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Recent Books of Interest
Authors C-F
Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
Nuclear Nativity - Carucci
A Companion to Psychological Anthropology - Casey & Edgerton
Life and Death in Intensive Care - Cassell
Culture and Mental Illness - Castillo
Negotiating Cultures and Identities - Caughey
Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities - Chodorow
The Power of Feelings - Chodorow
In Sickness and in Play - Clark
States of Denial - Cohen
Forget Colonialism? - J. Cole
Cultural Psychology - M. Cole
Consuming Grief - Conklin
The Descent of Mind - Corballis and Lea, eds.
Body/Meaning/Healing - Csordas
Language, Charisma, and Creativity - Csordas
Embodiment and Experience - Csordas, ed.
The Development of Cognitive Anthropology - D'Andrade
Human Motives and Cultural Models - D'Andrade & Strauss, eds.
Relatively Speaking - Danzinger
Sensory Biographies - Desjarlais
Shelter Blues - Desjarlais
Body and Emotion - Desjarlais
Imagining the Course of Life - Eberhardt
Arguing Sainthood - Ewing
The End of Time - Fenn
Emotional Expression among the Cree Indians - Ferrera
Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City - Ferzacca
Structures of Social Life - Fiske
Only Hope - Fong
Reinterpreting Freud from a Modern
Psychoanalytic Anthropological Perspective - Forsyth
G-Strings and Sympathy - Frank
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Nuclear Nativity:
Rituals of Renewal and Empowerment in the Marshall Islands
by Laurence Marshall Carucci
Northern Illinois University Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0875802176
In Nuclear Nativity, Carucci explores the rituals, customs, and meanings of the Kurijmoj festival. Feasts, competitive games, speeches, dances, songs of apocalypse, and gestures of extraordinary generosity are among the means by which Enewetak and Ujelang people celebrate the festival. Carucci thoroughly investigates the empowering aspects of these ritual devices. He gives special attention to the array of valu ables and intricate scenarios of exchange - including food and money, speeches and songs - and illuminates the ways that people create histories of Kurijmoj tracing the festival to its ancient or Christian sources depending on their positions or status in the community. Carucci's book will engage Pacific anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars interested in the anthropology of religion and ritual.
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A Companion to Psychological Anthropology
by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton
Blackwell Publishers, 2004.
ISBN: 0631225978
The late twentieth century, which witnessed the rapid acceleration of globalizing processes, resulted in dramatic changes to the ways in which individuals experience emerging or dissolving cultural communities. It is therefore a critical time to highlight the work of psychocultural anthropology: an area of anthropology that focuses on cultural, psychological, and social interrelations at all levels and across cultures. A Companion to Psychological Anthropology is a groundbreaking volume that brings together original essays by leading scholars and provides the first definitive overview of this fascinating field.
The Companion offers an in-depth exploration of the concepts and topics that have emerged through contemporary ethnographic work and the processes of global change. Key issues range from studies of consciousness and time, emotion, cognition, dreaming, and memory, to the lingering effects of racism and ethnocentrism, violence, identity, and subjectivity. An essential resource for teachers and students alike, A Companion to Psychological Anthropology also serves as a valuable tool for scholars, policy makers, and social service providers who want to understand and anticipate changing relations among individuals and cultures.
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Life and Death in Intensive Care
by Joan Cassell
Temple University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 1592133363
Life and Death in Intensive Care offers a unique portrait of the surgical intensive care unit (SICU), the place in medical centers and hospitals where patients with the gravest medical conditions—from comas to terminal illness—are treated. Author Joan Cassell employs the concept of "moral economies" to explain the dilemmas that patients, families, and medical staff confront in treatment. Drawing upon her fieldwork conducted in both the United States and New Zealand, Cassell compares the moral outlooks and underlying principles of SICU nurses, residents, intensivists, and surgeons. Using real life examples, Life and Death in Intensive Care clearly presents the logic and values behind the SICU as well as the personalities, procedures, and pressures that characterize every case. Ultimately, Cassell demonstrates the differing systems of values, and the way cultural definitions of medical treatment inform how we treat the critically ill.
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Culture and Mental Illness
by Richard L. Castillo
Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1996.
ISBN: 0534345581
Author Richard Castillo, who studied under Arthur Kleinman of Harvard University, has developed a client-centered paradigm for mental illness based on recent biological, psychological, social, and cross-cultural studies. His book provides practical applications for clinicians and addresses recent theoretical changes and their implications for the assessment and diagnosis of mental illness. Culture & Mental Illness is written for a global audience. Although the book discusses American ethnic minorities, its scope includes a wide variety of cultural and ethnic groups from around the world.
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Negotiating Cultures and Identities:
Life History Issues, Methods, and Readings
by John L. Caughey
University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0803264666
Negotiating Cultures and Identities examines issues, methods, and models for doing life history research with individual Americans based on interviews and participant observation. John L. Caughey helps students and other researchers explore the ways in which contemporary Americans are influenced by multiple cultural traditions, including ethnic, religious, and occupational frames of reference.
Using the example of Salma, a bicultural woman of Pakistani descent who lives in the United States, and the story of Gina, a multicultural American, Caughey examines how to capture the complexity of each situation, including step-by-step methods and exercises that lead the student interviewer through the process of locating and interviewing a research participant, making sense of the material obtained, and writing a cultural portrait. Arguing that comparison between the subject's life and one's own is an essential part of the process, the methodology also encourages the investigator to research his or her own social and cultural orientations along the way and to contrast these with those of the subject. The book offers a practical, manageable, and engaging form of qualitative research. It prepares the student to do grounded, experiential work outside the classroom and to explore important issues in contemporary American society, including ethnicity, race, identity, disability, gender, class, occupation, religion, and spirituality as they are culturally understood and experienced in the lives of individual Americans.
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Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities:
Freud and Beyond
by Nancy J. Chodorow
University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
ISBN: 0813108284
This volume contains "three linked essays previously delivered as the Blazer Lectures at the University of Kentucky. . . . {The author presents three theses.} The first is that Freud, upon being reread, appears to have had a far more naunced, flexible and pluralistic image of women than some critics would suppose. The second {argument} is that psychoanalysts should approach heterosexuality as a set of defensive solutions to certain universal psychological problems, no better and no worse than any other kind of sexual preference. Her third {thesis} . . . is that 'men and women love in as many ways as there are men and women.'"
New York Times Book Review
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The Power of Feelings:
Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture
by Nancy J. Chodorow
Yale University Press 1999.
ISBN: 0300079591
In this pathbreaking book a leading contemporary thinker brings together psychoanalysis, anthropology, and gender analysis to create an original theory about the ways in which we look at ourselves. The "power of feelings" -- the individual subjective meanings we bring to our experiences -- are at least as important as their cultural and social meanings, claims Nancy J. Chodorow.
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In Sickness and in Play:
Children Coping With Chronic Illness
by Cindy Dell Clark
Rutgers University Press 2003.
ISBN: 0813532701
For children who live with a chronic illness, each day is filled with endless treatments, painful symptoms, confusion, and embarrassment. How can an eight-year-old girl understand diabetes, let alone explain to her schoolmates why she has to leave class to have her blood tested? How can the father of a child with asthma ever sleep soundly through the night with the fear that his son may suffocate in the next room? In this book, Cindy Dell Clark tells the stories of children who suffer from two common illnesses that are often underestimated by those not directly touched by themÑasthma and diabetes. She describes how play, humor, and other expressive methods, invented by the children themselves, allow families to cope with the pain. Her interviews with forty-six families give readers an understanding of how children comprehend their illnesses and how parents struggle to care for their sons and daughters while trying to give them a "normal" childhood. Chronically ill children are at a greater risk of developing mental health or social adjustment problems than their peers, and asthma has been gaining ground in both incidence and fatality in recent years. This eye-opening work emphasizes the importance of improving the lives of these children by understanding their perspectives, both imagined and real.
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States of Denial
by Stanley Cohen
Polity Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0745623921
Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know,
wearing blinker, seeing what we want to see.....these states of mind are
all described as 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognise their
condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's
infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter,
high HIV risk groups who continue with unsafe sex: are supposedly 'in denial'.
Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities - and plan them to achieve
'maximum deniablity'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the denial and repression
of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene.
We are bombarded by images - homeless people whom we pass every day of
TV sights of decomposing bodies slaughtered in Kosova - that are impossible
to retain in conscious awareness.
Do these phenomena have anything in common ? When we deny, are we award
of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us
from unwelcome truths ? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to
overcome the public' s apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty ?
Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity ?
States of Denial is a comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways
in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from the clinical
states of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the
'passive bystander'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust
and other genocides, torture, political massacres - are denied by perpetrators
and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
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Forget Colonialism?:
Sacrifice and the Art of
Memory in Madagascar
by Jennifer Cole
University of California Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0520228464
While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.
Contents
List of Illustrations and Maps
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Colonial Interventions into Betsimisaraka Life
Chapter 3. Local Worlds: Daily Village Life
Chapter 4. Between Memory and History: Betsimisaraka Imagine the Past
Chapter 5. The Power in the Past and the Colonial in the Ancestral
Chapter 6. Memory: Official and Unofficial
Chapter 7. Reversing Figure and Ground: The Memory of the 1947 Rebellion and the Elections of 1992-93
Chapter 8. Constructing a Betsimisaraka Memoryscape
Epilogue: Looking Back: Memoryscapes in Time
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
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Cultural Psychology:
A Once and Future Discipline
by Michael Cole
Harvard University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0674179560
This book is an attempt to answer two questions: "Why do psychologists find it so difficult to keep culture in mind?" and "If you are a psychologist who believes that culture is a fundamental constituent of human thought and action, what can you do that is scientifically acceptable?" The answer to the first question involves an excursion into the history of psychology, exploring the way in which experimental science became divorced from the historical sciences. In addressing the second question, Cole (communication and psychology, Univ. of California, San Diego) builds upon the "cultural-historical" school of Russian psychology and advocates a methodology based upon field studies. In an increasingly diverse society, the neglect of cultural differences or their banishment as "extraneous variables" should be troubling to psychologists, and Cole's prescriptions for a new "cultural psychology" are most welcome. All academic and research libraries should purchase this title; since it is addressed to social scientists, it is not a necessary purchase for public libraries.
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Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
by Beth A. Conklin
University of Texas Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0292712367
Mourning the death of loved ones and recovering from their loss are universal human experiences, yet the grieving process is as different between cultures as it is among individuals. As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of grief for the family of the deceased, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives.
Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded. Beth Conklin explores Wari' conceptions of person, body, and spirit, as well as indigenous understandings of memory and emotion, to explain why the Wari' felt that corpses must be destroyed and why they preferred cannibalism over cremation. Her findings challenge many commonly held beliefs about cannibalism and show why, in Wari' terms, it was considered the most honorable and compassionate way of treating the dead.
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The Descent of Mind:
Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution
edited by Michael C. Corballis and Stephen E. Lea
Oxford University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0198524196
To what extent is the human mind like that of an ape? How much of human abilities are the product of culture and how much of biology? Is language uniquely human? In this volume, leading psychologists draw on ideas from the theory of evolution to shed new light on some of the most difficult questions about the human mind. The book includes a thorough overview of what is known of the non-primate mind and its evolution, a discussion of pre-hominids of 20 million years ago, and a survey of contemporary human behavior.
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Body/Meaning/Healing (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)
Thomas J. Csordas
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
ISBN: 0312293925
Exactly what is religious about religious healing? Thomas Csordas explores the relationships between religion, healing, and embodiment through a variety of ethnographic examples. Based on over 20 years of field research and drawing examples and cases from a wide variety of cultural groups, including Navajo, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese, and American Catholic Charismatics, Csordas examines the details of the therapeutic process in practice. The book brings together cultural phenomenology with an emphasis upon embodiment and performativity to explore ritual healing in the worlds of the body, the spirit, and culture.
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Language, Charisma, and Creativity:
The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement
Thomas J. Csordas
University of California Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0520204697
Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary tasks of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. This story, unlike an ethnography of a little-known tribal society, is about people who are quite like everybody else but at the same time inhabit a substantially different phenomenological world. Csordas has observed and studied Charismatic groups throughout the United States. He begins with an introduction to the Charismatic Renewal and a history of its development during the roughly thirty years of its existence. He describes the movement's internal diversity as well as its international extent, emphasizing Charismatic identity and the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life. Language, Charisma, and Creativity builds on the ideas of self-transformation that Csordas introduced in his earlier book on Charismatic healing. This work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, studies of religion and ritual, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American studies.
Annotation
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Embodiment and Experience:
The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, Vol. 2
edited by Thomas J. Csordas.
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
ISBN: 0521458900
Contents
Introduction: the body as representation and being-in-the-world
Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory
Society's body: emotion and the "somatization" of social theory
The political economy of injury and compassion: amputees on the Thai-Cambodia border
Nurturing and negligence: working on others' bodies in Fiji
The silenced body - the expressive Leib: on the dialectic of mind and life in Chinese cathartic healing
Embodied metaphors: nerves as lived experience
Bodily transactions of the passions: el calor among Salvadoran women refugees
The embodiment of symbols and the acculturation of the anthropologist
Chronic pain and the tension between the body as subject and object
The individual in terror
Rape trauma: contexts of meaning
Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology
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The Development of Cognitive Anthropology
by Roy D'Andrade
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
ISBN: 0521459761
Roy D'Andrade has written a lucid historical account of the growth and development of the field of cognitive anthropology. The origins of cognitive anthropology can be traced back to the late 1950s when anthropology was grappling with the problem of understanding native systems of categorization. This book starts with an evaluation of these formative years, portraying the way in which research evolved across more than thirty years to the present. It traces the way in which the early notions about semantics and taxonomies evolved into more sophisticated theories about prototypes, schemas, and connectionist networks, seen as the cognitive mechanisms underlying the organization of folk models and reasoning in ordinary life. This is followed by a review of the most recent research on the social distribution of cultural knowledge and the relation of cultural models to emotion, motivation, and action. The final section summarizes the general theoretical perspective of cognitive anthropology, which treats culture as particulate, socially distributed, variably internalized and embodied in physical structures - a view which opposes structuralist, interpretive, and post-modern conceptions of culture.
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Human Motives and Cultural Models
SPA Publication No. 1
by Roy G. D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss, eds.
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
ISBN: 0521423384
This volume seeks to integrate knowledge, desire, and action in a single explanatory framework. A full understanding of human action requires an understanding of what motivates people to do what they do. Typically, human motivation has been modeled on animal behavior, resulting in an insufficient appreciation of the role of culture in human motivation. Developed from research in cognitive anthropology on cultural models, through which human realities are constructed and interpreted, this study of human motivation also draws upon developmental psychology, and psychoanalytic and social theory.
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Relatively Speaking:
Language, Thought, and Kinship Among the Mopan Maya
by Eve Danziger
Oxford University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0195099109
Using fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, Eve Danziger examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children and shows that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods. In doing so she contributes not only to theoretical semantics and the ethnography of that area, but to the cross-cultural study of child development and language acquisition.
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Sensory Biographies:
Lives and Deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists
by Robert Desjarlais
University of California Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0520235886
Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal.
It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.
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Shelter Blues:
Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless
by Robert R. Desjarlais
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0812216229
Shelter Blues is an innovative portrait of people residing in Boston's Station Street Shelter. It examines the everyday lives of more than 40 homeless men and women of various ethnicities, ranging in age from early 20s to mid-60s. Based on a sixteen-month study, it draws readers into the personal worlds of these individuals and, by addressing the intimacies of homelessness, illness, and abjection, picks up where most scholarship and journalism stop. Robert Desjarlais works against the grain of media representations of homelessness by showing us not anonymous stereotypes but individuals. He draws on conversations as well as observations, talking with and listening to shelter residents to understand how they relate to their environment, to one another, and to those entrusted with their care. His book considers their lives in terms of a complex range of forces and helps us comprehend the linkages between culture, illness, language, and political agency on the margins of contemporary American society.
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Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing
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Body and Emotion:
The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas
by Robert R. Desjarlais
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
ISBN: 081221434X
Body and Emotion is a study of the relationship between culture and emotional distress, an examination of the cultural forces that influence, make sense of, and heal severe pain and malaise. In order to investigate this relationship, Robert R. Desjarlais served as an apprentice healer among the Yolmo Sherpa, a Tibetan Buddhist people who reside in the Helambu region of northcentral Nepal. In his quest to understand illness among Yolmo villagers, especially a prevalent malady known as "soul loss," Desjarlais goes beyond an exploration of causes and cures to analyze the "aesthetics" of everyday living and their relation to bodily experience, emotional distress, and ritual healing. In contrast to other recent accounts of "symbolic healing," which posit that shamanic rites heal by manipulating the symbolic categories that define a patient, the author contends that a shaman's rites work chiefly to change how a patient feels. A concern for the sensory influences the style of the book, as Desjarlais bids for an ethnography of the tactile, the visceral, the unspoken. Body and Emotion calls for a more sentient anthropology, moves beyond meaning-centered approaches to pain and the body, and outlines the profound role of aesthetic sensibilities in everyday life. Body and Emotion is an extraordinary work that will be of particular value to students and scholars in the fields of anthropology, psychology, Asian studies, and religious studies.
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Imagining the Course of Life:
Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community
by Nancy Eberhardt
University of Hawai'i Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0824829190
Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life.
Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.
Bringing together work from the fields of psychological anthropology, cultural history, and Southeast Asian studies, Imagining the Course of Life speaks to a wide range of readers and will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, religious studies, human development, and moral philosophy.
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Arguing Sainthood:
Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam
by Katherine Pratt Ewing
Duke University Press, 1997.
ISBN: 082232024X
In Arguing Sainthood, Katherine Pratt Ewing examines Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan and their relation to the Westernizing influences of modernity and the shaping of the postcolonial self. Using both anthropological fieldwork and psychoanalytic theory to critically reinterpret theories of subjectivity, Ewing examines the production of identity in the context of a complex social field of conflicting ideologies and interests. Ewing critiques Eurocentric cultural theorists and Orientalist discourse while also taking issue with expatriate postcolonial thinkers Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. She challenges the notion of a monolithic Islamic modernity in order to explore the lived realities of individuals, particularly those of Pakistani saints and their followers. By examining the continuities between current Sufi practices earlier popular practices in the Muslim world, Ewing identifies in the Sufi tradition a reflexive, critical consciousness that has usually been associated with the modern subject. Drawing on her training in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis as well as her anthropological fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, Ewing argues for the value of Lacan in anthropology as she provides the basis for retheorizing postcolonial studies.
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The End of Time:
Religion, Ritual, and the Forging of the Soul
by Richard K. Fenn.
Pilgrim Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0829812067
The End of Time is a highly original and topical study of how societies and individuals deal with the meaning and passage of time. Richard Fenn has a particular interest in time running out, in making up for lost time, and in what society - invariably through ritual - may demand in such situations by way of sacrifice. Fenn makes the disturbing claim that 'temporal panic' - the idea that time is short - leads to the exacerbation, in society, of fascist tendencies: fascist movements are the direct result of anxiety and panic about running out of time, and may have a lasting and disastrous effect on the communities which give rise to them. The message of this book is that it is exceedingly dangerous for any society to run out of time. In the shadow of the millennium, at the end of the century, Fenn discusses what the ultimate 'end of time' might signify. This exciting interdisciplinary work, written by a leading sociologist of religion writing at the height of his powers, will appeal to scholars of religion, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies alike.
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Emotional Expression among the Cree Indians
by Nadia Ferrera.
Taylor & Francis, 1998.
ISBN: 1853026565
The concept of psychological mindedness is used to describe a person's ability to perceive relationships among thoughts, emotions and actions, in order to learn the meanings and causes of his or her behaviour. In this study, Nadia Ferrara examines cultural differences in styles of emotional expression and psychological mindedness by comparing two groups; Euro-Canadians, and Cree Amerinidians--who are often stereotyped as taciturn and less verbally expressive. She investigates the ethnograpic, historical and cultureal context of the Cree People, as well as their style of communication, narratives, beliefs, and views of imagery, dreams and art. Ferrara argues that some cultures predispose individual to use non-verbal modes of emotional expression, but that psychiatry does not take this into consideration in clinical assessment.
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Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City
by Steve Ferzacca.
Carolina Academic Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0890892202
Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City is an ethnographic examination of urban medicine and the hybrid medical practices and perceptions encountered in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Based on observations, interviews, and other data, this book not only illustrates the plurality of Javanese approaches to their own health, but also how this medical pluralism was nurtured during the Suharto regime by an Indonesian nationalist discourse on the health of modernity. Healing the Modern also explores how the contours of medical pluralism in this Javanese urban landscape are built from a particular architecture, or structure of experience that articulates Javanese notions of the self and identity. From these concerns, this book spans interests in both medical anthropology and cultural psychology.
Undergraduate students will find the descriptive qualities useful, while students at the level of advanced study will find engaging the woof and weave of theory and ethnography. For undergraduates, the book will be useful as a primary text or supplementary readings for introductory courses in cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, and courses in peoples and cultures of Southeast Asia or Indonesia.
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Structures of Social Life:
The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations
by Alan Page Fiske
Macmillan, 1997.
ISBN: 0029066875
This is an analysis of human behavior and organization in terms of four basic models. The first model is "'communal sharing,' where the boundaries of individual selves are less distinct and where people are concerned about group membership and common identity. Another is 'authority ranking,' where individuals are alerted to differences in others' positions, ranks, and control of resources. A third is 'equity matching,' where there is equality in the contributions of individuals to activities and in the rewards that they receive from these activities. And the final model is 'market pricing,' where relationships are mediated by values determined by a market system and where individuals are rational in their calculations of value."
Contemporary Sociology
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Only Hope:
Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy
by Vanessa Fong
Stanford, 2004.
ISBN: 080475330X
The first generation of children born under China's one-child family policy is now reaching adulthood. What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only-children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the decision to accelerate the fertility transition.
"Only Hope" shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only-children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only-children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.
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Only Hope was winner of the 2005 Francis Hsu Prize from the
Society for East Asian Anthropology.
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Reinterpreting Freud from a Modern Psychoanalytic Anthropological Perspective
by Dan W. Forsyth
Edwin Mellen, 2003.
ISBN: 0773469230
Forsyth takes an in-depth and interdisciplinary look at the relationship between mind and sociocultural forms to clarify and resolve major issues in psychological anthropology. He holds that oedipal fantasy is a decisive and universal feature of the human mind, and that this results from oedipal fantasy being a central psychic adaptation. He supports these claims by drawing on current thinking in psychological anthropology, psychoanalysis, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, paleoanthropology, ethnology, and primatology. The argument is divided into 6 sections, each comprising a chapter in the book. Because the scope of the argument is so broad, the first chapter discusses basic terminology and the philosophical grounds underlying the argument. The second chapter describes a conceptualization of oedipal fantasy that is not culture-bound; i.e., it can be applied cross-culturally without losing its theoretical rigor or ethnographic validity (The principal psychoanalytic principles used are from works by Freud and Chodorow). The third chapter provides evidence from non-psychoanalytic studies supporting the conceptualization. The fourth chapter refutes well-known claims that oedipal fantasy is not an important human universal. This critique focuses on arguments by Kakar, Obeyesekere, Kurtz, and Parsons; but other cases are discussed as well. The fifth chapter assumes that oedipal fantasy is a basic human adaptation and suggests--in detail--how oedipal fantasy and human consciousness could have emerged in the course of human evolution. The final chapter places oedipal fantasy, as an adaptation, within the nomenclature of current evolutionary theory. If Forsyth's overall case is sound, then the burden of argument lies on those who deny that oedipal dynamics are important and universal aspects of human life. The book is 476 pages long and can be purchased from the Edwin Mellen Press as part of their series in Anthropology.
from the author
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G-Strings and Sympathy:
Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
by Katherine Frank
Duke University Press, October 2002.
ISBN: 0822329727
Based on her experiences as a stripper in a city she calls Laurelton—a southeastern city renowned for its strip clubs—anthropologist Katherine Frank provides a fascinating insider's account of the personal and cultural fantasies motivating male heterosexual strip club "regulars." Given that all of the clubs where she worked prohibited physical contact between the exotic dancers and their customers, in G-Strings and Sympathy Frank asks what—if not sex or even touching—the repeat customers were purchasing from the clubs and from the dancers. She finds that the clubs provide an intermediate space—not work, not home—where men can enjoyably experience their bodies and selves through conversation, fantasy, and ritualized voyeurism. At the same time, she shows how the dynamics of male pleasure and privilege in strip clubs are intertwined with ideas about what it means to be a man in contemporary America.
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