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Recent Books of Interest
Authors N-S
Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
Money and the Human Condition - Neary & Taylor
A Narrative Community - Noy
Cannibal Talk - Obeyesekere
Disciplined Hearts - O'Nell
Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan - Ozawa-de Silva
Dream and Culture - Parman
Moses and Civilization - Paul
Finding Culture in Talk - Quinn, ed.
Those Who Touch - Rasmussen
The Navigation of Feeling - Reddy
Connections: Mind, Brain and Culture an a Social Anthropology - Reyna
Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War - Robarchek & Robarchek
Cultures Under Siege - Robben & Suarez-Orozco, eds.
Becoming Sinners - Robbins
The Making of Global and Local
Modernities in Melanesia - Robbins & Wardlow, eds.
Armies of the Young - Rosen
Japanese Sense of Self - Rosenberger
Reason and Unreason - Rustin
The Five to Seven Year Shift - Sameroff and Haith, eds.
Girls in Trouble with the Law - Schaffner
New Directions in Psychological Anthropology - Schwartz et al., eds.
Children and Anthropology - Schwartzman, ed.
Between Cultures - Seelye with Wasilewski
Strange Harvest - Sharp
Culture in Mind - Shore
Respect and Disrespect - Shwalb & Shwalb, eds.
Applied Developmental Psychology - Shwalb, Nakazawa, Shwalb eds.
Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery - Silverman
Selves in Time and Place - Skinner & Pach, eds.
Village on the Edge - Smith
Chosen Women in Korean Politics - Soh
Making of Psychological Anthropology II - Spindler et al., eds.
Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality - Spiro
Culture in Psychology - Squire
A'aisa's Gifts - Stephen
A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning - Strauss & Quinn
Language and Self-Transformation - Stromberg
Children of Immigration - Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco
The New Immigration - Suarez-Orozco et al., eds.
Talk of Love: How Culture Matters - Swidler
authors | titles | date | top
Money and the Human Condition
by Mike Neary and Graham Taylor
St. Martin's Press, 1998.
ISBN: 0312212968
This book sets out to unlock the secrets of money and the intimate connections between the social and institutional forms of money and human individuality and personality. The book combines a reappraisal of sociological, economic and Marxist accounts of money with a substantive assessment of the way in which money impacts on intimate areas of everyday life. The areas covered include the National Lottery, the Criminal Justice System and Local Exchange and Trading Schemes. Through an analysis of these topics the authors conclude that a full understanding of money requires the development of a materialist psychology which links human personality with the material contradictions of money forms.
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A Narrative Community:
Voices of Israeli Backpackers
by Chaim Noy
Waye State University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0814331769
Backpacking, or Tarmila'ut, has been a time-honored rite of passage for young Israelis for decades. Shortly after completing their mandatory military service, young people set off on extensive backpacking trips to "exotic" and "authentic" destinations in so-called Third World regions in India, Nepal, and Thailand in Asia, and also Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in Central and South America. Chaim Noy collects the words and stories of Israeli backpackers to explore the lively interplay of quotations, constructed dialogues, and social voices in the backpackers' stories and examine the crucial role they play in creating a vibrant, voiced community.
A Narrative Community illustrates how, against the peaks of Mt. Everest, avalanches, and Incan cities, the travelers' storytelling becomes an inherently social drama of shared knowledge, values, hierarchy, and aesthetics. Based on forty-five in-depth narrative interviews, the research in this book examines how identities and a sense of belonging emerge on different social levelsÑthe individual, the group, and the collective--through voices that evoke both the familiar and the Other. In addition, Narrative Community makes a significant contribution to modern tourism literature by exploring the sociolinguistic dimension related to tourists' accounts and particularly the transformation of self that occurs with the experience of travel. In particular, it addresses the interpersonal persuasion that travelers use in their stories to convince others to join in the ritual of backpacking by stressing the personal development that they have gained through their journeys.
This volume is groundbreaking in its dialogical conceptualization of the interview as a site of cultural manifestation, innovation, and power relations. The methods employed, which include qualitative sampling and interviewing, clearly demonstrate ways of negotiating, manifesting, and embodying speech performances. Because of its unique interdisciplinary nature, A Narrative Community will be of interest to sociolinguists, folklore scholars, performance studies scholars, tourism scholars, and those interested in social discourses in Israel.
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Cannibal Talk:
The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas
by Gananath Obeyesekere
University of California Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0520243080
In this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. Cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism, he argues. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. Cannibal Talk considers how the colonial intrusion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of "conspicuous anthropophagy."
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Disciplined Hearts:
History, Identity, and Depression in an American Indian Community
by Theresa Deleane O'Nell
University of California Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0520214463
Drawing on recent anthropological theory as well as ethnographic and clinical work, Theresa O'Nell locates depression among the Flathead Indians in the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. Offering a rich account of family and community life, she describes the moral imagination with which Flathead Indian people weave together historical and personal loss, American Indian identity, and social responsibility.
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Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan
by Chikako Ozawa-de Silva
Routledge, 2006.
ISBN: 0415336759
Naikan is a Japanese psychotherapeutic method which combines meditation-like body engagement with the recovery of memory and the reconstruction of one's autobiography in order to bring about healing and a changed notion of the self.
Based on original anthropological fieldwork, this fascinating bookÊprovides a detailed ethnography of Naikan in practice. In addition, it discusses key issues such as the role of memory, autobiography and narrative in health care, and the interesting borderland between religion and therapy, where Naikan occupies an ambiguous position.ÊMultidisciplinary in its approach, it will attract a wide readership,Êincluding students of social and cultural anthropology, medical sociology, religious studies, Japanese studies and psychotherapy.
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Dream and Culture:
An Anthropological Study of the Western Intellectual Tradition
by Susan Parman
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1990.
ISBN: 0275932303
"Parman contends that in order to understand dreams we must first of all understand the cultural context within which they are expressed. Certainly we cannot 'interpret' a dream without some preliminary grasp of indigenous notions of psychology, cosmology, and epistemology. Readers are therefore introduced to everything from classical notions of the self through the modern schools of rationalism and psychoanalysis. This book brilliantly shows the vast shifts in Western presuppositions regarding dreams. Parman's insistence on an anthropological approach to dreams constitutes a healthy antidote to the anarchronistic tendency to foist the epistemology of contemporary psychoanalysis back onto earlier periods."
Choice
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Moses and Civilization:
The Meaning behind Freud's Myth
by Robert A. Paul
Yale University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0300064284
Freud's major cultural books, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, have long been viewed as failed attempts at historical reconstruction. This book, by an anthropologist and practicing psychoanalyst, offers a brilliant reinterpretation of these works, presenting them instead as versions and unwitting analyses of the great mythic narrative underlying Judeo-Christian civilization, found principally in the Five Books of Moses. Synthesizing aspects of structural anthropology, symbolic anthropology, evolutionary theory, and psychoanalysis, Robert A. Paul reveals the numerous parallels between Freud's myth of the primal horde and the Torah text. He shows how the primal-horde scenario is the basis for the Christian myth of the life and death of Jesus. And he details the way Freud's myth corresponds to the unconscious fantasy structure of the obsessional personality - a style of personality dynamics Paul sees as essential to maintaining the bureaucratic institutions that comprise Western civilization's most distinctive features. Paul thus corrects and completes Freud's project, creating a valid psychoanalytic account of Western civilization that rests not on faulty speculation, as did Freud's, but on a detailed reading of the biblical text and of the legends, folklore, commentaries, and social practices surrounding it.
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Finding Culture in Talk:
A Collection of Methods
SPA Series on Culture, Mind and Society
edited by Naomi Quinn
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
ISBN:
1403969159
This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.
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Those Who Touch:
Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective
by Susan Rasmussen
Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.
ISBN:
0875806104
A twenty-five-year veteran of field research in Niger and Mali, anthropologist Susan J. Rasmussen examines the female-dominated practice of herbalism in the seminomadic Muslim communities of Tuareg. Medicine women, known as tinesmegelen, diagnose by touch and treat their patients-mostly women and children-with leaves, bark, and roots from trees associated with ancestral spirits. In addition to healing, they relate oral traditions, offer marital counseling, protect patients against potential domestic violence, and practice divination.
By earning the trust of nearly twenty medicine women over the course of her fieldwork, Rasmussen is able to provide an in-depth profile of these healers and their beliefs. The women come from diverse backgrounds, many of noble origins. Whereas they must be mothers, most do not practice their profession fully until their post-childbearing years. Rasmussen traces the mythical-historical origins of female herbalism and the initiation process for entering the profession. Significantly, she investigates the powerful relationships between medicine women and various authorities: Islamic leaders, state officials, and the medical staff of nongovernment clinics.
Rasmussen draws the reader into this fascinating world of medicine women through interviews, guided conversations, life histories, illustrative case studies, and, most importantly, the words of the healers and their patients. As a participant-observer, she shares her own experiences with descriptions of the treatments she herself received. Then, moving from a focused analysis to a broader contextual frame, she addresses central questions in anthropology about gender, knowledge, and the interface between religion and medicine.
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The Navigation of Feeling:
A Framework for the History of Emotions
by William M. Reddy
Cambridge University Press, September 2001.
ISBN: 0521004721
This work argues that an entirely new conception of emotions can
be built in a space opened up once we confront the weaknesses both
of modern Cartesian dualism and of its principal critics the
poststructuralists. This space is constituted by the indeterminacy of
translation, and the recognition that translation is the principal
activity of "cognition," within the individual. It is the space between
attentionâs limited capacity and the vast array of thoughts in various
codes, in various states of activation, available to attention at all
times, a space we must navigate by means of the imperfect strategies
of mental control. Here "emotions" come to life, to vex, enlighten,
guide, encumber, to reveal goal conflicts we have overlooked, to aid
us in overlooking others. When we speak of such matters, we
inevitably alter their configuration. When we "describe" this space
through which we are obliged to navigate, we change its map. This
is a frustrating, paradoxical sea whose shape is of the utmost
importance. It is central to individual identity, and therefore to
community life and to politics. I have tried to show how a certain
conception of emotional liberty can help us to evaluate the emotional
styles that communities and states attempt to impose on their
members. These emotional "regimes" may make navigation easier or
more difficult. Minimizing human suffering inevitably entails that we
seek ways to make navigation--which will never be a simple
matter--as easy as we can. From this perspective, it is possible to
judge the political merits or demerits of any regime.
French history across the revolutionary divide provides an
important test case. Many French in the eighteenth century believed
sentimentalism would guide them to a new and unprecedented kind
of emotional liberty. This belief went to the scaffold with
Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just on 28 July 1794. The modern
dualist conception of emotions, formulated in reaction against this
stunning failure, lowered expectations, allowing greater flexibility,
but at the cost of imposing a painful burden: a systematic,
pessimistic underestimation of our capacity for self determination.
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Connections:
Mind, Brain and Culture in Social Anthropology
by Stephen P. Reyna
Routledge, 2002.
ISBN: 041527155X
Have you ever wondered how the internal space of our brain connects with the external space of society? Drawing on hermeneutics and neuroscience Stephen Reyna develops an anthropological theory that explains the relationship between the biological and the cultural. This groundbreaking work rethinks the relationship between psychology, cognitive neuroscience and anthropology and offers a new way of understanding the human condition.
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Waorani:
The Contexts of Violence and War
by Carole Robarchek and Clayton Robarchek
Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997.
ISBN: 0155037978
An ethnographic case study on the psychological and cultural dynamics of violence, this text is an ideal supplement in any anthropology or sociology course focusing on human social behavior. Attempting to serve as both a narrative account of violence and a general explanatory framework for this violence, Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War focuses on understanding and explaining violence in Waorani society while developing a theoretical model that can encompass violence in other societies.
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Cultures Under Siege:
Collective Violence and Trauma
SPA Publication No. 11
by Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, eds.
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0521780268
This book is a collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world. Profiting from an interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors provide provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, and they also propose new ways of understanding human cruelty and suffering.
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Becoming Sinners:
Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society
Joel Robbins
University of California Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0520238001
In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.
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The Making of Global and Local
Modernities in Melanesia:
Humiliation, Transformation and the Nature of Cultural Change
Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow, eds.
Ashgate Publishing, 2005.
ISBN: 0754643123
This work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.
Contents
Introduction - humiliation and transformation: Marshall Sahlins and the study of cultural change in Melanesia
Joel Robbins
The economics of develop-man in the Pacific
Marshall Sahlins
The humiliations of sin: Christianity and the modernization of the subject among the Urapmin
Joel Robbins
Transformations of desire: envy and resentment among the Huli of Papua New Guinea
Holly Wardlow
'We Are Not Straight': Bumbita Arapesh strategies for self-reflection in the race of Western superiority
Stephen C. Leavitt
Sepik river selves in a changing modernity: from Sahlins to psychodynamics
Eric Kline Silverman
'We Are All "Les" Men': sorrow and modernism in Melanesia, or humor in Paradise
Douglas Dalton
Moral and practical frameworks for the self in conditions of social change
Lisette Josephides
The death of Moka and polygamy in post-colonial highlands, Papua New Guinea,
Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern
On the life and times of the Ipili imagination
Aletta Biersack
On humiliation and class in contemporary Papua New Guinea
Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz
Turning to violence: hazarding intent in central New Ireland
Karen Sykes
Ancestral vigilance and the corrective conscience in Kwaio: Kastom as culture in a Melanesian society
David Akin
Afterword: frustrating modernity in Melanesia
Robert J. Foster
Index
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Armies of the Young:
Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism
by David M. Rosen
Rutgers University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0813535670
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Japanese Sense of Self
SPA Publication No. 2
by Nancy R. Rosenberger
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
ISBN: 0521466377
Demonstrating the Japanese ability to reconcile opposition within their community, this presentation of the idea of the self as interactive with society challenges previous simplistic comparisons between Western individualism and non-Western collectivism.
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Reason and Unreason
by Michael Rustin
University Press of New England, July 2001.
ISBN: 0819564796
Reason and Unreason explores issues concerning the justification and legitimacy of psychoanalytic knowledge, and its relevance to political and social questions. Part I explores the achievements of the British psychoanalytic tradition, relating these to recent developments in the sociological understanding of the sciences. The argument over the legitimacy of psychoanalysis is advanced beyond sterile polemics towards a more complex and self-confident understanding of its distinctive features and contributions.
The book's second major theme concerns the relevance of psychoanalysis to social and political understanding. Psychoanalysis is here identified as a late form of "modernism" providing coherent and profound ways of thinking about the needs of society. Public policy, Rustin argues, would be more effective if based on a psychoanalytically-informed understanding of relational needs and unconscious anxieties.
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The Five to Seven Year Shift:
The Age of Reason and Responsibility
edited by Arnold J. Sameroff and Marshall M. Haith
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0226734471
With increasing numbers of children suffering emotional, educational, and social failure on entering school, the years from five to seven have returned to prominence in developmental psychology. This volume collects state of the art research on child behavior in the school transition years. Leading researchers in neurology, sociology, anthropology, education, and psychology assess what is now commonly known as the five to seven year shift. They consider how development is influenced by changes in neurobiological subsystems; cognition, emotion, and self-concept; concerns with peers and families; and school and cultural practices. They find that important transitions in behavior and environment do take place in this period, and are best described in terms of the qualitative increase in complexity due to interactions among ecological systems. This volume increases our understanding of both child development and the study and treatment of children at home and at school. It will interest researchers, clinicians, and students of psychology and education.
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Girls in Trouble with the Law
by Laurie Schaffner
Rutgers University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0813538343
In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens.
Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile legal system, Schaffner makes a compelling argument that current policies do not go far enough to empower disadvantaged girls so that communities can assist them in overcoming the social limitations and gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic discrimination that continue to plague young women growing up in contemporary United States.
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New Directions
in Psychological Anthropology
SPA Publication No. 3
by Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz, eds.
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
ISBN: 052142609X
The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are prominent figures in psychological anthropology, and they write about recent developments in this field. Psychological anthropology's present scope includes the psychology of cognition and affect, to which it has made substantial contributions.
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Children and Anthropology:
Perspectives for the 21st Century
edited by Helen B. Schwartzman
Greenwood Publishing Group, October 2001.
ISBN: 0897896866
The volume was inspired by the "Children and Anthropology" conference at the 14th International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnological Sciences, which was held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in July of 1998. It was there that the contributing researchers/authors presented an argument aimed at changing the face of both anthropology and the study of children. They contend that anthropologists could and should contribute to a revitalized framework for the study of children and that childhood and youth culture are important sites for developing a more innovative and integrated anthropology.
As anthropologists struggle with competing research paradigms and agendas in this post-industrial, post-structural, late-modern world, it is argued here that research on children is an important arena for demonstrating the value of an anthropology that is both integrative (across sub-fields) and comparative. It seems clear that children in the 21st century will confront a range of both new and continuing problems that anthropologists are well-situated to address, such as the exploitation of Third World child labor, AIDS and other epidemics affecting children world-wide, and the impact of immigration as well as forced relocations due to war, natural disasters, and other social and environmental ills.
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Contents
Children and Anthropology: A Century of Studies
Helen B. Schwartzman
Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Prehistoric Children: Past Trends and Future Directions
Blythe E. Roveland
The Bodily Costs of Childbearing: Western Science through a West African Lens
Caroline Beldsoe
Street Children and their Peers: Perspective on Homelessness, Poverty, and Health
Catherine Panter-Brick
Participatory Research with Children in Vietnam
Joachim Theis
The Bear (Ir)Realities: Media Technology and the Pretend-Real Distinction on a Televised Puppet Show
Calvin Smith, Candi Forrest, Laurence Goldman, and Michael Emmison
Feminist Theory and the Ethnography of Children's Worlds: Barbie New Haven, Connecticut
Elizabeth Chin
Young People and the Creation of Cultural Meaning: Three Examples from the Realm of Computing in Brazil
Gerald Lombardi
Those on the Other Side: Ethnic Identity and Imagination in Greek Cypriot Children's Lives
Spyros Spyrou
Constructing Racialized Childhoods in Canadian Political Discourse
Jane Helleiner
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Between Cultures: Developing Self-Identity in a World of Diversity
by H. Ned Seelye with Jacqueline Howell Wasilewski
NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group, 1996.
ISBN: 0844233056
The authors offer self-identity exercises and real-life examples illustrating the experiences of those who routinely cross cultural borders, discussing issues such as biological and cultural diversity, ethnicity and race, bilingualism, and archetypes and metaphors that can help develop self-identity. For multicultural general readers.
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Strange Harvest:
Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self
by Lesley Sharp
University of California Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0520247868
Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor anonymity. As Sharp argues, new forms of embodied intimacy arise in response, and the riveting insights gleaned from her interviews, observations, and descriptions of donor memorials and other transplant events expose how patients and donor families make sense of the transfer of body parts from the dead to the living. For instance, all must grapple with complex yet contradictory clinical assertions of death as easily detectable and absolute; nevertheless, transplants are regularly celebrated as forms of rebirth, and donors as living on in others' bodies. New forms of sociality arise, too: recipients and donors' relatives may defy sanctions against communication, and through personal encounters strangers are transformed into kin. Sharp also considers current experimental research efforts to develop alternative sources for human parts, with prototypes ranging from genetically altered animals to sophisticated mechanical devices. These future trajectories generate intriguing responses among both scientists and transplant recipients as they consider how such alternatives might reshape established--yet unusual--forms of embodied intimacy.
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Culture in Mind:
Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning
by Bradd Shore
Oxford University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0195126629
Despite the recognized importance of cultural diversity in understanding the modern world, the emerging science of cognitive psychology has relied far more on experimental psychology, neurobiology, and computer science than on cultural anthropology for its models of how we think. In new book, anthropologist Bradd Shore has created the first study linking multiculturalism to cognitive psychology, exploring the complex relationship between cultural expressions in public institutions and in mental representations. In so doing, he answers in a completely new way the age-old question of whether humans are basically the same psychologically, independent of cultures, or essentially different. The author argues that culture must be considered an intrinsic component of the human mind to a degree that most psychologists and even many anthropologists have not recognized. This new position of cultural models will make absorbing reading for psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers, and for anyone interested in the issues of cultural diversity, multiculturalism, or cognitive science in general.
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Respect and Disrespect:
Cultural Perspectives on Antecedents and Consequence
David Shwalb & Barbara J. Shwalb eds.
Wiley, John & Sons, 2007.
ISBN: 0787995584
How and when do respect and disrespect develop in childhood or adolescence? Respect enables children and teenagers to value other people, institutions, traditions, and themselves. Disrespect is the agent that dissolves positive relationships and fosters hostile and cynical relationships. Unfortunately, parents, educators, children, and adolescents in many societies note with alarm a growing problem of disrespect and a decline in respect for self and others. Is this disturbing trend a worldwide problem? To answer this question, we must begin to study the developmental and cultural origins of respect and disrespect.
Five research teams report that respect and disrespect are influenced by experiences in the family, school, community, and, most importantly, the broader cultural setting. The chapters introduce a new topic area for mainstream developmental sciences that is relevant to the interests of scholars, educators, practitioners, and policymakers.
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Applied Developmental Psychology:
Theory, Practice, and Research from Japan
David Shwalb, Jun Nakazawa, Barbara J. Shwalb eds.
Information Age Publishing, 2005.
ISBN: 1593112629
Contents
To the Reader
Irving Sigel
Introduction
David Shwalb, Jun Nakazawa, Barbara Shwalb
Section I: Technology And Media Influences
Video Games and the Psychological Development of Japanese Children
Akira Sakamoto
Development of Manga (Comic Book) Literacy in Children
Jun Nakazawa
Longitudinal Research on Children's Vulnerability to Television
Takashi Muto, Shiori Sumiya, and Mami Komaya
Section II: Cognitive Development And Education
Cognitive Counseling to Improve
David Shwalb
Students' Metacognition and Cognitive Skills
Shin'ichi Ichikawa
Children's Misconceptions: Research on Improving Understanding of Mathematics and Science
Keiichi Magara
Motivation for Abacus Studies and School Mathematics: A Longitudinal Study of Japanese 3rd-6th Graders
David Shwalb, Shuji Sugie,and Chongming Yang
Developmental Processes of Literacy in Japan: Kana Reading in Early Childhood
Kiyomi Akita
Section III: Children With Disabilities
Use of Electronic and Information Technologies for Japanese Children with Developmental Disabilities
Kenryu Nakamura, Mamoru Iwabuchi, and Satoshi Sakai
Language Interventions Using Scripts for Children with Down Syndrome
Tsutomu Nagasaki and Miho Onozato
Social Cognitive Development of Autistic Children: Attachment Relationships and Understanding the Existence of Minds of Others
Satoshi Beppu
Section IV: Research On The Family With Policy Implications
Maternal Employment and Child Development in Japan: A Twelve-Year Longitudinal Study
Masumi Sugawara
Job-Related Temporary Father Absence (Tanshinfunin) and Child Development
Yuko Tanaka and Jun Nakazawa
Child Abuse in Japan: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Perspectives
Junichi Shoji
Section V: Peer Relations
School Absenteeism, Bullying, and Loss of Peer Relationships in Japanese Children
Toru Hosaka
Bullying and Peer Support Systems in Japan: Intervention Research
Yuichi Toda
Peer Adjustment Processes of a Five-Year-Old Chinese Boy in a Japanese Day Nursery
Makoto Shibayama
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Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery:
Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea
by Eric Kline Silverman
University of Michigan Press, fall 2001.
ISBN: 0472067575
Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery analyzes the relationship between masculinity and motherhood in an Eastern Iatmul village along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. It focuses on a metaphoric dialogue between two countervailing images of the body that literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin dubbed the "moral" and the "grotesque." Eastern Iatmul men in Tambunum village idealize an image of motherhood that is nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste, in a word, moral. But men also fear an equally compelling image of motherhood that is defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal, hence, grotesque. Masculinity in Tambunum is a rejoinder both subtle and strident, muted and impassioned, to these contrary, embodied images of motherhood... This book is the first sustained examination of naven since Bateson that presents new data and interpretations that are based entirely on original, first-hand research. By contextualizing the rite in psychodynamic imagery, local concepts of personhood, and paradoxes of gender, Silverman shows that naven portrays masculinity as a tale of tragedy and pathos that is scripted through images of carnivalesque motherhood.
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Selves in Time and Place:
Identities, Experience, and History in Nepal
edited by Debra Skinner and Alfred Pach III
Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
ISBN: 0847685993
Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach, power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts. Contributors to this volume extend this emphasis, drawing upon their ethnographic research in Nepal to examine closely how selves, identities, and experience are produced in dialogical relationships through time in a multi-ethic nation-state and within a discourse of nationalism. The diversity of peoples, recent political transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an especially rich locale to examine people's struggles to define and position themselves. But the authors move beyond geographical boundaries to more theoretical terrain to problematicize the ways in which people recreate or contest certain identities and positions. Various authors explore how people-positioned by gender, ethnicity, and locale-use cultural genres to produce aspects of identities and experiences; they examine how subjectivities, agencies and cultural worlds co-develop and are shaped through engagement with cultural forms; and they portray the appropriation of multiple voices for self and group formation. As such, this collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the mutual constitution of selves and society.
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Village on the Edge:
Changing Times in Papua New Guinea
by Michael French Smith
University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0824826094
Kragur village lies on the rugged north shore of Kairiru, a steep volcanic island just off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. In 1998 the village looked much as it had some twenty-two years earlier when author Michael French Smith first visited. But he soon found that changing circumstances were shaking things up. Village on the Edge weaves together the story of Kragur villagers' struggle to find their own path toward the future with the story of Papua New Guinea's travails in the post-independence era. Smith writes of his own experiences as well, living and working in Papua New Guinea and trying to understand the complexities of an unfamiliar way of life. To tell all these stories, he delves into ghosts, magic, myths, ancestors, bookkeeping, tourism, the World Bank, the Holy Spirit, and the meaning of progress and development. Village on the Edge draws on the insights of cultural anthropology but is written for anyone interested in Papua New Guinea.
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Chosen Women in Korean Politics:
An Anthropological Study
by Chung-Hee S. Soh
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991.
ISBN: 027593876X
Soh contributes a unique perspective on women in politics by analyzing ethnographic materials on the experiences of Korean women in their national legislature. Among the questions she raises are: Who are these women? How did they attain their political positions? What motivated their participation in male-dominated politics? Soh investigates the life histories of twenty-nine women who have been chosen to serve in the South Korean National Assembly to answer these questions. This study sheds light on the dynamics of sociocultural change in male-female relations and gender role conceptions in a modernizing society.
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Making of Psychological Anthropology II
edited by George D. Spindler, Louise S. Spindler, and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
Harcourt, 1994.
ISBN: 0155013122
Contents
General Introduction
George and Louise Spindler
Remaking Psychological Anthropology
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
Psychological Anthropology as the Naturalist's Art
Tanya M. Luhrmann
My Approach to Psychological Anthropology
Robert A. Paul
Entertaining (Im)possibilities: Chance and Necessity in the Making of a Psychological Anthropologist
David H. Spain
The Violence of Everyday Life: In Search of a Critical and Politically Engaged Psychological Anthropology
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Doing Psychological Anthropology at the Fin de Siecle
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco
Reflections on the Savage Self: Introspection, Empathy, and Anthropology
Waud H. Kracke
Rethinking Psychological Anthropology: A Critical View
Vincent Crapanzano
Coginitive Anthropology: An Origin Story
Charles O. Frake
Cultural Knowledge and Cognitive Strucutre
A. Kimball Romney
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Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality:
An Essay on Cultural Reproduction
by Melford E. Spiro
Yale University Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0300070071
Why do members of a society espouse culturally constituted beliefs that are at odds with their personal interests and experiences? In this book Melford Spiro, a psychological anthropologist, answers this question by investigating ideologies of gender and sex relations in Burma, according to which men are superior and women are morally and sexually dangerous - despite the reality that women enjoy high economic, legal, and social status. Spiro argues that these sexist ideologies - prevalent in most of the human world - are an expression of male anxieties and insecurities. Spiro propose a theory of cultural reproduction that is an alternative to the enculturation model of radical cultural determinism. He postulates that cultural systems are reproduced only insofar as they are internalized by members of society and that this occurs if these systems resonate with members' conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires or are employed by them as a resource for the construction of defense mechanisms. He compares his firsthand observations of a Burmese village to extensive data from a wide array of other societies (including our own) and argues that this explanation applies to all societies.
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Culture in Psychology
by Corinne Squire
Routledge, 2000.
ISBN: 0415217032
Culture in Psychology breaks new ground by attempting to understand the complexity and specificity of cultural identities today. It rejects the idea that Western culture is a standard, or that any culture is homogenous and stable. Equally, it rejects the notion that culture is a mechanism that enhances reproductive fitness. Instead, it alerts psychologists to the many forms of 'foreignness' that research should address and to alliances psychology can make with other disciplines such as anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis.
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A'aisa's Gifts:
A Study of Magic and the Self
by Michele Stephen
University of California Press, 1995.
ISBN: 0520088298
Filled with insight, provocative in its conclusions, A'aisa's Gifts is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea and a valuable contribution to anthropological theory. Based on twenty years' fieldwork, this richly detailed study of Mekeo esoteric knowledge, cosmology, and self-conceptualizations recasts accepted notions about magic and selfhood. Drawing on accounts by Mekeo ritual experts and laypersons, this is the first book to demonstrate magic's profound role in creating the self. It also argues convincingly that dream reporting provides a natural context for self-reflection. In presenting its data, the book develops the concept of "autonomous imagination" into a new theoretical framework for exploring subjective imagery processes across cultures.
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A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning
SPA Publication No. 9
by Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 052159541X
Anthropologists must draw on modern psychological theories of cognition in order to understand how the shared schemas of a culture are learnt, and come to shape everyday actions and decisions. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn review a range of current psychologic al theories of cultural meaning, many unfamiliar to anthropologists, and formulate a new approach which draws particularly on 'connectionist', or 'neural network', modelling This is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage, and ideas of success, in the United States.
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Language and Self-Transformation:
A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative
SPA Publication No. 5
by Peter G. Stromberg
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
ISBN: 0521440777
This is a study of how self-transformation may occur through the practice of reframing one's personal experience in terms of a canonical language: that is, a system of symbols that purports to explain something about human beings and the universe they live in. The Christian conversion narrative is used as the primary example here, but the approach used in this book also illuminates other practices such as psychotherapy in which people deal with emotional conflict through language.
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Children of Immigration
by Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
Harvard University Press, March 2001.
ISBN: 0674004922
Now in the midst of the largest wave of immigration in history, America, mythical land of immigrants, is once again contemplating a future in which new arrivals will play a crucial role in reworking the fabric of the nation. At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold. For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers. The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how "Americanization," long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.
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The New Immigration:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(6 volumes plus a paperback volume)
edited by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Carola Suarez-Orozco and Desiree Qin-Hilliard
Garland Publishing, November 2001.
ISBN: 0815337043
While the experiences of the earlier waves of European immigrants have been thoroughly analyzed in historical and social science scholarship, the experiences of the new non-European immigrants of color are less understood. This series is a contribution to that vision. Encompassing a range of different disciplines, these volumes present the past decade's most influential scholarship.
Available as a set or as single volumes:
* Vol. 1: Theoretical Perspectives on the New Immigration
350 pp*[0815337051]
* Vol. 2: The New Immigrant in the American Economy
350 pp*[081533706X]
* Vol. 3: The New Immigrant in American Society
350 pp*[0815337078]
* Vol. 4: The New Immigrant and the Family
350 pp*[0815337086]
* Vol. 5: The New Immigrants and the Schools
350 pp*[0815337094]
* Vol. 6: Language and the New Immigrant
350 pp*[0815337108]
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Talk of Love:
How Culture Matters
by Ann Swidler
University of Chicago Press, May 2001.
ISBN: 0226786900
Talk of love surrounds us-in movies, talk shows, advice books, pop songs, and novels. But how do people find and sustain real love in the midst of all this talk? In Talk of Love, Ann Swidler speaks with Middle Americans about their loves, both triumphant and disappointing. She seeks to understand how the American culture of love shapes what people expect from love and what they actually find. The central problem, she argues, is that people do not face a single culture, but a diverse one with multiple perspectives and competing experts. American culture speaks of love that is perfect and instantaneous and yet also talks of the constant need to improve relationships. Talk of Love shows how people navigate between these discordant messages and learn to live with these contradictions.
In exploring how Americans engage the culture of love, Swidler also probes what it means to have a culture. We think of ourselves as being molded by our culture, its values or deep beliefs. But a culture includes platitudes and clichŽs as well; cynicism and disillusionment coexist with high ideals. And still, people manage to draw on these mixed messages to build and make sense of their lives: the Middle Americans Swidler interviews are not passive victims of a romantic myth. They treasure the Hollywood picture of a perfect and sudden love, but they also recognize that love takes work; that "real love" is built by commitment and compromise, by taking the bad with the good, and, above all, by communicating. But despite this wisdom, the romantic ideal remains. Even those who consciously reject it still call upon it in their day-to-day lives. This moving paradox between all-or-nothing romance and mature slow-growing partnerships is what Talk of Love resolves. But in the process, Swidler discovers that culture gets organized inside the minds of individuals, and outside the self as well, in different social contexts, codes, and institutions. In her penetrating analysis of love, then, Swidler demonstrates something even greater: what culture is and how it matters.
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Index by author | title | date
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Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
http://www.aaanet.org/sections/SPA/bkauthns.htm -- Revised: February 20, 2008
Designed by Stephen C. Leavitt: leavitts@union.edu
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