Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Customs & Traditions

Christmas in Texas shows how Texans have celebrated Christmas over four centuries, during good times and bad. The Texas holiday season is steeped in the rich legacy of the different ethnic groups represented here. The music, the food, the decorations, the secular fun and frolic have been imported to Texas by land and by sea, often as the nostalgic efforts of homesick immigrants to recreate...

This volume celebrates the cultural diversity of the United States as it is articulated through ritual performance. It presents the diverse ways in which people choose to validate and perpetuate their cultural identity. The collection of essays invokes the state of critical self-awareness that is increasingly enlisted in multicultural discourse. This volume is an important addition to the literature on ritual in America and will be useful to anthropologists, sociologists, and researchers in social sciences and humanities because it explores all dimensions of ritual experience and provides...

Using new case data from South American, Australian, and Papua New Guinean societies, the authors explore how cultural ideas for humanity are reflected in seemingly universal understandings of our potential for anthropophagy. Whether or not a society actually practices cannibalism, these conceptions are often articulated at the level of folklore and myth, where flesh-eating is imbued with symbolic meanings centered on ideas about regeneration after death, the equivalence between human flesh and food, and the morality of social exchange in and between groups. Thus, cannibalism emerges at...

Miriam Meyers celebrates the "positive" role that food plays in the mother-daughter relationship. Despite their increasing freedom to pursue other roles in society, women still retain primary responsibility for food-related tasks in the home. With that responsibility comes considerable work, but it also affords women in families a special opportunity for companionship, communication, learning, and inspiration. To illuminate the ways women use this role to connect with their daughters, Meyers combines original research, encompassing focus groups, interviews, and a national survey, with a...

In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to food to gain a better understanding of history, culture, economics, and society. The emerging field of food studies has yielded a great deal of useful research and a host of publications. Missing, however, has been a focused effort to use gender as an analytic tool. This stimulating collection of original essays addresses that oversight, investigating the important connections between food studies and women's studies.

Applying the insights of feminist scholarship to the study of food, the thirteen...

Infibulation is the most extreme form of female circumcision. It plays an important role in the Islamic societies of northeastern Africa. Until now, the social significance and function of this practice has been poorly understood. This has been no less true of Western commentators who have condemned the practice than of relevant governments that have attempted to curb it. In Infibulation, Esther K. Hicks analyzes female circumcision as a cultural trait embedded in a historically traditional milieu and shows why it cannot be treated in isolation as a single issue destined for elimination....

In many contexts of Greek social life, Scotch whisky has coincidentally become a symbol of "Greekness," national identity, modernity, and the middle class. This ethnographic study follows the social life of Scotch in Greece through three distinct trajectories in time and space in order to investigate how the meanings of the beverage are projected, negotiated, and acquired by various different networks. By examining the mediascapes of the Greek cultural industry, the Athenian nightlife and entertainment, and the North Aegean drinking habits, the study illustrates how Scotch became...

"At Home Among Strangers" presents an engrossing portrait of the Deaf community as a complex, nationwide social network that offers unique kinship to deaf people across the country. Schein depicts in striking detail the history and culture of the Deaf community, its structural underpinnings, the intricacies of family life, issues of education and rehabilitation, economic factors, and interaction with the medical and legal professions. This book is a fascinating, provocative exploration of the Deaf community in the United States for scholars and lay people alike.

-Within the short period of a year she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse, - reported The National Intelligencer on the death of Elizabeth Buchanan in 1838.

Such obituaries fascinate us. Few of us realize that, when examined historically, they can reveal not only information about the departed but also much about American culture and about who and what we value. They also offer hints about the way Americans view death.

This book also will fascinate, for it surveys more than 8,000 newspaper obituaries from 1818 to 1930 to show what they reveal about our...