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Showing 161 - 180 of 19120 items
By Harry Liebersohn. 2011
This book is a history of European interpretations of the gift from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Reciprocal…
gift exchange, pervasive in traditional European society, disappeared from the discourse of nineteenth-century social theory only to return as a major theme in twentieth-century anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, and literary studies. Modern anthropologists encountered gift exchange in Oceania and the Pacific Northwest and returned the idea to European social thought; Marcel Mauss synthesized their insights with his own readings from remote times and places in his famous 1925 essay on the gift, the starting-point for subsequent discussion. The Return of the Gift demonstrates how European intellectual history can gain fresh significance from global contexts.By Cornel West. 2009
New York Times best-selling author Cornel West is one of America s most provocative and admired…
public intellectuals Whether in the classroom the streets the prisons or the church Dr West s penetrating brilliance has been a bright beacon shining through the darkness for decades Yet as he points out in this new memoir I ve never taken the time to focus on the inner dynamics of the dark precincts of my soul That is until now Brother West is like its author brilliant unapologetic full of passion yet cool This poignant memoir traces West s transformation from a schoolyard Robin Hood into a progressive cultural icon From his youthful investigation of the death shudder to why he embraced his calling of teaching over preaching from his three marriages and his two precious children to his near-fatal bout with prostate cancer West illuminates what it means to live as an aspiring bluesman in a world of ideas and a jazzman in the life of the mind Woven together with the fibers of his lifelong commitment to the prophetic Christian tradition that began in Sacramento s Shiloh Baptist Church Brother West is a tale of a man courageous enough to be fully human living and loving out loudBy Mcfadden, Bernice L.. 2002
In This Bitter Earth, Sugar Lacey is on her way out of Bigelow, Arkansas, where she’d come to break with…
the past. With her worn leopard-print suitcase and her head held high, she walks past the prying eyes of its small-minded, cruel-hearted townsfolk, praying for the strength to keep going. She doesn’t stop until she arrives at her childhood home in Short Junction. Here she learns the truth about her parentage: a terrible tale of unrequited love, of one man’s enduring hatred, and of the black magic that has cursed generations of Lacey women. A powerfully realized novel that brings back the unforgettable characters from Sugar, McFadden’s bestselling debut, This Bitter Earth is a testament to the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. .By Deborah Mathis. 2002
3 nationally syndicated columnist takes a controversial look at the divisions that remain between black and white America more than…
40 years after the Civil Rights movement.In a provocative examination of the state of race relations today, Deborah Mathis provides personal and sociological perspective on what it feels like for African Americans who continue to be segregated spiritually and emotionally from the rest of the country. Mathis airs mutual fears and suppositions and shines a spotlight on how far we still have to go before black Americans can truly feel at home in a country that benefits so strongly from their many contributions. Topics of discussion include: Affirmative actionare we starting to move backward?Racial profiling and the assumptions it involves The poor state of education in low-income area schoolsBlacks and their treatment in the judicial system The dangerous sense of complacency about how things are so much better than they used to beAnd more.By Charles W. Chesnutt, Donald B. Gibson. 1993
An early masterwork among American literary treatments of miscegenation, Chesnutt's story is of two young African Americans who decide to…
pass for white in order to claim their share of the American dream.By Jr, William Andrefsky. 2005
This fully updated and revised edition of William Andrefsky Jr's ground-breaking manual on lithic analysis is designed for students and…
professional archaeologists. It explains the fundamental principles of the measurement, recording and analysis of stone tools and stone tool production debris. Introducing the reader to lithic raw materials, classification, terminology and key concepts, the volume comprehensively explores methods and techniques, presenting detailed case studies of lithic analysis from around the world. It also examines new emerging techniques and includes a new section on stone tool functional studies.By Brian Doherty. 2004
It's been compared to Brigadoon and Woodstock, called Xanadu and Utopia. But none of these terms captures the essence of…
the ecstatically wild, visionary desert gathering known as Burning Man. Every year, an elaborate, fantastical city rises out of Nevada's vast and forbidding Black Rock Desert, only to vanish again one week later. The rules are few: Participation and self-reliance are mandatory; money and spectators are not allowed. It is, without question, the most glamorous, anarchic city on earth, dedicated purely to creativity and play, where on any given stroll you might wander past giant metal flame-spewing lotus flowers, commune at a three-story temple made from discarded dinosaur puzzle pieces, or hop on a life-size, glowing white whale as it sails over the sands backlit by an endless starry sky. But Burning Man is more than just fun. It's an environment that exists in complete opposition to normal society in that the usual rules and standards are ignored or inverted in the pursuit of fresh experiences and new identities. It's a place where accumulated cultural debris is swept aside in order to reestablish and reinvent what's important and what's meaningful in one intensely accelerated, vividly colorful week. Burning Man is the most profound and subversive idea to surface in decades - and has become the underground mecca for Americans who are searching for community and meaning.By Emilio F. Moran. 2008
Designed to help students understand the multiple levels at which human populations respond to their surroundings, this essential text offers…
the most complete discussion of environmental, physiological, behavioral, and cultural adaptive strategies available. Among the unique features that make Human Adaptability outstanding as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals are a complete discussion of the development of ecological anthropology and relevant research methods; the use of an ecosystem approach with emphasis on arctic, high altitude, arid land, grassland, and tropical rain forest environments; an extensive bibliography on ecological anthropology; and a comprehensive glossary of technical terms. Entirely new to the third edition are chapters on urban sustainability and methods of spatial analysis, with enhanced emphasis throughout on the role of gender in human-adaptability research and on global environmental issues as they affect particular ecosystems. In addition, brand-new sections in each chapter guide students to websites that provide access to relevant material, complement the text's coverage of biomes, and suggest ways to become active in environmental issues.By Megan Ming Francis. 2014
Did the civil rights movement impact the development of the American state? Despite extensive accounts of civil rights mobilization and…
narratives of state building, there has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, and secured the support of Congress. In the NAACP's most far-reaching victory, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional rights of black defendants were violated by a white mob in the landmark criminal procedure decision Moore v. Dempsey. This book demonstrates the importance of citizen agency in the making of new constitutional law in a period unexplored by previous scholarship.By Audrey Smedley, Brian Smedley. 1996
Few topics in the Western intellectual tradition have been subjected to as much scrutiny and analysis as the topic of…
race. This book examines the evolution of the concept. It shows that late-eighteenth-century North Americans came to believe that their society was composed of biologically exclusive and permanently unequal human groups, each with distinctive behavioral, moral, spiritual, and intellectual characteristics, led people to see biophysical and behavioral features as innate and immutable. In the nineteenth century, differences between whites, American Indians, and blacks were magnified in the popular mind and in scholarly writings to the point that these groups were seen as separate species, justifying the preservation of “racial” slavery and the subsequent dehumanization of freed blacks. With the application in the late nineteenth century of the racial worldview to European peoples and the subsequent twentieth-century inhumanity and brutality of Nazi race ideology, the concept of race came under attack. Liberal ideology coupled with advances in science prompted criticism of “race” and efforts to eliminate the term from the lexicon of science. In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race through three centuries of North American history, Audrey Smedley shows race to be a cultural construct used variously and opportunistically throughout time, although the scientific record shows little common agreement on its meaning. Tracing the social and historical processes that helped shape the idea of race, Smedley argues that race was and is a folk worldview, fabricated as an existential reality out of elements of English cultural history and the conquest and enslavement of physically distinct populations. The schism between science and popular thought on race, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century, continues today. If progressive scientists no longer accept the biological idea of race, will society eventually also reject it?The second edition expands its coverage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in matters of IQ testing and changing racial attitudes, including the contemporary movement aimed at identifying a “mixed race” category in the U. S. census. Smedley further examines the economic, social, and political factors after World War II that directly or indirectly affected the public’s thinking about race and discusses how the Civil Rights Movement and television during the 1950s and 1960s prompted greater attention to race and racism, causing many to rethink their beliefs and values. The first edition was named a 1994 Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center.By Mohan Ambikaipaker. 2018
One evening in 1980 a group of white friends drinking at the Duke of Edinburgh pub on East…
Ham High Street made a monstrous five-pound wager The first person to kill a Paki would win the bet Ali Akhtar Baig a young Pakistani student who lived in the east London borough of Newham was their chosen victim Baig s murder was but one incident in a wave of antiblack racial attacks that were commonplace during the crisis of race relations in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s Ali Akhtar Baig s death also catalyzed the formation of a grassroots antiracist organization Newham Monitoring Project NMP that worked to transform the racist victimization of African African Caribbean and South Asian communities into campaigns for racial justice and social change In addition to providing a 24-hour hotline and casework services NMP activists worked to mitigate the scourge of racial injustice that included daily racial harassment hate crimes and antiblack police violence Since the advent of the War on Terror NMP widened its approach to support victims of the state s counterterror policies which have contributed to an unfettered surge in Islamophobia These realities as well as the many layers of gendered racism in contemporary Britain come to life through intimate ethnographic storytelling The reader gets to know a broad range of east Londoners and antiracist activists whose intersecting experiences present a multifaceted portrait of British racism Mohan Ambikaipaker examines the life experiences of these individuals through a strong theoretical lens that combines critical race theory and postcolonial studies Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain shows how the deep processes of everyday political whiteness shape the state s failure to provide effective remedies for ethnic racial and religious minorities who continue to face violence and institutional racismBy Khaled Ziadeh. 2011
Combines the styles of memoir, history, anthropology, and theory to develop an innovative reflection on the materiality of culture. Through…
its style and content, the text challenges the Orientalist bifurcation between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, revealing instead tradition's own dynamism and its coexistence alongside modernity.Mixing--whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism--is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies.…
Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference. Khan combines ethnographic research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a callaloo nation--a multicultural society--is manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.With his counterintuitive sense since his boyhood in Qadhafi's Libya that the Middle East, despite all the bloodshed in its…
recent history, is a place of warmth, humanity, and generous eccentricity, Neil MacFarquhar introduces a cross-section of unsung, dynamic men and women pioneering political and social change. The author interacts with Arabs and Iranians in their every day lives, removed from the violence we see constantly, yet wrestling with the region's future.By Ravina Aggarwal. 2004
The Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost thousands of lives.…
In this innovative ethnography, Ravina Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the conflict--which tend to emphasize geopolitical security concerns and religious essentialisms--to consider how it is experienced by those living in the border zones along the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India from Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region in northern India's State of Jammu and Kashmir. Located high in the Himalayan and Korakoram ranges, Ladakh borders Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh, Beyond Lines of Control is an impassioned call for the inclusion of the region's cultural history and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir. Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier, how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state, and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional control that are legitimized through discourses of religious purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted in particular cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games. By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.By Kamari Maxine Clarke. 2004
Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of ytnj African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black…
nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorb Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, ytnj is a Yorb revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yorb Networks is an innovative ethnography of ytnj and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorb rs voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes ytnj in vivid detail--the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices--and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorb past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorb transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life. Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of ytnj Village's religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs--such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings--and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied ytnj villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they--more than the Nigerian Yorb--are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great y Empire of the Yorb people. Mapping Yorb Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.By Jennifer Glaser. 2016
In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating…
into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.By Nicholas Buccola. 2012
Frederick Douglass, one of the most prominent figures in African-American and United States history, was born a slave, but escaped…
to the North and became a well-known anti-slavery activist, orator, and author. In The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Buccola provides an important and original argument about the ideas that animated this reformer-statesman. Beyond his role as an abolitionist, Buccola argues for the importance of understanding Douglass as a political thinker who provides deep insights into the immense challenge of achieving and maintaining the liberal promise of freedom. Douglass, Buccola contends, shows us that the language of rights must be coupled with a robust understanding of social responsibility in order for liberal ideals to be realized. Truly an original American thinker, this book highlights Douglass's rightful place among the great thinkers in the American liberal tradition.By Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart. 2002
Drawing on both their own fieldwork from 1991 to 1999 and older written sources, Stewart and Strathern explore how the…
Duna have remade their rituals and associated myths in response to the outside influences of government, Christianity, and large-scale economic development, specifically mining and oil prospecting. The authors provide in-depth ethnographic materials on the Duna and present many detailed descriptions of ritual practices that have been abandoned. Remaking the World is a timely contribution to the literature on agency and the making of cultural identity by indigenous peoples facing economic, social, and political change.By Richard D. Lewis. 1996
Cross-cultural expert Richard Lewis broadens the scope of his seminal work on global business and intercultural communication. Within each country-specific…
chapter, Lewis provides invaluable insight into the beliefs, values, behaviors, mannerisms, and prejudices of each culture.