Recalling how they lived in a single house that was occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, Joelle Bahloul's informants build up a multi-voice microhistory of a way of life that came to an end in the early l960s. Uprooted and dispersed, these former neighbors constantly refer back to the architecture of the home itself, which, with its internal boundaries and shared spaces, structures their memories. Here, in miniature, is a domestic history of North African Muslims, Jews and Christians living under French colonial rule.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote community in the Auvergne, Dr. Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She shows how parents subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, even in the official educational discourse. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr. Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and...

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...

Hage and Harary present a comprehensive introduction to the use of graph theory in social and cultural anthropology.

This book studies data received by the anthropologist and how it is dealt with.