements. Bolivia's insistence on its right for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean is a source of tension with Chile and Peru. Colombia and Venezuela have unresolved boundary issues in the Gulf of Venezuela. Clearly, boundary disputes have and continue to play a major role in creating larger conflicts within South America.

Territorial boundaries are marks on the ground, but, as Parodi shows, their staying power or stability depends on their grip on consciousness. By examining the boundary theory of South American states and its implementation, he also explains how the symbolic system of South American boundaries is used to instill national identity, mobilize people to war, and control population and territory. This text will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with Latin American politics, diplomacy, and international relations.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia's imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control. These expeditions served the acquisition of social and scientific information to benefit the Russian Empire's colonization efforts. Their leaders were often elites trained in ethnography, geography, and natural science subjects, and a major objective of this book is to give a fuller picture of the diverse biographies of these figures, not all of whom were Russian or European males. In the `Wild Countries' moves chronologically from the founding of the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 to the beginning of the revolutionary period in Russia in 1905. During these decades, research missions became more overtly "imperial" and coincided with the consolidation of Russian hegemony over Central Eurasia and an increasing Russian interest in territories in the western and northern regions of the Chinese Q'ing Empire. The book also addresses wider moves toward imperial projects worldwide.

Designed for both academic and lay audiences, this book identifies the characteristics of ritual and, via multiple examples, details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohesion by enacting cultural-or individual-beliefs and values. It also shows what happens when ritual fails.

'May you live in interesting times' was made famous by Sir Austen Chamberlain. The premise is that 'interesting times' are times of upheaval, conflict and insecurity - troubled times. With the growing numbers of displaced populations and the rise in the politics of fear and hate, we are facing challenges to our very 'species-being'. Papers in the volume include ethnographic studies on the 'refugee crisis', the 'financial crisis' and the 'rule of law crisis' in the Mediterranean as well as the crisis of violence and hunger in South America.

Addressing several issues of significance in the fields of Anthropology of Migration, Politics of Healthcare, Religious and Francophone Studies, this book pursues an unprecedented line of research by bringing to the fore the geopolitical dimension of francophonie, understood as a political construct, as much as a cultural, artistic and a linguistic space, with French as common language. The book is based on participant observation carried out in Paris in a foyer among Soninke migrants, the principal ethnographic focus, and at the secondary field-site based at the Mouride Islamic Centre of Taverny, which serves to show an important facet of the so-called Francophone Islam.

Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. From backgrounds ranging from political theory, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged, racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately articulated.

Minority populations are often regarded as being 'hard to reach' and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

Recent literature has identified modern "parenting" as an expert-led practice-one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make-and break-relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

Organizational Culture provides a sweeping interdisciplinary overview of the organizational culture literature, showing how and why researchers have disagreed about such fundamental questions as: What is organizational culture? What are the major theoretical perspectives used to understand cultures in organizations? How can a researcher decipher the political interests inherent in research that claims to be political neutral -- merely "descriptive"?

Expert author Joanne Martin examines a variety of conflicting ways to study cultures in organizations, including different theoretical orientations, political ideologies (managerial, critical, and apparently neutral); methods (qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid approaches), and styles of writing about culture (ranging from traditional to postmodern and experimental). In addition, she offers a guide for those who might want to study culture themselves, addressing such issues as: What qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid methods can be used to study culture? What standards are used when reviewers evaluate these various types of research? What innovative ways of writing about culture have been introduced? And finally, what are the most important unanswered questions for future organizational culture researchers?

Intended for graduate students and established scholars who need to understand, value, and utilize highly divergent approaches to the study of culture. The book will also be useful for researchers who do not study culture, but who are interested in the ways political interests affect scholarly writing, the ways critical and managerial approaches to theory differ, the use and justification of qualitative methods in domains where quantitative methods are the norm.

The authors present a historical picture of gender relations in Highlands New Guinea by exploring domains of imagination as revealed in courting songs, ballads, and folktales from across the Highlands but with particular reference to field areas in the western Highlands. Texts and/or translations are from a rich corpus of materials previously unpublished in English. The examples draw the reader into the imaginative world of the people, while the analytical framework sets the discussion firmly into debates within interpretive anthropology.

The aim is to re-examine the images of gender relations in Highlands New Guinea by revealing the sensuous and emotional modalities of expressive folk genres and their aesthetic qualities. Ideas and practices centered on female spirit entities are shown to be important and pervasive in cult contexts, and these spirits were felt to have a significant influence on relations of courtship, marriage, and reproduction. Both women and men are also shown to have complex expressions of emotional dispositions in the spheres of courting and the choice of marital partners. By entering into these domains, the book modifies earlier analyses that have concentrated on antagonism, behavioral taboos, separation, and domination as themes in gender relations in Highland societies.

Since the earliest days of universities, students have told stories about their daily lives, often emphasizing extraordinary, surprising, and baffling events. This book examines the fascinating world of college and university legends. While it primarily looks at legends, it also gives some attention to rumors, pranks, rituals, and other forms of folklore. Included are introductory chapters on types of campus folklore, a collection of some 50 legends from a broad range of colleges and universities, an overview of scholarship, and a discussion of campus legends in movies, television, and popular culture. Since the earliest days of universities, students have told stories about their daily lives, often emphasizing extraordinary, surprising, and baffling events. Legends often dramatize certain hopes and fears, showing how stressful and exciting the college experience can be. From the stereotype of the absent minded professor to the adventures of spring break to the mysterious world of fraternities and sororities, campus legends have also become an important part of popular culture. This book provides a convenient, readable introduction to campus legends. While the volume focuses primarily on legends, it also explores rumors, pranks, rituals, and other related folklore types. The book begins with an overview of college and university folklore. This is followed by a discussion of particular types of legends and other folklore genres. The handbook then presents some 50 examples of college and university legends, including ghost stories, urban legends, food lore, drinking tales, murders and suicides, and many others. These examples are accompanied by brief comments. The book next surveys scholarship on campus folklore and discusses the place of college and university legends in films, television, literature, and popular culture. The volume cites numerous print and electronic resources.

After introducing the dramaturgical perspectives by drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, and the theater, the contributors give examples of enactments for which the persons involved were quite conscious of the fact that they must first establish a stage, or action area, before they could perform. As in theater, the setting of the stage has implicit meanings and actions will then become explicit as the drama unfolds. In Part I of the book, the accounts of the early kibbutzniks who needed an action area for their collective agricultural settlements, the new settlers who wish to reclaim Judea and Samaria, and the African-Americans who discovered that Israel was at the intersection of Hebrew and African traditions, provide variations on this theme.

Part II details varieties of enactments that have and possibly will take place in Israel, including an account of Ethiopian youths who experienced their crossing of the Sudan on their way to Israel to participate in the events of the Millennium. Other accounts of social dramas describe the sulha, the traditional Bedouin method of the resolution of a blood feud between Bedouin tribes, and the religious pilgrimmages by Jews, Arabs, and Christians to holy sites where they sometimes reenact a past event.

Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africa's agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong hunting's rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.