This unique survey of the evolution of the modern Chinese national character incorporates a rich blend of history and theory as well as nation, gender, and film studies. It begins with the dawn of the concept of "nation" in China at the end of the Imperial period, and follows its development from early Republican China to the present People's Republic, drawing on themes of national identity, "Orientalness," racial evolution and purity, cultural and gender roles, regional animosities, historical impediments, and more. The book also takes up the changing American perceptions of Chinese personality development and gender, using materials from American popular culture.

Stereotypes of Mexican American women and the lack of their representation in research literature contribute to misrepresentations of Mexican American culture and their invisibility. In this qualitative study, Mexican American women were interviewed and their life histories examined using an ethnographic and hermeneutical phenomenological approach.

From an interdisciplinary perspective based primarily on European ethnology and political economy, this book explores issues and concepts concerning the link between culture and economy. A historical introduction to key theoretical problems is followed by five empirical chapters discussing aspects of development in rural as well as urban locations. The author considers local leadership, looking in particular at part-time farming, counter-urban migration, and pluriactivity. The classification of informal economy is illustrated with examples drawn from fieldwork, and urban poverty and migration are each explored in detail. A discussion of heritage and identity as a resource for development questions whether the concern with the authenticity of culture(s) may be an inappropriate approach to take. The book concludes with a theoretical reflection on the problematic of culture and economy and a call for a return to the roots of European ethnology as an essentially political science.

Nearly a century ago, it was predicted that Kula, the exchange of shell valuables in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea, would disappear. Not only has this prophecy failed to come true, but today Kula is expanding beyond these island communities to the mainland and Australia.This book unveils the many deep motivations and meanings that lie behind the pursuit of Kula. Focusing upon the visually stimulating carved and painted prow boards that decorate canoes used by the Kula voyagers, Campbell argues that these designs comprise layers of encoded meaning. The unique colour associations and other formal elements speak to Vakutans about key emotional issues within their everyday and spiritual lives. How is mens participation in the Kula linked to their desire to achieve immortality? How do the messages conveyed by the canoe boards converge with those presented in Kula myths and rituals? In what ways do these systems of meaning reveal a male ideology that competes with the prevailing female ideology? Providing an alternative way of understanding the significance of Kula in the Trobriand Islands, "The Art of Kula" makes an influential new contribution to the ethnography of Papua New Guinea.

Cybertypes looks at the impact of the web and its discourses upon our ideas about race, and vice versa. Examining internet advertising, role-playing games, chat rooms, cyberpunk fiction from Neuromancer to The Matrix and web design, Nakamura traces the real-life consequences that follow when we attempt to push issues of race and identity on-line.

""Moving Through and Passing On" rewards the reader with intimate, sensitive observations on Fulani in transition in the Greater Accra region. Its insights into coping, adapting, and change have validity and applicability elsewhere." --Donald E. Vermeer, "African Studies Review"
The Fulani are one of West Africa's most populous and geographically dispersed ethnic groups. Commonly thought of as a pastoral people, primarily engaged in cattle herding, Fulani peoples are in reality highly differentiated in livelihood and patterns of mobility. Despite having a long history of residence in Ghana, Fulani are considered "aliens" in the eyes of the state and "strangers" by the various ethnic groups among whom they reside. Among Fulani themselves, differences of place, circumstance, and experience have generated parallel ambigities on matters of identity and survival. In "Moving Through and Passing On," Yaa P.A. Oppong focuses on the Fulani of the Greater Accra region to offer the first detailed account of the lives of this transnational community in Ghana.

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, Oppong develops detailed case studies and draws upon over two hundred in-depth life histories to explore issues of mobility, survival, and identity among this spacially dispersed and diverse group. Using perspectives and insights gained from oral life histories, private and public ceremonies, and ethnic associations, she examines the sites and circumstances in which people profess to be the "same" or "different" from one another. The markers of Fulani identity-as recognized by Fulani and non-Fulani alike-are examined. Oppong also explores the factors that allow them, as a distinct ethnic category, to maintain and perpetuate this identity and viability in Greater Accra. The metaphoric analogy of "construction sites" is employed to define the explicit and implicit events and recurring processes through which people conceive of themselves as Fulani. These locations and contexts of action include ethnic associations, public gatherings, and common rites of passage. The recurring processes include genealogical reckoning of kinship and endogamous marriage transactions, and the ways in which ties of descent and filiation are used to enhance individual survival and family development goals.

In tracing Fulani mobility, survival, and identity across space and through time, Oppong connects her investigation to universal experiences of migration, social change, education, and family life. "Moving Through and Passing On" will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and Africa area specialists.

Yaa P.A. Oppong received her doctorate in social anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina's landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing. The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced "Katrina fatigue" as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.

The discovery in the 1920s of a huge cache of fossils in the Gobi Desert fuelled a mania for dinosaurs that continues to the present. But the original goal of the expedition was to search for the origins of man. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), director of the American Museum of Natural History, stood at the forefront of the debate over human evolution and the expedition aimed to prove his theory of human origins. Osborn rejected the idea of primate ancestry and constructed a non-Darwinian theory that the evolution of man was the long adventurous story of individuals and groups exerting personal will-power and inborn characteristics to achieve both biological and spiritual success. It is an idea that still echoes today. Study of Osborn's thinking, however, has been obscured by the perception that racism influenced his theories. Brian Regal paints a different and more textured picture in this book - he shows that Osborn's views on race, like his political ideas, were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine. His belief in the Central Asian origins of man, his role as an activist for eugenic reform and immigration controls, his support for Nordicism, his place in the 'New' versus 'Old' biology debate, his role in the Christian Fundamentalist controversy, the Scopes Monkey trial, and finally his construction of the 'Dawn Man' hypothesis - all stemmed from his desire to support his human evolution theory, and point the way to salvation. This biography charts Osborn's intellectual development, from its roots in the eclectic Christianity of his mother, through his student days with Arnold Guyot, James McCosh, and T.H. Huxley, to his mature work at the American Museum. It examines his trials and tribulations, friendships and conflicts, and the world in which he lived: all contributed to the construction of his theory. It is the dramatic story of a man holding onto ideas that for him represented the very meaning of life itself.

The distinction between humans and the natural world is an artefact and more a matter of linguistic communication than a conceptual separation. This Element proposes ecosemiotics as an epistemological tool to better understand the relationship between human and natural processes. Ecosemiotics with its affinity to the humanities, is presented here as the best disciplinary approach for interpreting complex environmental conditions for a broad audience, across a multitude of temporal and spatial scales. It is proposed as an intellectual bridge between divergent sciences to incorporate within a unique framework different paradigms. The ecosemiotic paradigm helps to explain how organisms interact with their external environments using mechanisms common to all living beings that capture external information and matter for internal usage. This paradigm can be applied in all the circumstances where a living being (man, animal, plant, fungi, etc.) performs processes to stay alive.

Winner, 2017 Margaret Mead Award presented by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2015 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize presented by the Society for Medical Anthropology Analyzes the ways in which nurses work to collect and preserve evidence while addressing the needs of sexual assault victims as patients Every year in the US, thousands of women and hundreds of men participate in sexual assault forensic examinations. Drawing on four years of participatory research in a Baltimore emergency room, Sameena Mulla reveals the realities of sexual assault response in the forensic age. Taking an approach developed at the intersection of medical and legal anthropology, she analyzes the ways in which nurses work to collect and preserve evidence while addressing the needs of sexual assault victims as patients. Mulla argues that blending the work of care and forensic investigation into a single intervention shapes how victims of violence understand their own suffering, recovery, and access to justice-in short, what it means to be a "victim". As nurses race the clock to preserve biological evidence, institutional practices, technologies, and even state requirements for documentation undermine the way in which they are able to offer psychological and physical care. Yet most of the evidence they collect never reaches the courtroom and does little to increase the number of guilty verdicts. Mulla illustrates the violence of care with painstaking detail, illuminating why victims continue to experience what many call "secondary rape" during forensic intervention, even as forensic nursing is increasingly professionalized. Revictimization can occur even at the hands of conscientious nurses, simply because they are governed by institutional requirements that shape their practices. The Violence of Care challenges the uncritical adoption of forensic practice in sexual assault intervention and post-rape care, showing how forensic intervention profoundly impacts the experiences of violence, justice, healing and recovery for victims of rape and sexual assault.

Illustrated with prints from a unique archive of glass and celluloid negatives from the Aegean island of Anafi, this book deals with the life of people who were sent into internal exile under the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1942). Like others before and after, this regime used imprisonment, internal deportation and exile as a means of containing and isolating a wide variety of people who were thought to be 'public dangers'. Drawing on published and unpublished memoirs and on firsthand accounts of former exiles, it gives a vivid picture of a by no means unified collection of people, facing a common set of problems on an island at the borders of the Greek State. During the Occupation, the Anafi exiles faced privation, hunger and finally the dissolution of the commune. This is a human drama which will interest a wide range of readers.

The Circassians have a long history forged in the crucible of their homeland in the mountains and valleys of the Northwest Caucasus. Of the many peoples of the Caucasus, they are notable for their wide and vociferous diaspora, particularly in Turkey and the Middle East. After living for many centuries in comparative obscurity under the shadow of Russia, the Circassians staged a minor comeback after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As was the case with other regions in the Caucasus, this rebirth into nationhood was swiftly stifled, yet today's Circassian territories have been rediscovered as a cultural and political focus for Circassians globally. This book provides an in-depth description by an "insider" of the ancient beliefs, customs and traditions of a remarkable people - offering insights into a fascinating world, much of which until now remained unknown.

In this timely and well-argued book, author Philip Nicholson offers a provocative explanation of the force and place of race in modern history, showing that race and nation have a linked history. Using the deliberately ironic metaphor of the double helix, the author shows the close historical connection of race and nation as each interrelates with the other in shaping and carrying social and institutional practices over many centuries.

-- Five themes recur throughout the work:
-- modernity is built on the twin pillars of race and nation;
-- national instability, rivalry, and imperial conquest -- outside of dynastic, religious, or feudal disputes -- evoke differential (i.e., racial) human social categories, loyalties, and mythologies;
-- racial vilification emerges out of material and cultural expropriation;
-- racial degradation is typically the inverse projection of dominant national normative values, beliefs, or ideals; and
-- race and nation share in the twists and turns of modern histo and are inseparably linked and interdependent.

Sambach brings together an ethnograhic study of a school and community in East Africa. Stambach focuses on the role school plays in the development of the children's identity and relationships to their parents and community, as well as in the development of the region. At issue here are the competing influences of Western modernity and the cultural traditions of East Africa-ideas about gender roles, sexuality, identity, and family and communal obligations are all at stake. Stambach looks at the controversial practice of female circumcision in the context of school and community teachings about girls' bodies and examines cultural signifiers like music, clothing and food to discuss the tensions in the region.

Is TV news racist? If the purpose of local news is to cover individual communities and to present issues of interest and concern to local audiences, why are local newscasts so similar in markets around the country? These are the questions that motivated Heider's research, leading to the development of this book. Recognizing that local news is the outlet through which most people get their news, Heider ventured into the local television newsrooms in two moderate-size, culturally diverse U.S. markets to observe the news process. In this report, he uses his insider's perspective to examine why local television news coverage of people of color does not occur in more meaningful ways.
Heider examines the perceptions of racism and ethnicity, and addresses such dichotomies as "white" news (content determined by white managers) being delivered by non-white news anchors, thus giving the appearance of "non-white" news. He also considers how coverage of minorities influences viewers' perceptions of their minority neighbors. Heider then sets forth a new theoretical concept--incognizant racism--as a way of explaining how news workers consistently ignore news in significant portions of the communities they cover.
This contribution to the minorities and media discussion provides important insights into the newsroom decision-making process and the sociology and structure of newsrooms. It is required reading for all who are involved in news reporting, mass communication, media and minority studies, and cultural issues in today's society.

This text applies a consumption approach to the study of ethnicity and nationalism, thereby challenging the usual "top down" approach to nation-formation. Contributors look at different forms of consumption, including the national lottery, theme parks, museums, cross-cultural handbooks, pop songs and audio-visual material. Chapters span diverse parts of Asia, from Korea, Japan and China to Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

This rich source book informs its reader in a comparative perspective about the political and social-economic past and present of fifteen Western, Central and Eastern European countries. This includes the economic and social aspects of the development of the nation state, descriptions of the current political structures and institutions, an account of the types of ethnic composition of the populations, definitions of citizenship and a background to the existing political parties and preferences. The countries involved are: the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, France, Spain and Italy. The authors are scholars in the fields of nationalism and ethnic conflict and they were invited to write their country chapters along the lines of a common format, paying special attention to the notion of state and nation building processes, citizenship definitions and minority issues. This book is a comprehensive reference guide for students and scholars in the fields of social sciences, European studies, history and other related disciplines and generally to those who are interested in the past and present of any one of the large number of countries described.

In this timely and well-argued book, author Philip Nicholson offers a provocative explanation of the force and place of race in modern history, showing that race and nation have a linked history. Using the deliberately ironic metaphor of the double helix, the author shows the close historical connection of race and nation as each interrelates with the other in shaping and carrying social and institutional practices over many centuries.

Five themes recur throughout the work: modernity is built on the twin pillars of race and nation;

national instability, rivalry, and imperial conquest -- outside of dynastic, religious, or feudal disputes -- evoke differential (i.e., racial) human social categories, loyalties, and mythologies;

racial vilification emerges out of material and cultural expropriation;

racial degradation is typically the inverse projection of dominant national normative values, beliefs, or ideals; and

race and nation share in the twists and turns of modern history and are inseparably linked and interdependent.

Series Information:
Zones of Religion

This is the first book to examine the connections between diaspora - the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another - and its representations in visual culture. Two foundational articles by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj provide points of departure for an exploration of the meanings of diaspora for cultural identity and artistic practice.
A distinguished group of contributors, who include Alan Sinfield, Irit Rogoff, and Eunice Lipton, address the rich complexity of diasporic cultures and art, but with a focus on the visual culture of the Jewish and African diasporas. Individual articles address the Jewish diaspora and visual culture from the 19th century to the present, and work by African American and Afro-Brazilian artists.

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.

This book focuses on how Latin American people and cultural practices have moved from one continent to another, and specifically to London. How do Latin Americans experience such a process and what part do different people play in the re-making of Latin identities in the neighbourhoods, parks, bars and dance clubs of London? Through a critical engagement with theories of globalization, the geography of power, cultural identity and the transformation of places, the book explores how the formation of Latin identities is directly related to wider social, economic and political processes. Drawing on the voices of migrant peoples, community activists, shop owners, sports organizers, club owners, dancers, dance teachers, musicians and disc jockeys, the book argues that the micro movements of people - through a shopping mall or across a dance floor in a club - are directly connected to global processes involving the regulated movement of citizens, sounds and images across national boundaries and through cities.

In an increasing number of countries, women are more likely to emigrate to the United States than men. This book examines this trend, comparing selected case studies of Guatemalan women in Los Angeles who chose to immigrate, with a group of women who did not make their own decisions to immigrate, to determine what the conditions are in Guatemala that prompt women's migration. Kohpahl, a recent doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA, includes discussions of which type of woman decides to immigrate and what the conditions are for the women who remain behind.

Comparing migration in China itself to Chinese migration to Europe, this book critically assesses received ideas, perceptions and theories concerning internal and international migration.

This book of interdisciplinary readings on Gypsies is sensitive to the Romani point of view and avoids exoticizing or patronizing the Gypsies and their culture. Recurrent themes in the readings include: the historical oppression of the Gypsies including contemporary xenophobia and violence; the nonstatic, heterogeneous nature of Gypsy cultures; the persistence of racist stereotypes; and personal and institutional Gypsy/non-Gypsy relationships. Nearly all of the classic essays updated for this volume tell stories of the persistance of the Roma in the face of savage atrocities and appalling living conditions.