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Recent Books of Interest
Authors G-H
Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
Culture and the Senses - Geurts
The Puerto Rican Syndrome - Gherovici
The Bridge to Humanity - Goldschmidt
Medicine, Rationality, and Experience - Good
The Endangered Self - Green & Sobo
Self Representation - Gregg
A Natural History of Peace - Gregor
Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia - Gregor & Tuzin, eds.
Is America Breaking Apart? - Hall & Lindholm
Parents' Cultural Belief Systems - Harkness & Super, eds.
The Survival of the Self - Harwood
Culture and Attachment - Harwood et al.
Anthropology and Psychoanalysis - Heald & Deluz, eds.
Secrecy and Cultural Reality - Herdt
Sambia Sexual Culture - Herdt
Same Sex, Different Cultures - Herdt
Something to Tell You - Herdt et al.
Adolescence in Pacific Island Societies - Herdt and Leavitt, eds.
Comparative Arawakan Histories - Hill and Santos-Granero, eds.
Why Did They Kill? - Hinton
Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions - Hinton, ed.
Genocide: An Anthropological Reader - Hinton, ed.
A Courtship after Marriage - Hirsch
Experiences of Death - Hockey
Contentment and Suffering - Hollan and Wellenkamp
The Thread of Life - Hollan and Wellenkamp
Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds - Holland et al.
History in Person - Holland & Lave, eds.
Scandal in a Small Town - Hollos
Cognition in the Wild - Hutchins
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Culture and the Senses:
Embodiment, Identity and Well-Being in an African
Community
by Kathryn Linn Geurts
University of California Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0520234553
Culture and the Senses explores how socialization and the process of
becoming a person entail developing a way of perceiving and experiencing
the world that is "embodied" and hence seems "natural," but is in fact
learned through the acquisition of a culturally relative sensorium. This
ethnography of sensory experience among Anlo-Ewe speaking people in
southeastern Ghana focuses on the ways cultural knowledge becomes
"naturalized," and how culturally shaped sensory orientations help
solidify ethnic or identity differences by instantiating perceptual
categories, meanings and frames. Culture and the Senses argues that an
Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states, and their way of delineating a category
of immediate experiences, poses a challenge to the Western folk theory of
sensory functioning being reducible to the five modalities of sight,
touch, taste, hearing and smell. An Anlo category of seselelame
(literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside) represents a cultural meaning system
in which bodily feeling and the interior milieu are sources of vital
information. The specific kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades
Western European/Anglo-American cultural traditions and philosophical
thought is absent in Anlo accounts of seselelame. Four propositions
concerning sensory orders, embodiment, identity and well-being are
developed as a way of forging an interpretive framework for the study of
sensoriums and cultural difference.
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The Puerto Rican Syndrome
Winner of the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology
by Patricia Gherovici
Other Press, 2003.
ISBN: 1892746751
In the book I examine the so-called Puerto Rican syndrome in the contemporary world, its social and cultural implications for the growing Hispanic population in the US and, therefore, for the US as a whole. As a mental illness that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome links nationality and culture to a psychiatric disease whose reappearance recalls the spectacular hysteria that led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. I use the combined insights of Freud and Lacan to examine the current state of psychoanalysis and the growing Hispanic community in the U.S. Blending these insights with history, current events, and case material, I take a look at the Puerto Rican Syndrome as a social and cultural phenomenon while arguing that psychoanalysis is not only possible, but much needed in the barrio.
The Puerto Rican Syndrome was also a recipient of the 2004 Gradiva Award.
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The Bridge to Humanity:
How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene
by Walter Goldschmidt
Oxford University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0195179668
The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene explores the relationship of biology and culture in the evolution of human behavior. Building upon several of the theoretical issues he first addressed in Man's Way, renowned anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt presents a unique look at how human culture functions through biological mechanisms that have evolved from our distant past.
"Affect hunger"--the need for affective expressions from others--underlies nurturance and mutuality. Goldschmidt contends that affect hunger--in combination with other factors unique to the human species--in effect "trumps" the selfish gene and is therefore the essential missing key to understanding human behavior. Employing discussions of primate behavior, ethnographies, cognitive studies, psychological research, and hormonal and neurological studies, he demonstrates how affect hunger not only provides a reward system for learning language and other cultural information, but also remains a motive for social behavior throughout life. Transforming the debate on nature versus culture to one on nature and culture, The Bridge to Humanity provides a fresh perspective on the ways that biology and culture fit together. Indeed, in this book Goldschmidt reinterprets anthropological knowledge, profoundly affecting all students concerned with human behavior and reaching far beyond the discipline's borders.
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Medicine, Rationality, and Experience:
An Anthropological Perspective
by Byron J. Good
Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1994.
ISBN: 052142576X
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a universal, scientific account of the human body and illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of "belief" and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering. And he argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.
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The Endangered Self:
Identity and Social Risk
by Gill Green and Elisa Sobo
Routledge, 2000.
ISBN: 1857289102
This text focuses on how the discovery of an HIV positive status affects the individual's sense of identity, and on the experience of living with HIV and its effects on the individual's social relationships. Green (health & social services, U. of Essex, UK) and Sobo (a researcher at Children's Hospital, San Diego) explore identity change and the stigma attached to an HIV positive status within the context of the sociology of risk. Topics discussed include living and coping with HIV, telling and the danger of disclosure, and reactions in health care and sexual settings.
Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR
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Self-Representation :
Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology, Vol. 18
by Gary S. Gregg
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991.
ISBN: 0313278628
Gregg offers a new look at self-representation that falls into both the older "study of lives" tradition in personality psychology and the newer "narrative psychology." By applying methods of symbolic analysis to the texts of life-historical interviews, he presents a generative model of self-representation. His work re-analyzes such famous case studies as Freud's "Rat Man," presents original life-narrative analyses, and draws the theories and observations together to create a compelling model of self-representation.
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A Natural History of Peace
by Thomas A. Gregor
Vanderbilt University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0826512801
This book provides the first broadly interdisciplinary examination of peace as viewed from the perspectives of social anthropology, primatology, archeology, psychology, political science, and economics. In its broad perspective and conclusions, this book makes a fresh and timely contribution to our understanding of the fundamental characteristics of peace. It will become a basic building block in the further development of the rapidly emerging field of peace studies.
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Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method
edited by Thomas A. Gregor and Donald F. Tuzin
University of California Press, November 2001.
ISBN: 0520228529
One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation.
The contributors to this innovative volume illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia the authors expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new and rewarding directions.
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Feeding Anorexia:
Gender and Power at a Treatment Center
by Hellen Gremillion
Duke University Press, September 2003.
ISBN: 0822331209
Feeding Anorexia challenges prevailing assumptions regarding the notorious difficulty of curing anorexia nervosa. Through a vivid chronicle of treatments at a state-of-the-art hospital program, Helen Gremillion reveals how the therapies participate unwittingly in culturally dominant ideals of gender, individualism, physical fitness, and family life that have contributed to the dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in the United States since the 1970s. She describes how strategies including the meticulous measurement of patients' progress in terms of body weight and calories consumed ultimately feed the problem, not only reinforcing ideas about the regulation of women's bodies, but also fostering in many girls and women greater expertise in the formidable constellation of skills anorexia requires. At the same time, Gremillion shows how contradictions and struggles in treatment can help open up spaces for change.
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Is America Breaking Apart?
by John A. Hall and Charles Lindholm
Princeton University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0691090114
Many believe that the United States is a nation of materialistic loners whose politics are dictated by ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual identities. Americans seem to fear that their society is breaking apart, but how accurate is this portrayal and how justified is the fear? Introducing a balanced viewpoint into this intense debate, John Hall and Charles Lindholm demonstrate that such alarm is unfounded. In this engaging volume, they explore the institutional structures of American society, emphasizing its ability to accommodate difference and defuse conflict. Vivid and ambitious, this book draws a realistic portrait of a society that is among the most powerful and stable in the world, yet is perennially shaken by self-doubt.
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Parents' Cultural Belief Systems:
Their Origins, Expressions, and Consequences
edited by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super
Guilford Publications, 1996.
ISBN: 1572300310
This illuminating new volume offers a multifaceted view of parenting cultural belief systems - their origins in culturally constructed parental experience, their expressions in parental practices, and their consequences for children's well-being and growth. Discussing issues with implications beyond the study of parenthood, the book shows how the analysis of child outcomes which relate to parents' cultural belief systems (or parental "ethnotheories") can provide valuable insights into the nature and meaning of family and self in society and, in some cases, a basis for culturally sensitive therapeutic interventions. Illuminating the powerful influence of parents' cultural belief systems on the health and development of children, this volume will be welcomed by a broad audience. Anthropologists and psychologists interested in cultural theory and the interface of self and society will find a rich source of ideas and information. Parent educators, family therapists, pediatricians, and others who deal with ethnically diverse populations will discover invaluable information on what makes parents think and act the way they do. The book can be used as a primary text for courses in cognitive anthropology and cultural psychology, and as an auxiliary text for culturally oriented courses in lifespan development, education, health, and human services.
from the publisher
Contents
Introduction
Parents' Free Descriptions of Child Characteristics: A Cross-Cultural Search for the Developmental Antecedents of the Big Five
Processes of Generalization in Parental Reasoning
The Answer Depends on the Question: A Conceptual and Methodological Analysis of a Parent Belief-Behavior Interview Regarding Children's Learning
Essential Contrasts: Differences in Parental Ideas about Learners and Teaching in Tahiti and Nepal
How Do Children Develop Knowledge? Beliefs of Tanzanian and American Mothers
Japanese Mothers' Ideas about Infants and Temperament
Scenes from a Marriage: Equality Ideology in Swedish Family Policy, Maternal Ethnotheories, and Practice
Parents' and Adolescents' Ideas on Children: Origins and Transmission of Intracultural Diversity
Education and Mother-Infant Interaction: A Mexican Case Study
The Contrasting Developmental Timetables of Parents and Preschool Teachers in Two Cultural Communities
Ask the Doctor: The Negotiation of Cultural Models in American Parent-Pediatrician Discourse
From Household Practices to Parent's Ideas about Work and Interpersonal Relationships
How Mayan Parental Theories Come into Play
Parental Theories in the Management of Young Children's Sleep in Japan, Italy, and the United States
Maternal Beliefs and Infant Care Practices in Italy and the United States
My Child Is My Crown: Yoruba Parental Theories and Practices in Early Childhood
Growth Consequences of Low-Income Nicaraguan Mothers' Theories about Feeding 1-Year-Olds
The Three R's of Dutch Childrearing and the Socialization of Infant Arousal
Imagining and Engaging One's Children: Lessons from Poor, Rural, New England Mothers
American Cultural Models of Early Influence and Parent Recognition of Developmental Delays: Is Earlier Always Better Than Later?
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The Survival of the Self
by Robin Harwood
Ashgate Publishing, 1998.
ISBN: 1840143436
Gives an account of personal identity derived from the Butler-Reid position, arguing that from the first-person point of view, one necessary condition of personal identity is the survival of the Self. Claims that a person is a combination of a Self, a mind, and a body, and that the Self is the center of consciousness and agency. Discusses the nature of the Self and gives arguments for its existence, and argues against the neo-Lockean views of personal identity.
from Booknews
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Culture and Attachment:
Perceptions of the Child in Context
by Robin L. Harwood, Joan G. Miller, Nydia Lucca Irizarry
Guilford Publications, 1995.
ISBN: 1572302461
Bridging the fields of culture and attachment, this book illuminates the relationship between them in two ways: It examines attachment from the perspective of culture, and then evaluates two different cultures (Anglo and Puerto Rican) from the vantage point of mothers' perceptions of attachment behavior. In so doing, the volume delineates coherent conceptual frameworks that can be used to guide research and to help interpret the results of cross-cultural attachment studies. Designed to sharpen our understanding of the ways in which attachment is both universal and culturally shaped, this volume will enhance the work of scholars investigating basic processes of culture and human development, mental health professionals searching for alternative heuristic frameworks, and professionals involved in formulating policy regarding the social and emotional health of children. It also provides valuable information about the rapidly growing, yet understudied, Puerto Rican culture.
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Anthropology and Psychoanalysis:
An Encounter through Culture
by Suzette Heald and Ariane Deluz, eds.
Routledge, 1994.
ISBN: 0415097436
This book examines the interface between these two disciplines, locating its historical context and investigating the distinctive reactions of British, French and American anthropology to the role of the unconscious in cultural life.
from the publisher
Contents
Introduction
Interpreting the implicit: George Devereux and the Greek myths
Incestuous fantasy and kinship among the Guro
Islam, symbolic hegemony and the problem of bodily expression
Trauma and ego-syntonic response: the Holocaust and 'The Newfoundland Young Yids', 1985
Dream imagery becomes social experience: the cultural elucidation of dream interpretation
Psychoanalysis, unconscious phantasy and interpretation
Gendered persons: dialogues between anthropology and psychoanalysis
Lacanian ethnopsychoanalysis
Lacan and anthropology: comments on Chapters 8 and 9
Indulgent fathers and collective male violence
Every man a hero: Oedipal themes in Gisu circumcision
Symbolic homosexuality and cultural theory: the unconscious meaning of sister exchange among the Gimi of Highland New Guinea
Psychoanalysis as content: reflections on Chapters 11, 12 and 13
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Secrecy and Cultural Reality:
Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House
by Gilbert Herdt
University of Michigan Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0472067613
Secrecy and Cultural Reality explores the ways in which male ritual secrecy is created and inflects collective reality in uncertain sociopolitical conditions and in times of war. Through a series of detailed case studies beginning with the life of Lewis Henry Morgan, followed by studies of male ritual secrecy and the menŐs house in Melanesia and Papua New Guinea, the author shows how a form of conditional masculinity always precedes the creation of sexuality as a means of rule over women and children.
Proposing a general theory of the conditions that foster secrecy, especially among men, Gilbert Herdt posits that men deploy rituals of conditional masculinity in order to cope with social anxiety, gain purpose, achieve homosociality, and impose hierarchy and rule over younger males and women. The personal and institutional outcome is to create an alternative, hidden cultural reality in society. While previous theorists have paid little attention to the role of sexuality in these processes, this book demonstrates the significance of sexuality in homosociality and relationships between the genders. This historical formation is especially interesting in view of the fact that in Melanesia it precedes the development of "homosexuality" as a category or homosexual subjects in the cultural meaning system.
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Sambia Sexual Culture:
Essays from the Field
by Gilbert Herdt
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0226327523
Few cultures have received as much attention in the study of erotic desire, sexuality, and gender as the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. Here, for the first time, is a collection of groundbreaking essays and a new introduction on the Sambia's sexual culture by the renowned anthropologist Gilbert Herdt. Over the course of 20 years, Herdt made 13 field trips to live with the Sambia in order to understand sexuality and ritual in the context of warfare and gender segregation. Herdt's essays examine Sambia fetish and fantasy, ritual nose-bleeding, the role of homoerotic insemination, the role of the father and mother in the process of identity formation, and the creation of a "third sex" in nature and culture. He also discusses the representation of homosexuality in cross-cultural literature on premodern societies, arguing that scholars have long viewed desires through the tropes of negative western models. Herdt asks us to reconsider the realities and subjective experiences of desires in their own context, and to rethink how the homoerotic is expressed in radically divergent sexual cultures.
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Same Sex, Different Cultures:
Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives
by Gilbert Herdt
Westview Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0813331641
In a definitive account of gay and lesbian practices across ancient and contemporary cultures, within tribal, developing, and modern societies, author Gilbert Herdt reveals a diversity of sexuality and sexual practices that erases the lines between gay and straight love. Herdt shows that what we view as specifically gay and lesbian practice is treated as a natural expression of human nature in many other cultures.
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Something to Tell You:
The Road Families Travel when a Child Is Gay
by Gilbert Herdt, Bruce Koff, and Paul Beeman
Columbia University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0231104383
Even now, at the end of the twentieth century, many still have difficulty standing up and saying, "I am the parent of a gay child." Something to Tell You recounts the stories of families whose lives have been touched by the discovery that a child is lesbian or gay - how it affects and influences people's perceptions of their children and even changes the self-image of parents themselves. Focusing on fifty average families - not people seen in clinics or therapy - the authors found a consistent pattern of change: first negative, then positive.... Something to Tell You also shows the lasting and sometimes tragic consequences for families who falter in the process of integration... A richly diverse collection of family stories, Something to Tell You is a book that will help break down widespread prejudice and put an end to destructive cultural myths. It affirms families' highest aspirations toward active love for their gay children, showing the steps to take toward new levels of support, solidarity, and love.
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Adolescence in Pacific Island Societies
edited by Gilbert Herdt and Stephen C. Leavitt
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0822956721
A comparative study of adolescence in the Pacific Islands, taking an anthropological approach. Contains sections on comparative perspectives of Pacific adolescence, cultural constructions of adolescence, and adolescence and social change in the Pacific. Can be used in anthropology courses dealing with social change, psychology and anthropology courses focusing on development and the life cycle, and any course addressing the nature versus nurture question.
Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Contents
Introduction: Studying Adolescence in Contemporary Pacific Island Communities
Gilbert Herdt and Stephen C. Leavitt
Adolescence in the Pacific: A Biosocial View
Carol M. Worthman
Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenthood in an Australian Aboriginal Community
Victoria K. Burban and James S. Chisholm
Horticulture and Hierarchy: The Youthful Beautification of the Body in the Paiela and Porgera Valleys
Aletta Biersack
Woman the Sexual, a Question of When: A Study of Gebusi Adolescence
Eileen M. Cantrell
Coming of Age on Vanatinai: Gender, Sexuality, and Power
Maria Lepowsky
Youth in Rotuma, Then and Now
Alan Howard
The Bikhet Mystique: Masculine Identity and Patterns of Rebellion Among Bumbita Adolescent Males
Stephen C. Leavitt
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Comparative Arawakan Histories
edited by Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero
University of Illinois Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0252073843
This penetrating study is the first to synthesize the writings of ethnologists, historians, and anthropologists concerned with contemporary Arawakan cultures in South America and the adjacent Caribbean basin. Before they were largely decimated and dispersed by the effects of European colonization, Arawak-speaking peoples were the most widespread language family in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they were the first people Columbus encountered in the Americas. Comparative Arawakan Histories examines social structures, political hierarchies, rituals, religious movements, gender relations, and linguistic variations through historical perspectives to document sociocultural diversity across the diffused Arawakan diaspora.
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Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions
SPA Publication No. 10
by Alexander Laban Hinton, ed.
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0521652111
Are emotions given by biology or are they learnt? Are they the same everywhere, or culturally variable? Research on the emotions tends to be polarised between neo-Darwinian and culturalist perspectives. In this volume, biological and cultural anthropologists attempt to transcend the traditional oppositions, proposing various strategies for integrating biological and cultural approaches to the study of emotion. Discussing a variety of fascinating ethnographic examples, topics covered range from the effects of music to the relationships between emotion and respiration. The editor's introduction lucidly reviews the state of the field.
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Why Did They Kill?:
Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide
by Alexander Laban Hinton
University of California Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0520241797
Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates perpetrators to kill. Basing his analysis on years of investigative work in Cambodia, Hinton finds parallels between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazi regimes. Policies in Cambodia resulted in the deaths of over 1.7 million of that country's 8 million inhabitants--almost a quarter of the population--who perished from starvation, overwork, illness, malnutrition, and execution. Hinton considers this violence in light of a number of dynamics, including the ways in which difference is manufactured, how identity and meaning are constructed, and how emotionally resonant forms of cultural knowledge are incorporated into genocidal ideologies.
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Genocide: An Anthropological Reader
edited by Alexander Laban Hinton
Blackwell, April 2002.
ISBN: 063122355X
During the twentieth century, tens of millions of people were
annihilated by genocidal regimes. At the onset of the twenty-first
century, we must look back and attempt to comprehend what has aptly been
termed the "century of genocide." Genocide: An Anthropological Reader
helps lay a foundation for an "anthropology of genocide" by gathering
together for the first time seminal, previously published texts in the
fields of genocide studies and anthropology for learning about and
understanding this phenomenon.
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A Courtship after Marriage:
Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families
by Jennifer S. Hirsch
University of California Press, August 2003.
ISBN: 0520228715
From about seven children per woman in 1960, the fertility rate in Mexico has dropped to about 2.6. Such changes are part of a larger transformation explored in this book, a richly detailed ethnographic study of generational and migration-related redefinitions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in rural Mexico and among Mexicans in Atlanta.
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Experiences of Death:
An Anthropological Account
by Jennifer L. Hockey
Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
ISBN: 0748602402
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Contentment and Suffering:
Culture and Experience in Toraja
by Douglas W. Hollan and Jane C. Wellenkamp
Columbia University Press, 1994.
ISBN: 0231084234
Contentment and Suffering, a psychocultural ethnography of the Toraja wet-rice farmers of Indonesia, provides a rich portrait of Torajan life and contributes to debates on the relationship between culture and individual psychology. Hollan and Wellenkamp describe the central aspects of Torajan personal experience -emotion, identity, and sense of self- and a variety of fascinating cultural practices, including possession trance, kickfights, elaborate mortuary customs, dream interpretation, and buffalo sacrifice.
Presenting exceptionally detailed ethnographic data through a person-centered perspective and extensive use of open-ended interviews, Contentment and Suffering engagingly expresses how the Toraja understand their lives.
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The Thread of Life:
Toraja Reflections on the Life Cycle
by Douglas W. Hollan and Jane C. Wellenkamp
University of Hawaii Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0824818393
"This is an enjoyably readable and generally illuminating look at the more intimate side of Toraja life and relationships.... [It is] an innovative approach to ethnography, valuable in its attempt to deal with aspects of life that are often passed over in more conventional ethnographic writing."
Journal of Asian Studies
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Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
by Dorothy Holland, Debra Skinner, William Lachicotte, Carole Cain
Harvard University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 0674815661
This book addresses the central problem in anthropological theory today: the paradox that humans are products of social discipline yet producers of remarkable improvisation. Synthesizing theoretical contributions by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu, Dorothy Holland and her co-authors examine the processes by which people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially imposed worlds. Ethnographic illumination of this complex theoretical construction comes from vividly described fieldwork in vastly different microcultures: American college women "caught" in romance; patients in U.S. institutions of mental health care; members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and girls and women in patriarchal Hindu villages in central Nepal. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds offers a liberating yet tempered understanding of agency, as it shows how, despite the force of cultural and social traditions, people improvise, redescribe themselves, and re-create their cultural worlds.
from Publisher's Weekly
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History in Person:
Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities
edited by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave
School of American Research Press, 2000.
ISBN: 1930618018
Extended conflict situations in Northern Ireland or South Africa, the local impacts of the rise of multinational corporations, and conflicts in workplaces, households, and academic fields are all crucibles for the forging of identities. In this volume, the authors' research is brought to bear on enduring struggles and the practices of identity within those struggles. This collection of essays explores the innermost, generative aspects of subjects as social, cultural, and historical beings and raises serious questions about long-term conflicts and sustained identities in the world today. Nine ethnographers address such topics as the politically sexualized transformation of identities of women political prisoners in Northern Ireland; the changing character of political activism across generations in a Guatemala Mayan family; the cultural forms that mediate the struggles of working-class men on shop floors in England; and class and community struggles between the state and grassroots activists in New York
from the publisher
Contents
History in Person: An Introduction
Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave
Engendering Violence: Strip Searching of Women in Northern Ireland
Bego–a Aretxaga,
Indigenous Activism across Generations: An Intimate Social History of Antiracism Organizing in Guatemala
Kay B. Warren,
From Women's Suffering to Women's Politics: Reimagining Women after Nepal's 1990 Pro-Democracy Movement
Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner
Placing the Politics of Black Class Formation
Steven Gregory
"Tekin' the Piss"
Paul Willis
The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori
Daniel T. Linger
Class and Identity: The Jujitsu of Domination and Resistance in Oaxacalifornia
Michael Kearney
Getting to Be British
Jean Lave
Figures of the Future: Dystopia and Subjectivity in the Social Imagination of the Future
Liisa Malkki
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Scandal in a Small Town:
Understanding Modern Hungary through the Histories
of Three Families
by Marida C. Hollos
M. E. Sharpe, December 2001.
ISBN: 0765607409
This book tells the story of modern Hungarian society through the interconnected lives of several families in a small town. The families are Catholic, Lutheran, and Communist, prosperous and impoverished, admirable and awful. They are linked by their involvement in a petty scandal that became grist for the national press as the Hungarian regime began to topple in 1989 -- an episode that prompted the town's popular mayor to take his own life.
Each of the three main parts of the book traces the family history of one of the scandal's protagonists over the course of the last century. Through that family history, we learn to see the world from the perspective of one of the social groups making up the community. The ups and downs of each family are tied not only to the strengths and weaknesses of its individual members, but also to twists and turns of East European history and the vagaries of politics under changing regimes and economic systems.
At the end of the book the author revisits the town and the surviving characters, and tells of their fate in the new Hungary. The overall effect is a vision of twentieth-century Hungarian society that no standard history can convey.
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Cognition in the Wild
by Edwin Hutchins
MIT Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0262581469
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that differ from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture; thus the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing life in the Navy and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he adopts David Marr's paradigm and applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science - cognition as computation - to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that involve multiple individuals. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales.
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