Children in the Taiwanese fishing community of Angang have their attention drawn, consciously and unconsciously, to various forms of identification through their participation in schooling, family life and popular religion. They read texts about virtuous mothers, share meaningful foods with other villagers, visit the altars of divining children and participate in dangerous god-strengthening rituals. In particular they learn about the family-based cycle of reciprocity, and the tension between this and commitment to the nation. Charles Stafford's study of childhood in this community (with...

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...

This study describes and interprets the ritual activity that follows upon death in the Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea. Robert J. Foster shows how the performance of large-scale feasts and ceremonial exchanges both commemorate the dead and regenerate the social relations of the living. He places the rites in an historical context by demonstrating how the effects of participation in an expanding cash economy has allowed Tangans to conceive of the rites as "customary" in opposition to the new and foreign practices of "business."

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 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...

In 1992, an explosion of "stock fever" hit Shanghai. Ellen Hertz's anthropological study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. She explains the way in which investors and officials construct a "moral storyline" to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle among the big investors, the little investors and the state to control the market.

This text provides an account of the moral life of Naples, a city in which the ethics of work, family and neighbourhood exist in complex relationship with the teachings of the church and, crucial to key processes of democracy, with the power and limitations of law, bureaucracy and government. It identifies the importance of strong continuous interaction between material and non-material aspects in the entrepreneurial strategies of the ordinary Neapolitan and shows the ways in which different ethical systems are negotiated in everyday life. Success is measured not only by material gain, but...

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...

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...