The essays collected in this volume offer comparative perspectives on scholarship across a wide range of cultures and periods, from oral instruction by Yoruba diviners in West Africa to Renaissance humanism and nineteenth-century anthropology. The contributors address three prominent issues in cultural studies: the relation between oral and written transmission of knowledge; the nature of contacts between European scholars and the learned persons of other societies; and Western constructions of the culture and knowledge of non-Western peoples and of the "folk" in Europe.
It has recently...

How does a minority come to be? In an unusual project, a notable group of French and American scholars take the view that minorities are socially constructed. Their original studies of specific historical examples produce a series of stimulating and provocative essays useful and enjoyable for specialists and the general reader alike.
Spawned from a conference organized by the journals Annales and Comparative Studies in Society and History in concert with the Center for Historical Research at l'EHESS in Paris and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, this...

This book departs from stereotypes that often dominate Western discourse about Muslim societies. The Muslim world encompasses a wide range of countries--among them Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco--each with a varying degree of religious stricture. Generalizations, therefore, can be erroneous and misleading. The contributors to this book--prominent scholars in anthropology, history, sociology, and political science--examine such issues as the ideology and political practices of Iran's ruling Shi'ite clerics, the impact of state policies on the status of women, the...