For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create images of collective identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the processes that make such accounts compelling for those who tell them? Why do some narratives acquire a kind of mythic status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimized by raiding headhunters in...

The French historian Marc Bloch has often been praised for his interdisciplinary approach. This book demonstrates the importance of both Vidalian geography and Durkheimian sociology for Bloch and the significant, but often overlooked, differences between his approach and theirs. In contrast to much other work on Bloch, Professor Friedman highlights the intellectual and institutional contexts of Bloch's works, arguing that only by a careful examination of the debates in which he was involved can one begin to come to terms with the nature of his contribution.

The Macro Polity provides the first comprehensive model of American politics at the system level. Focusing on the interactions between citizen evaluations and preferences, government activity and policy, and how the combined acts of citizens and governments influence one another over time, it integrates understandings of matters such as economic outcomes, presidential approval, partisanship, elections, and government policy-making into a single model. The book's macro and longitudinal focus makes it possible to directly connect the behaviors of electorate and government.

Little has been written about honour in the social sciences and almost nothing about grace. Yet honour has caused more deaths than the plague and grace is what we all yearn for, whether in the form of favor, luck, pardon, gratuity, or salvation. This collection of essays develops a line of thought in anthropology which was opened in the 1960s by the editors (and some of the same contributors) in Honor and Shame: The Values of a Mediterranean Society. The essays, half of them historical and half contemporary, deal with different aspects of honor and grace, and the strategies and transactions...

Dr Frankel's study of the rapid transformation of traditional medical care among the Huli of New Guinea by Western treatments strikingly combines the methods of social anthropology and epidemiology. Until the 1950s the Huli used only their own form of therapy, including symptomatic treatments, specialist surgery and major ritual intended to enlist the support of spirits. Since then, superficially at least, there has been a rejection of many traditional measures and a corresponding enthusiasm for Western treatments underpinned by Christianity. The Huli Response to Illness analyses the rich...

The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernization, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations. He argues that modernization is not a secular, progressive process that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is an idiom--a legitimizing discourse--in which Cypriots represent, and contest, relationships among social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernization, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of...

This anthropological account of a Catholic community in East Africa reveals how Catholicism came to have widespread acceptance in Southern Tanzania and how this history currently affects practicing Catholics. Maia Green provides a descriptive account of those considering themselves Catholics in Eastern Africa in relationship to Western assumptions of "conversion." She thus encourages a new approach to the consequences of large-scale shifts in religious affiliation. The book also contains information about other ritual practices concerning kinship, aging and death.

Java is famous for its combination of diverse cultural forms and religious beliefs. In this most comprehensive study of Javanese religion since Clifford Geertz's classic study, Andrew Beatty considers Javanese solutions to problems of cultural difference, and how villagers make sense of their complex, multi-layered culture. Pantheist mystics, supernaturalists, orthodox Muslims and Hindu converts at once construct contrasting faiths and create a common ground through syncretist ritual. Vividly evoking the local religious life, this book probes beyond the surface of ritual and cosmology,...

The lowland Philippines, in contrast to the apparently "exotic," "tribal" areas, has for many years been thought of as a strangely Westernized place, without a cultural life of its own. This innovative and important book shows that this perception is a myth, which reflects our own obsessions with defining culture and identity as something "unchanging." Through an absorbing account of arranged marriages, miraculous saint cults, spirit mediumship and gay beauty contests, the author describes the unexpectedness of daily life in rural Bicol and the resilience and imagination of the Filipino...

The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs through this book.