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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology
Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980
has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier
twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional
southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that
this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years,
challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South
as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal
migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by
Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the
region's relation to the nation and a range of transnational
scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti),
transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and
transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers
under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John
Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha
Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen,
Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate
southern studies by drawing on theories of "scale" that originated
in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in
which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other
scales from the local to the global, making both literature about
the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in
scope.
This volume presents new data and interpretations from research at
Florida's Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and
convert Indigenous groups to Christianity. In these chapters,
archaeologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists draw on the past
thirty years of work at sites from St. Augustine to the
panhandle.Contributors explore the lived experiences of the
Indigenous people, Franciscan friars, and Spanish laypeople who
lived in La Florida's mission communities. In the process, they
address missionization, ethnogenesis, settlement, foodways,
conflict, and warfare. One study reconstructs the sonic history of
Mission San Luis with soundscape compositions. The volume also
sheds light on the destruction of the Apalachee-Spanish Missions by
the English. The recent investigations highlighted here
significantly change earlier understandings by emphasizing the kind
and degree of social, economic, and ideological relationships that
existed between Apalachee and Timucuan communities and the Spanish.
Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida updates and rewrites the
history of the Spanish mission effort in the region.
Carlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery,
challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very
foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical." His
landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply
etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where
don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer's knowledge--the
knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a
spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our
lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to
retain. Castaneda describes how don Juan and his party, left
thisworld--"the warriors of don Juan's party had caught me for an
eternal instant, before they vanished into the total light, before
the Eagle let them go through"--and how he, himself, upon
witnessing such a sight, jumped into the abyss.
In this volume, Christina Friberg investigates the influence of
Cahokia, the largest city of North America's Mississippian culture
between AD 1050 and 1350, on smaller communities throughout the
midcontinent. Using evidence from recent excavations at the
Audrey-North site in the Lower Illinois River Valley, Friberg
examines the cultural give-and-take Audrey inhabitants experienced
between new Cahokian customs and old Woodland ways of life.
Comparing the architecture, pottery, and lithics uncovered here
with data from thirty-five other sites across five different
regions, Friberg reveals how the social, economic, and political
influence of Cahokia shaped the ways Audrey inhabitants negotiated
identities and made new traditions. Friberg's broad interregional
analysis also provides evidence that these diverse groups of people
were engaged in a network of interaction and exchange outside
Cahokia's control. The Making of Mississippian Tradition offers a
fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of cultural exchange in
precolonial settlements, and its detailed reconstruction of Audrey
society offers a new, more nuanced interpretation of how and why
Mississippian lifeways developed. A volume in the Florida Museum of
Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series.
Jan Ken Po, Ai Kono Sho"" ""Junk An'a Po, I Canna Show"" These
words to a simple child's game brought from Japan and made local,
the property of all of Hawaii's people, symbolize the cultural
transformation experienced by Hawaii's Japanese. It is the story of
this experience that Dennis Ogawa tells so well here.
Archaeology in Dominica examines the everyday lives of enslaved and
free workers at Morne Patate, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Caribbean plantation that produced sugar, coffee, and provisions.
Focusing on household archaeology, this volume helps document the
underrepresented history of slavery and colonialism on the edge of
the British Empire. Contributors discuss how enslaved and free
people were entangled in shifting economic and ecological systems
during the plantation's 200-year history, most notably the
introduction of sugarcane as an export commodity. Analyzing
historical records, the landscape geography of the plantation, and
material remains from the residences of laborers, the authors
synthesize extensive data from this site and compare it to that of
other excavations across the Eastern Caribbean. Using historical
archaeology to investigate the political ecology of Morne Patate
opens up a deeper understanding of the environmental legacies of
colonial empires, as well as the long-term impacts of plantation
agriculture on the Caribbean region and its people. A volume in the
Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series.
Juarez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s,
and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's
most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon
that traveled from person to person, across rivers and
borders-wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place.
From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the
street, Julian Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the
words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juarez,
creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the
city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries
consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English
definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from
interviews-stories that put the terms in context and provide a
personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters,
and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs's evocative
illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein's famous
Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions
in ABCedario de Juarez both document and interpret the everyday
violence of this vital border city.
Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of
international relations by providing a full account of political
organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE
up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological
and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they
discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the
'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations
perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe
tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as
explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be
understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly
dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's
ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of
succession politics can help us to understand the policies and
behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.
Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked
in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class
mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is
radically transforming how India's citizens perceive class. Living
Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with
media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the
currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can
produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue
of class in India, introducing four people who live in the
""second-tier"" city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic
designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker.
Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how
class is determined by both subjective perceptions and objective
conditions, documenting Madurai residents' palpable day-to-day
experiences of class while also tracking their long-term impacts.
By analyzing the intertwined symbolic and economic importance of
phenomena like wedding ceremonies, religious practices,
philanthropy, and loan arrangements, Dickey's study reveals the
material consequences of local class identities. Simultaneously, it
highlights the poignant drive for dignity in the face of moralizing
class stereotypes. Through extensive interviews, Dickey scrutinizes
the idioms and commonplaces used by residents to justify class
inequality and, occasionally, to subvert it. Along the way, Living
Class in Urban India reveals the myriad ways that class status is
interpreted and performed, embedded in everything from cell phone
usage to religious worship.
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