Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Anthropology - Cultural & Social

Based on over six years of fieldwork, Sandra L. Faiman-Silva's "The Courage to Connect" traces the transformation of the Cape Cod community of Provincetown from its nineteenth-century origins as a fishing town where Portuguese immigrants settled to its present status as a welcoming, sexually diverse tourist enclave. Faiman-Silva examines the community s history and economy as well as how gay and straight cultures intersect in areas such as public education, local government, and law enforcement. Using queer and critical culture theory to deconstruct day-to-day local encounters,...

Our Gang provides a fascinating historical portrait of the Jewish criminal world from the era of mass immigration through Prohibition and beyond. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins, nature, patterns, location, and impact of Jewish crime from the early years, when it was inextricably bound up with the East Side community as a whole, with criminals living among the more or less law-abiding citizens they preyed upon, to the post-World War I period and the gradual assimilation and absorption of Jewish crime into the mainstream of the American underworld.

Parallel with this theme...

"This is a rich and stimulating collection of articles." --Journal of Ritual Studies

The importance of the figurative imagination in human interaction is the focus of these seminal essays by cultural anthropologist James W. Fernandez.

Cultural displacement--physical dislocation from one's native culture or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture--is one of the most formative experiences of our century. These essays examine the impact of this experience on contemporary notions of cultural identity from the perspectives of anthropology, history, philosophy, literature, and psychology.

This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses. The period covered encompasses the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the mixed economy and...

"The real beauty of this book is that the thinking does not stop... deep in the thickets of philosophic references. Instead, true to the spirit of phenomoenology, we are provided with provocative accounts of how such thinking flows in contemporary anthropological practice." XCP - Cross Cultural Poetics

In this timely collection, thirteen contemporary ethnographers demonstrate the importance of phenomenological and existential ideas for anthropology. In emphasizing the link between the empirical and the experiential, these ethnographers also explore the relationship between...

"Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity, this book constitutes a unique intervention in contemporary cultural politics." --Social Semiotics

At a time when cultural identity has become intrinsic to the way we read our many "others," Rey Chow argues that what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but the idealism--especially in the sense of idealizing otherness--that lies at the heart of identity politics. She discusses multiple cultural...

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.

Universe of the Mind
A Semiotic Theory of Culture
Yuri M. Lotman
Introduction by Umberto Eco
Translated by Ann Shukman

A major book by one of the initiators of cultural studies.

"Universe of the Mind is an ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging book that semioticians, textual critics, and those interested in cultural studies will find stimulating and immensely suggestive." Journal of Communication

"Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the...

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture
Barry Hallen

Reveals everyday language as the key to understanding morals and ethics in Yoruba culture.

"This contrasts with any suggestion that in Yoruba or, more generally, African society, moral thinking manifests nothing much more than a supine acquiescence in long established communal values.... Hallen renders a great service to African philosophy." --Kwasi Wiredu

In Yoruba culture, morality and moral values are intimately linked to aesthetics. The purest expression of beauty, at...

Biotechnology and Culture
Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics
Edited by Paul Brodwin

Untangles the broad cultural effects of biotechnologies
"A timely and perceptive look from many acute angles, at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day." --Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

"This impressive collection offers a number of rich examples of why the development of anthropological studies of science, technology, and their disruptive social effects is a leading edge of critical enquiry." --Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

As birth, illness, and...

..". refreshing and provocative... a significant addition to existing literature on African politics." --Stephen Ellis

"It opens up a whole new field of investigation, and brings into focus the pertinence of an interdisciplinary approach to African politics." --Rene Lemarchand

In this innovative work, Michael G. Schatzberg reads metaphors found in the popular press as indicators of the way Africans come to understand their political universe. Examining daily newspapers, popular literature, and political and church documents from across middle Africa, Schatzberg finds that...

"Offers an extremely sophisticated, nuanced view of the social and political construction of an African middle class in colonial Zimbabwe." -Elizabeth Schmidt

Tracing their quest for social recognition from the time of Cecil Rhodes to Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, Michael O. West shows how some Africans were able to avail themselves of scarce educational and social opportunities in order to achieve some degree of upward mobility in a society that was hostile to their ambitions. Though relatively few in number and not rich by colonial standards, this comparatively...