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.

The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the environment, and explains how it is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society.

The Murik of Papua New Guinea conceptualize women as the source of nurture, generosity and love. Men have political power, but their claim to sustain and reproduce society requires them to appropriate the nurturant qualities of women. So they must, in some sense, model certain aspects of themselves after women. A "maternal schema" or "poetics" of the female body, which underlines Murik sociocultural patterns, expresses itself in a range of societal domains. These issues tie in with some of the major contemporary debates in the social sciences, including the relationship between ideas of male...

Immigration is among the most contested issues in Western Europe. Studies commonly focus on political activity and the plight of minorities, but this book breaks new ground in its emphasis on the everyday reactions of Italians to immigration, nationalism and racism. Drawing on research carried out in Palermo, Jeffrey Cole considers the ambivalent responses of rich and poor Sicilians to immigrants. He places Italian attitudes in a European context, and investigates why anti-immigrant politics are concentrated in the wealthy Italian North.

Among the people of Avatip, a community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the most prestigious and valued forms of wealth are personal names. In this intriguing study, Simon Harrison analyzes the significance of names in the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology, and concepts of the person, and shows how the Avatip system of names parallels the gift-exchange systems of many other Melanesian societies. In ritualized debates, which form the arena of Avatip political life, rival leaders and the groups they represent struggle in oratorical contests for the possession of strategic names, and...

Neapolitan scholar Italo Pardo has produced a thoughtful and original account of the moral life of Naples, where the ethics of family and neighborhood exist in tension with the constraints of church and government. Dr. Pardo shows how different ethical systems are accommodated in the choices of everyday life, while success is measured by satisfying spiritual obligations as well as by material gain. This is one of the very few ethnographic studies of a European city; it questions old assumptions and raises fresh issues in the field of urban studies.

The Murik of Papua New Guinea conceptualize women as the source of nurture, generosity and love. Men have political power, but their claim to sustain and reproduce society requires them to appropriate the nurturant qualities of women. So they must, in some sense, model certain aspects of themselves after women. A "maternal schema" or "poetics" of the female body, which underlines Murik sociocultural patterns, expresses itself in a range of societal domains. These issues tie in with some of the major contemporary debates in the social sciences, including the relationship between ideas of male...

The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rastafari is led by a woman, Mother Earth, whose ideas emerged from her experience of a cerebral disease. The author, Roland Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, offers a nonreductionist view on the relationship between pathology and creativity, between the natural and the human sciences.

In this innovative study, David Parkin shows how indigenous African rites and beliefs may be reworked to accommodate a variety of economic systems, new spatial and ecological relations among communities, and the locally variable influences of Islam and Christianity. The Giriama people of Kenya include pastoralists living in the hinterland; farmers, who work land closer to the coast; and migrants, who earn money as laborers or fisherman on the coast itself. Wherever they live, they revere an ancient and formerly fortified capital, located in the pastoralist hinterland, which few of them ever...

This 1991 study deals with a specific set of institutions in nineteenth-century Athens. Relying on matrimonial contracts, travellers' accounts, memoirs and popular literature, the authors show how distinctive forms of marriage, kinship and property transmission evolved in Athens in the nineteenth century. These forms then became a feature of wider Greek society which continued into the twentieth century. Greece was the first post-colonial modern nation state in Europe whose national identity was created largely by peasants who had migrated to the city. As Athenian society became less...