Sequestered within the heart of a cosmopolitan city is an exotic world a place where diamonds, astronomically priced, are bought and sold on the strength of a handshake, and business disputes are resolved according to ancient Jewish principles of arbitration. Yet it is also a modern industry facing the same fundamental global changes affecting all businesses today.In Diamond Stories, Renee Rose Shield leads us into the unexamined realm of wholesale diamond traders in New York. Related to several well-respected traders, she had unprecedented access to a society normally closed to outside...
Sequestered within the heart of a cosmopolitan city is an exotic world a place where diamonds, astronomically priced, are bought and sold on the stren...
Korean immigrants to the United States establish their own small businesses at a rate exceeding that of immigrants from any other nation, with more than one third of all Korean immigrant adults involved in small businesses. Kyeyoung Park examines this...
Korean immigrants to the United States establish their own small businesses at a rate exceeding that of immigrants from any other nation, with more th...
Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the transition occurred during the 1970s, and the area's two-decade experience of multiracial diversity offers us an early look at the future of urban America. The result of more than a dozen years' work, this remarkable book immerses us in Elmhurst-Corona's social and political life from the 1960s through the 1990s.
First settled in 1652, Elmhurst-Corona by 1960 housed a mix of Germans, Irish,...
Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-C...
When a nursing facility for AIDS patients is planned for a city neighborhood, residents might be expected to respond, "Not in my backyard." But, as Jane Balin recounts in A Neighborhood Divided, when that community is known for its racial and ethnic...
When a nursing facility for AIDS patients is planned for a city neighborhood, residents might be expected to respond, "Not in my backyard." But, as Ja...
For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan face to face, over an extended period of time. At last in the late 1980s she set out on an excursion to Sichuan Province. That visit was the first of many she would make there on a remarkable double adventure: to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese women and to complete a difficult passage in her own life. Looking for Chengdu is her memoir of these trips. By turns analytic, witty, and bittersweet, Gates's observations on contemporary China are enlivened by a...
For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan face to face, over...
Navigating the maze of modern American health care is rarely easy; those who enter it are confronted with a dizzying array of specialists, practitioners, and clinics from which to choose, and are forced to make decisions regarding drugs and treatments about which they may know very little. For immigrants, finding their way can be difficult especially for those to whom Western medicine is itself unfamiliar.In this engaging, accessible, and detail-rich book, Zibin Guo narrates elderly Chinese immigrants' response to contemporary American medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine emphasizes...
Navigating the maze of modern American health care is rarely easy; those who enter it are confronted with a dizzying array of specialists, practitione...
Anna M. Kerttula, an anthropologist, offers a vivid portrayal of life in Sireniki, a Siberian village on the Bering Sea. Once a traditional Yup'ik community, it was by the final years of the Soviet Empire home to three cultural groups: the Yup'ik, native hunters of sea mammals; the Chukchi, nomadic reindeer herders who had been required by the state to turn their animals over to cooperative farms; and Russians of European ancestry enticed to the region by incentive programs designed to colonize the Russian Far East. Kerttula, who lived among the villagers for eighteen months, draws on her...
Anna M. Kerttula, an anthropologist, offers a vivid portrayal of life in Sireniki, a Siberian village on the Bering Sea. Once a traditional Yup'ik com...
A dilemma long faced by western societies how to bring the generations together is also of growing concern in the east. In Japan, where, until recently, the extended family often lived under the same roof, social programs designed to facilitate interaction between old and young have proliferated. Leng Leng Thang offers an in-depth view of one of those programs, an unusual social welfare institution called Kotoen. Kotoen is a pioneering facility for multigenerational living, providing both daycare for preschoolers and a home for elderly residents. With its twin mottoes of fureai (being in...
A dilemma long faced by western societies how to bring the generations together is also of growing concern in the east. In Japan, where, until recentl...
In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three bilingual, bicultural psychiatric programs for Latino patients at public mental health facilities in New York City. The introduction of "cultural sensitivity" in mental health clinics, she concludes, led doctors to construct essentialized, composite versions of Latino ethnicity in their drive to treat mental illness with sensitivity. The author demonstrates that stressing Latino differences when dealing with...
In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted e...
Janet Siskind goes back to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in the United States to better understand the formation of the country's capitalist culture. She studies the papers and letters of three generations of the Watkinson family. The stories of their lives demonstrate how merchants amassed the capital to become industrial entrepreneurs, organized factories and private corporations, and constructed philanthropic and cultural institutions. The author traces how "upper-class work," the everyday tasks of organizing and maintaining trade or a system of production, shaped the family's...
Janet Siskind goes back to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in the United States to better understand the formation of the country's capitalist...
