New and Forthcoming Titles

Index by author | title | date

Browse:
  Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming

---

Our Wealth is Loving Each Other - Brison
Vietnam's Children in a Changing World - Burr
Negotiating Cultures and Identities - Caughey
Imagining the Course of Life - Eberhardt
Comparative Arawakan Histories - Hill and Santos-Granero, eds.
Family Mealtime as a Context of Development and Socialization - Larson, Wiley, Branscomb, eds.
A Narrative Community - Noy
Cannibal Talk - Obeyesekere
Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan - Ozawa-de Silva
Those Who Touch - Rasmussen
Girls in Trouble with the Law - Schaffner
Strange Harvest - Sharp
Respect and Disrespect - Shwalb & Shwalb, eds.
Wayward Women - Wardlow



authors | titles | date | top

---

Our Wealth is Loving Each Other
by Karen Brison
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
ISBN: 0739114883

Our Wealth is Loving Each Other explores the fluid and context-bound nature of cultural and personal identity among indigenous Fijians. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized pre-modern tradition, individual Fijians are often more concerned with defining their identity vis-á-vis other villagers and other groups within Fiji. When people craft self accounts to justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity on the margins is an experience of anxiety provoking contradictions between competing ideologies, and between international ideologies and local experiences. Indigenous Fijians have been exposed to international ideologies and government programs extolling to virtues of "pre-modern" communities that place communal good and time honored tradition over individual gain. But other waves of policy and rhetoric have stressed individual achievement and the need to "shake" individuals out of community bonds to foster economic development. Individuals feel contradictory pressures to be autonomous, achieving individuals and to subordinate self to community and tradition. Brison examines traditional kava ceremonies, evangelical church rhetoric and individual life history narratives, to show how individuals draw on a repertoire of narratives from local and international culture to define their identity and sense of self. Our Wealth is Loving Each Other is appropriate for upper level students and anyone with an interest in Fiji or anthropology.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

Vietnam's Children in a Changing World
by Rachel Burr
Rutgers University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0813537967

Like the majority of children living in the global South today, a large number of Vietnamese youths work to help support their families. International human rights organizations have focused on these children, seeking to bring their lives into line with an understanding of childhood that is generally accepted in the developed world.

In this ethnographic study, Rachel Burr draws on her daily observations of working children in Hanoi and argues that these youngsters are misunderstood by the majority of agencies that seek to help them. Most aid programs embrace a model of childhood that is based on Western notions of individualism and bountiful resources. They further assume that this model is universally applicable even in cultures that advocate a collective sense of self and in countries that do not share the same economic advantages. Burr presents the voices and experiences of Vietnamese children in the streets, in a reform school, and in an orphanage to show that workable solutions have become lost within the rhetoric propagated by aid organizations. The reality of providing primary education or adequate healthcare for all children, for instance, does not stand a chance of being achieved until adequate resources are put in place. Yet, organizations preoccupied with the child rights agenda are failing to acknowledge the distorted global distribution of wealth in favor of Western nations.

Offering a unique, firsthand look at the experiences of children in contemporary Vietnam, this book also provides a broad analysis of how internationally led human rights agendas are often received at the local level.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

Family Mealtime as a Context of Development and Socialization:
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, No. 111
edited by Reed W. Larson, Angela R. Wiley, Kathryn R. Branscomb
Jossey-Bass, 2006.
ISBN: 0787985775

This book examines the impact of family mealtime on the psychological development of young people. In the popular media, family mealtime is often presented as a vital institution for the socialization and development of young people, but also as one that is "going the way of the dinosaur." Although elements such as fast food and TV have become a part of many family mealtimes, evidence is beginning to suggest that mealtimes can also provide rich opportunities for children's and adolescents' development.

While what happens at mealtimes varies greatly among families, an outline of the forms and functions of mealtimes is beginning to emerge from this research. In this issue, leading mealtime researchers from the fields of history, cultural anthropology, psycholinguistics, psychology, and nutrition critically review findings from each of their disciplines, giving primary focus on family mealtimes in the United States. The authors in this issue examine the history of family mealtimes, describe contemporary mealtime practices, elucidate the differing transactional processes that occur, and evaluate evidence on the outcomes associated with family mealtimes from children and adolescents.

If you are a student, researcher, scholar, or professional interested in this topic, you will find this issue to be a valuable contribution to your existing knowledge of the subject.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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."
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Read the review in Ethos
Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.

Order this book from Amazon

authors | titles | date | top

---

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.
from the publisher


Order this book from Amazon
authors | titles | date | top

---

Wayward Women:
Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society
by Holly Wardlow
University of California Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0520245601

Written with uncommon grace and clarity, this extremely engaging ethnography analyzes female agency, gendered violence, and transactional sex in contemporary Papua New Guinea. Focusing on Huli "passenger women," (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of "prostitution" and "sex work," Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated "olsem maket" (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming "wayward." Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women's own raw, caustic, and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.
from the publisher

Order this book from Amazon

Index by author | title | date

Browse:
forthcoming   Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z

---