Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Customs & Traditions

Twenty years ago, before she wrote The Orchid Thief or was hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post, Susan Orlean was a journalist with a question: What makes Saturday night so special? To answer it, she embarked on a remarkable journey across the country and spent the...

"Available electronically in an open-access, full-text edition from the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Repository at"" """"http: / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /146845"." "
Child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Astrid Berg states in her introduction that "South Africa is a microcosm." It is a modern nation, yet many of its inhabitants follow ancient traditions. It is a nation with a colonial past marked by periods of violence, yet it has managed to make a largely peaceful transition to majority rule. It is a nation with eleven official languages embracing a great diversity of...

The global production, marketing and consumption of tea present a resource for tea-related tourism. Tea and Tourism: Tourists, Traditions and Transformations profiles tea cultures and examines the social, political and developmental contexts of using related traditions for touristic purposes. This volume views tourism related to tea from differing disciplinary perspectives, and from marketing, planning, entrepreneurial and developmental viewpoints. The book examines the transformation of indigenous and imported tea traditions into experiences for tourists. Profiling these tea experiences...

Over the last decades quite a few studies have been devoted to drinking. Most of these were concerned with alcohol and written by social anthropologists. This book presents multidisciplinary aspects of the ingestion of liquids at large, addressing many of the overt and covert meanings of drinking: from satisfying biological needs to communicating with humans and the hereafter, attempting to reach a differential emotional state or seeking good health and longevity through the ingestion of appropriate beverages. It includes papers from both biological and social scientists and covers a fair...

Throughout the world, the kitchen is the heart of family and community life. Yet, while everyone has a story to tell about their grandmother's kitchen, the myriad activities that go on in this usually female world are often devalued, and little scholarly attention has been paid to this crucial space in which family, gender, and community relations are forged and maintained. To give the kitchen the prominence and respect it merits, Maria Elisa Christie here offers a pioneering ethnography of kitchenspace in three central Mexican communities, Xochimilco, Ocotepec, and...

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things--most often money--for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought...

The historical themes addressed include 1950s and '60s...

Why does food taste better when you know where it comes from? Because history--ecological, cultural, even personal--flavors every bite we eat. Whether it's the volatile chemical compounds that a plant absorbs from the soil or the stories and memories of places that are evoked by taste, layers of flavor await those willing to delve into the roots of real food. In this landmark book, Gary Paul Nabhan takes us on a personal trip into the southwestern borderlands to discover the terroir--the "taste of the place"--that makes this desert so delicious.

To savor the terroir of the...

For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom--from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern.

Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of...