First published in 1974, this collection of classic case studies in the ethnography of speaking had a formative influence on the field. No other volume has so successfully provided a broad, cross-cultural survey of the use, role and function of language and speech in social life. The essays deal with traditional societies in Native North, Middle, and South America, Africa, and Oceania, as well as English, French, and Yiddish speaking communities in Europe and North America and Afro-American communities in North America and the Caribbean. Now reissued, the collection includes a key introduction by the editors that traces the subsequent development of the ethnography of speaking and indicates directions for future research. The theoretical and methodological concepts and perspectives that illuminated the first edition are recognized anon and valued by many disciplines beyond that of linguistic anthropology. Scholars and students whose backgrounds may be in literature, speech communication, performance studies or ethnomusicology will equally welcome this edition.

Despite having emerged in the heyday of a dominant Europe, of which Ancient Greece is the hallowed spiritual and intellectual ancestor, anthropology has paradoxically shown relatively little interest in contemporary Greek culture. In this innovative and ambitious book, Michael Herzfeld moves Greek Ethnography from the margins to the centre of anthropological theory, revealing the theoretical insights that can be gained by so doing. He shows that the ideology that originally led to the creation of anthropology also played a large part in the growth of the modern Greek nation-state, and that Greek ethnography can therefore serve as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself. He further demonstrates the role that scholarly fields, including anthropology, have played in the construction of contemporary Greek culture and Greek identity.

This pathbreaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media -- including websites, email and chat -- the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a comprehensive approach to new media. It points to the future direction of Internet research, proposing a detailed agenda for comparative ethnographic study of the cultural significance and effects of the Internet in modern society. Clearly written for the non-specialist reader, it offers a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds. An innovative tie-in with the book's own website provides copious illustrations amounting to over 2,000 web-pages that bring the material right to your computer.

This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of identity through both movement and attachment. The study follows the Italian identity project since 1975, when community leaders first raised concerns about 'the future of invisible immigrants'. The author uses the image of 'invisible immigrants' as the starting point of her inquiry, for it captures the ambivalent position Italians occupy within the British political and social landscape. As a cultural minority absorbed within the white European majority, their project is steeped in the ideal of visibility that relies on various 'displays of presence'. Drawing on a wide range of material, from historical narratives, to political debates, processions, religious rituals, activities of the Women's Club, war remembrances, card games, and beauty contests, the author explores the notion of migrant belongings in relation to performative acts that produce what they claim to be reproducing. She reveals how these acts work upon the historical and cultural environment to re-member localized terrains of migrant belongings, while they simultaneously manufacture gendered, generational and ethnicized subjects. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, 'diaspora' studies, and feminist/queer theory, this book is distinctive in connecting an empirical study with wider theoretical debates on identity. Nominated for the Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize 2001.

This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of identity through both movement and attachment.
The study follows the Italian identity project since 1975, when community leaders first raised concerns about 'the future of invisible immigrants'. The author uses the image of 'invisible immigrants' as the starting point of her inquiry, for it captures the ambivalent position Italians occupy within the British political and social landscape. As a cultural minority absorbed within the white European majority, their project is steeped in the ideal of visibility that relies on various 'displays of presence'.
Drawing on a wide range of material, from historical narratives, to political debates, processions, religious rituals, activities of the Women's Club, war remembrances, card games, and beauty contests, the author explores the notion of migrant belongings in relation to performative acts that produce what they claim to be reproducing. She reveals how these acts work upon the historical and cultural environment to re-member localized terrains of migrant belongings, while they simultaneously manufacture gendered, generational and ethnicized subjects.
Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, 'diaspora' studies, and feminist/queer theory, this book is distinctive in connecting an empirical study with wider theoretical debates on identity.
Nominated for the Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize 2001

In August 1945, the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is hardly known is that 4,000 Nisei (Japanese Americans), the sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants who had been sent back to Japan to be educated before World War II erupted, were caught in the Hiroshima bombing. This extraordinary book commemorates the 3,000 Nisei who died from the atomic blast in Hiroshima and documents the plight of another 1,000 "hibakusha" (survivors of the bomb) who returned to the West Coast after the war.Branded as "foreigners" in wartime Japan and as "enemies" in postwar United States, their existence as victims of the atomic blast has not been recognized by either the Japanese or the U.S. government, both of which have refused to alleviate the medical and political problems of the survivors. Drawing on primary sources and rich interview data, Rinjiro Sodei has contributed an original scholarly work to the literature on World War II and the Asian-American experience. This book bears witness to the human calamities of the nuclear age and to the dignity of these Japanese Americans striving to obtain their rights and sustain their bicultural identity.

Drawing together a century of widely scattered scientific and technical reports, as well as 25 years of first-hand experience in the field, Scott Anfinson provides the first comprehensive overview of the people who inhabited the Prairie Lake Region of the northwestern Plains before the arrival of European explorers. Focusing on southwestern Minnesota, north-central Iowa, and south-eastern South Dakota, the author describes the dramatic environmental changes that occurred during the precontact millennia, and the impact on the human, animal, and plant cultures of the region once treated as the insignificant edge of the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands. His synthesis reveals how the successions of peoples in this transition region selectively accepted -- and denied -- influences from the better-known cultures around them. Archaeologists and historians of Native Americans, as well as amateur and armchair archaeologists, will welcome this valuable addition to the region's geological, natural and cultural history.

Death, for bacteria, is not inevitable. Protect a bacterium from predators, and provide it with adequate food and space to grow, and it would continue living--and reproducing asexually--forever. But a paramecium (a slightly more advanced single-cell organism), under the same ideal conditions, would stop dividing after about 200 generations--and die. Death, for paramecia and their offspring, is inevitable. Unless they have sex. If at any point during that 200 or so generations, two of the progeny of our paramecium have sex, their clock will be reset to zero. They and their progeny are granted another 200 generations. Those who fail to have sex eventually die. Immortality for bacteria is automatic; for all other living beings--including humans--immortality depends on having sex. But why is this so? Why must death be inevitable? And what is the connection between death and sexual reproduction?
In Sex and the Origins of Death, William R. Clark looks at life and death at the level of the cell, as he addresses such profound questions as why we age, why death exists, and why death and sex go hand in hand. Clark reveals that there are in fact two kinds of cell death--accidental death, caused by extreme cold or heat, starvation, or physical destruction, and "programmed cell death," initiated by codes embedded in our DNA. (Bacteria have no such codes.) We learn that every cell in our body has a self-destruct program embedded into it and that cell suicide is in fact a fairly commonplace event. We also discover that virtually every aspect of a cell's life is regulated by its DNA, including its own death, that the span of life is genetically determined (identical twins on average die 36 months apart, randomly selected siblings 106 months apart), that human tissue in culture will divide some 50 times and then die (an important exception being tumor cells, which divide indefinitely). But why do our cells have such programs? Why must we die? To shed light on this question, Clark reaches far back in evolutionary history, to the moment when "inevitable death" (death from aging) first appeared. For cells during the first billion years, death, when it occurred, was accidental; there was nothing programmed into them that said they must die. But fierce competition gradually led to multicellular animals--size being an advantage against predators--and with this change came cell specialization and, most important, germ cells in which reproductive DNA was segregated. When sexual reproduction evolved, it became the dominant form of reproduction on the planet, in part because mixing DNA from two individuals corrects errors that have crept into the code. But this improved DNA made DNA in the other (somatic) cells not only superfluous, but dangerous, because somatic DNA might harbor mutations. Nature's solution to this danger, Clark concludes, was programmed death--the somatic cells must die. Unfortunately, we are the somatic cells. Death is necessary to exploit to the fullest the advantages of sexual reproduction.
In Sex and the Origins of Death, William Clark ranges far and wide over fascinating terrain. Whether describing a 62-year-old man having a major heart attack (and how his myocardial cells rupture and die), or discussing curious life-forms that defy any definition of life (including bacterial spores, which can regenerate after decades of inactivity, and viruses, which are nothing more than DNA or RNA wrapped in protein), this brilliant, profound volume illuminates the miraculous workings of life at its most elemental level and finds in these tiny spaces the answers to some of our largest questions.

"Struggling with Development" is a study of the complex relationships among international development, hunger, and gender in the context of political violence in the Philippines. This ethnography demonstrates that gender-specific international development, which has among its main goals the alleviation of hunger in women and children and the raising of women's social position, has instead perpetuated the problems of hunger and gender inequality in societies.This ethnographic study of upland Ifugao social and cultural life in the Philippines portrays how Ifugao women's unequal relationship to men has been perpetuated by international development programs largely because development personnel tend to ignore ongoing processes of social inequality operating within local communities and between nations. International development programs leave local forms of inequality unchanged and sometimes increase social inequality despite their efforts to improve women's and children's social position and nutritional status. Examples and analyses of how local forms of inequality are ignored by international development programs are provided in the text. This book questions the international "women in development" thrust of some feminist and development scholarships and organizations.Lynn Kwiatkowski also demonstrates how health care has been used in a variety of ways by different groups to serve ends other than the reduction of hunger or illness, including religious healing and military and revolutionary healing generated during the internal political conflict in the Philippines. "Struggling with Development" will be useful for advanced courses in medical anthropology and sociology, gender studies, development studies, and Asian studies.

Majorities are made, not born. This book argues that there are no pure majorities in the Asia-Pacific region, broadly defined, nor in the West. Numerically, ethnically, politically, and culturally, societies make and mark their majorities under specific historical, political, and social circumstances. This position challenges Samuel Huntington's influential thesis that civilizations are composed of more or less homogeneous cultures, suggesting instead that culture is as malleable as the politics that informs it.
The fourteen contributors to this volume argue that emphasis on minority/majority rights is based on uncritically accepted ideas of purity, numerical superiority, and social consensus. Emphases upon multiculturalism can become ways of masking serious political, ethnic, and class differences merely in terms of cultural difference, and affirmative-action policies can isolate, identify, and stigmatize minorities as often as they homogenize, unify, and naturalize majorities.
This book analyzes how minorities are made and marked across cultural, regional, and national boundaries from Hawai'i to Turkey, a region that encompasses extraordinarily diverse populations and political developments and that is often regarded as composed of relatively homogeneous majorities.
This volume details discourses of majority and minority, allowing exploration of a number of questions of more general concern in the humanities and social sciences, including: How does one become officially "ethnic" in many states in Asia? How are understandings of majority and minority cultures created and shaped in specific political and historical contexts? How does the state shape the way people think of themselves? How do people resist, transform, and appropriate these official representations?

When evolutionary biology stretched out a tentacle called sociobiology and began to probe human behavior back in the 1970s, there was no room for neutrality. Advocates of the new science hailed the dawn of a new era in our understanding of human behavior, while opponents wrung their hands with concern over the new field's potential to transform and even destroy anthropology and other social and behavioral sciences. Twenty years later, little has changed. Anthropology and its sister disciplines are still intact and thriving, though they seldom make use of insights from evolutionary biology. Cultural anthropology in particular has recoiled from the biological threat by moving away from the sciences and toward the humanities. During that same time, a new generation of scholars in biological anthropology, psychology, and other fields has made great progress by using evolutionary theory to understand human behavior, applying it to everything from mating and parenting to the study of mental illness. The success of this research program is threatened, however, by its lack of a serious role for the concept of culture."That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior" is an effort to develop a scientific study of human behavior that is at once evolutionary and cultural. In a lively, readable style, it deals with such serious, scholarly issues as how to best define culture, the question of whether culture is present in other species, human universals and human diversity, the relationship between culture and behavior, and cultural and moral relativism. It covers existing models of the relationship between cultural and biological evolution, including the concept of the meme and the new science of memetics, as well as the author's own work on the role of culture in human communications that draws upon the study of animal signals.

This valuable study of 20th-century reservation life, first published in 1939, portrays 150 families on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota in a period of loss of traditional ways. Sister M. Inez Hilger used a straightforward approach in her research and elicited a wealth of information. By concentrating on both the traditional Chippewa (Ojibway) ways as well as on the adaptations the families had made, Hilger was able to present a Chippewa world in transition. She placed her broad cultural analysis in the context of reservation housing. The many quotes from the people she interviewed bring a lively, personal expression to the story. This reprint edition contains a new introduction by Brenda J. Child, assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, and Kimberly M. Blaeser, professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Throughout the twentieth century, Spanish people have deployed conflicting sexual moralities in their struggle for political supremacy within the state. The Spanish Gypsies or Gitanos, who live at the very bottom of the Spanish socio-economic scale, have appropriated this concern with gender morality and, in the process, have reinvented themselves as the only honourable Spaniards. Although the Gitano gender ideology has a distinctively Spanish flavour, it revolves around a conceptualization of the female body that is radically different from that of other Spaniards.
The subtle exploration of these acts of cultural invention is one of the original features of this important new ethnography. Another even more striking aspect of the work is the author's vision of the 'impermanent' nature of the Gitano social order and the absence of any representation of 'community' or 'society'. Unlike their non-Gypsy neighbours, Gitanos do not use concepts of tradition, territory or social harmony as bases for their singularity. Instead, they focus on the evaluation of personal moral performances in the present. In a cultural universe where all activities are markers of shared identity, and where personhood is always sexed, men and women continually enact the superiority of Gypsies over non-Gypsies. Through dress, manner and the management of emations, or at wedding rituals where the virginity of young brides is put to the test, the body works as the site of these processes.

Focusing on the role of the human body, anthropologist Ulrike Linke examines the ways Nazism and its legacy has defined German identity since 1945. Beginning with the Nazi eroticization of the bodily ideal, Linke explains how post-war Germany has organized its understanding of the body including:
* public nudism
* the revival of the cult of the body * the feminisation of guest labourers.

Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally important and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups.

In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals."

At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contmeporary American culture and race relations.

A major critique of the globalization of the culture principle in anthropology. This study contends that the subjective anthropology promoted through postmodernism represents an extreme development of long established, highly patronizing and misleading evaluations in the anthropologist's creative role in the construction of theory. Arguing that theory building is dependent on the actual study of peoples - a study which is empirically based and historically sensitive - the book advocates the "fieldwork mode of production and reproduction." The simplest model for the construction of empirically-grounded theory involves three interacting sets of factors: the subjective ethnographer and their deployment of current theoretical assumptions; the multi-layered ethnographic "facts" disclosed by fieldwork; and the geopolitical and historical contexts in which fieldwork is conducted.

In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also being lost. At the same time, an enormous body of knowledge about nature, plants and animals is vanishing. However, in parallel with this, the people of the Pacific are confronted with new modes of knowledge and newly introduced technologies through imported educational systems, missions of various denominations, and the media. They do not passively assimilate this knowledge but adopt, adapt, and apply it in a syncretistic way.These changes will have permanent effects on the individual lives of people in the region and their knowledge about themselves and their surrounding 'world'. This stimulating book tracks the course of these developments and offers revealing insights into the complexity of Pacific peoples' responses to the process of globalization.

In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also being lost. At the same time, an enormous body of knowledge about nature, plants and animals is vanishing.
However, in parallel with this, the people of the Pacific are confronted with new modes of knowledge and newly introduced technologies through imported educational systems, missions of various denominations, and the media. They do not passively assimilate this knowledge but adopt, adapt, and apply it in a syncretistic way.
These changes will have permanent effects on the individual lives of people in the region and their knowledge about themselves and their surrounding 'world'. This stimulating book tracks the course of these developments and offers revealing insights into the complexity of Pacific peoples' responses to the process of globalization.

Asian Indians figure prominently among the educated, middle class subset of contemporary immigrants. They move quickly into residences, jobs, and lifestyles that provide little opportunity with fellow migrants, yet they continue to see themselves as a distinctive community within contemporary American society. In Life Lines Bacon chronicles the creation of a community--Indian-born parents and their children living in the Chicago metropolitan area--bound by neither geographic proximity, nor institutional ties, and explores the processes through which ethnic identity is transmitted to the next generation.
Bacon's study centers upon the engrossing portraits of five immigrant families, each one a complex tapestry woven from the distinctive voices of its family members. Both extensive field work among community organizations and analyses of ethnic media help Bacon expose the complicated interplay between the private social interactions of family life and the stylized rhetoric of "Indianness" that permeates public life.
This inventive analysis suggests that the process of assimilation which these families undergo parallels the assimilation process experienced by anyone who conceives of him or herself as a member of a distinctive community in search of a place in American society.

In the revised and updated second edition of this comprehensive book, the first anthology to integrate social-psychological literature on prejudice with sociological and historical investigations, contributors introduce readers to the key debates and principal writings on racial and ethnic conflict, representing conservative, liberal, and radical positions. Presented in debate format, each section offers a provocative discussion of contemporary problems and issues, allowing students to take part in the controversies from an informed perspective. The editors' introductions provide current data and describe cutting-edge arguments that are reshaping the study of race and ethnicity today. The second edition boasts new readings which serve to further enhance the dialogue on America's continuing struggle with racial issues. Contributors tackle a wide array of issues which plague the country today--from discrimination and immigration to education and politics--and ask how we can affect change as we move into the twenty-first century.

This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these movements arose when they did. Emphasizing the demographic situation of American Indians prior to the movements, Professor Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians following their virtual collapse. By joining the movements, he contends, tribes sought to assure survival by increasing their numbers through returning the dead to life. Thornton supports this thesis empirically by closely examining the historical context of the two movements and by assessing tribal participation in them, revealing particularly how population size and decline influenced participation among and within American Indian tribes. He also considers American Indian population change after the Ghost Dance periods and shows that participation in the movements actually did lead the way to a demographic recovery for certain tribes. This occurred, Thornton argues, not, of course, by returning dead American Indians to life, but by creating enhanced tribal solidarity.

This book examines the concept of adaptation in four major fields in the human sciences. Genetic aspects are first considered through an examination of the human genes which have so far been identified as conferring survival value in particular environmental circumstances. The drift versus selection argument is also fully reviewed. The second contribution concerns the physiological changes which occur when individuals move from one environment to another. In the past, most attention has been given to the mechanisms of these changes, but here the focus is on the effects. The third contribution is directed at the analysis of behaviour - especially social behaviour. The application of kin selection and reciprocal attraction theories to humans is explored and the value of these approaches explained, whether the behaviour has a genetic basis or not. The final essay deals with the relevance of the adaptation concept to the social sciences and especially to social anthropology. It demonstrates that an ecological approach to understanding the nature and structure of human societies demands attention to adaptation.Reprinted in paperback for the first time and with a new foreword, this book, which serves as an excellent teaching text, clearly shows how attempts at integration in each of these various fields can benefit the study of human evolution, social structure and organization from all perspectives.

An original anthology of essays illuminating the role of nativism in America's history Nativism-an intense opposition to immigrants and other non- native members of society-has been deeply imbedded in the American character from the earliest days of the nation. Correspondingly, nativism, overtly or covertly, has always permeated our national discourse. Dating from the Alien and Sedition controversy of 1798 to California's recent Proposition 187, nativism has long been a driving force in policy making, a particular irony in a country founded and populated by immigrants. This anthology of original essays is informed at its core by George Santayana's famous edict that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Examining the current surge in nativism in light of past waves of anti- immigrant sentiment, the volume takes an unflinchingly critical look at the realities and rhetoric of the new nativism. How can the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II illuminate our understanding of the English Only movement today? How has the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty evolved since its dedication and what can it tell us about the American disposition to immigration? What is the new nativism? What are the semantic and rhetorical similarities, if any, between the most shrill nativist voices of the present, such as Pat Buchanan's or Peter Brimelow's in his widely publicized book Alien Nation, and National Socialist propaganda in 1930s Germany? Juan Perea has here assembled a truly interdisciplinary group of contributors to emphasize the changing relationship between citizens and immigrants, and the effects of economics, history, and demographics on that relationship. Immigrants Out! provides a needed antidote to the often poisonous attacks on America's most vulnerable.

In this book, based on intensive fieldwork in a major French provincial city (Lyon), Grillo shows how an anthropological perspective enhances our understanding of institutional processes and ideological forces in industrial society, presenting a detailed account of relations between the indigenous French population and immigrant workers and their families of non-French origin. The framework of the book is provided by two linked themes. First, the study shows how the situation of immigrants is represented ideologically by various elements of French society, as well as by the immigrants themselves, in different ways as 'problematic'. Dr Grillo examines this ideological dimension initially by contrasting the discourses of the political Right and Left concerning a range of immigrant 'problems', for example in the fields of housing, family life, school, language use and work. He then shows that not only are there significant ideological differences within both Right and Left, but also similarities between them which stem from certain basic cultural preoccupations of French thought.

In departing from the traditional stance taken by anthropologists, who study 'others' ethnographically, this timely book explores forms of self-inscription on the part of both the ethnographer and those 'others' who are studied. Informed by developments in postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism, this is an original contribution to the growing dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. The chapters build upon recent reconsiderations of the uses and meaning of personal narrative to examine the ways in which selves and social forms are culturally constituted through biographical genres. Ethnic autobiography, self-reflexivity in ethnography, and native ethnography raise provocative questions about a range of issues for the contemporary scholar: authenticity of voice; ethnographic authority; and the degree to which autoethnography constitutes resistance to hegemonic bodies of discourse. Examined here in a variety of cultural and political contexts, writing about the self offers challenging insights into the construction and transformation of identities and cultural meanings.