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Recent Books of Interest
Authors A-B
Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
Permitted and Prohibited Desires - Allison
Opportunity House - Angrosino
Tense Past - Antze & Lambek, eds.
Narrative that Heals - Arundale, ed.
Reflexive Ethnographic Science - Aunger
The Electric Meme - Aunger
Darwinizing Culture - Aunger, ed.
Intertwined Lives - Banner
Missing the Revolution - Barkow, ed.
The Adapted Mind - Barkow et al., eds.
The Vulnerable Observer - Behar
Jews of the Dutch Caribbean - Benjamin
Any Time Is Trinidad Time - Birth
Handbook of Psychological Anthropology - Bock
The Male Body - Bordo
Twilight Zones - Bordo
Psychological Aspects of Modernity - Braun
Our Wealth is Loving Each Other - Brison
Theorizing Masculinities - Brod and Kaufman, eds.
Medicine and Morality in Haiti - Brodwin
Biotechnology and Culture - Brodwin, ed.
Manly Traditions - Bronner, ed.
Is Taiwan Chinese? - M. Brown
Intentional Community - S. L. Brown, ed.
Culture and Sexual Risk - Brummelhuis & Herdt, eds.
Dreaming Beyond Death - Bulkeley & Bulkley
Dreams - Bulkeley, ed.
Vietnam's Children in a Changing World - Burr
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Permitted and Prohibited Desires:
Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan
by Anne Allison
University of California Press, 2000 1st. univ. ed.
ISBN: 0520219902
This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes--or obentos--that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and ger in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.
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Opportunity House:
Ethnographic Stories of Mental Retardation
by Michael V. Angrosino with James Peacock
AltaMira Press 1997.
ISBN: 076198917X
Calling on a decade of participant observation at a residence for mentally retarded adults, anthropologist Michael Angrosino's riveting and demystifying account offers an insider's picture of the lives of the inhabitants of Opportunity House. Using a dozen fictional short stories told in the voices of various community members, as well as in that of the researcher, Angrosino uses a life-histories approach to ethnography together with an innovative culture concept to tackle the complexities of representing marginalized groups. As opposed to traditional clinical or statistical studies, which insufficiently conveyed the subjective and experiential perspectives of individuals themselves, Angrosino presents an intimate and complex picture of a highly functioning community with its cast of entrepreneurs, bullies, victims, and do-gooders. This account is a resource for those interested in mental illness and disability, as well as a model for those experimenting with forms of ethnographic writing.
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Tense Past:
Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek
Routledge, 1996.
ISBN: 0415915635
Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust. Contributors examine the historical origins of memory in psychiatric discourse and show its connection to broader developments in Western science and medicine. They address the new links between trauma and memory, and they explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.
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Narrative That Heals
edited by W. H. Arundale
Arctic Anthropology special issue, 2003.
This special issue of Arctic Anthropology focuses on how communities across the Arctic use traditional aboriginal ways of solving social problems. Contributors draw on personal experience and first-hand information to describe how "traditional" knowledge works.
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Reflexive Ethnographic Science
by Robert Aunger
Altamira Press, December 2003.
ISBN: 0759102759
Aunger proposes a solution to a fundamental debate in contemporary ethnography: the source of ethnographic authority. The author advocates the method of reflexive analysis as a new way of doing ethnography that can make it a more effective scientific endeavor. Reflexive Ethnographic Science constitutes a foil to those in cultural studies and related fields who deride the possibility of verifiable ethnographic representations. Aunger's new work promises to reinvigorate ethnographic research and methods by a unique combination of traditional and postmodern objectives, through the reflexive achievement of authority. He explains how reflexive analysis requires changes in standard ethnographic practice in terms of data collection, analysis and presentation. Using this method, the author offers a case study of the food taboos in a multi-ethnic population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which includes the pygmy foragers and their horticulturalist Bantu neighbors. This book will be a key reference for researchers in the social sciences who employ interviewing, participant observation methods, and multivariate statistical models, including anthropology, sociology, and allied disciplines. It is useful for a variety of graduate level courses in ethnographic method and theory.
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The Electric Meme:
A New Theory of How We
Think and Communicate
by Robert Aunger
The Free Press, July 2002.
ISBN: 0743201507
In his defining book, The Selfish Gene, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins sought to describe cultural evolution in biological terms with the newly coined term "meme," a metaphorical information particle that replicates itself as people exchange information, as the cultural equivalent of the gene, the replicating agent of biological evolution. Here, Cambridge anthropologist Aunger (Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science) theorizes on the nature of this so-called "thought gene." In doing so, Aunger coins a term of his own, "neuromemetics," proposing that memes are in fact self-replicating electrical charges in the nodes of our brains. The author explains that the shift in perspective from Dawkins's purely social memetics to a memetics working at the intercellular level is akin to sociobiology's view of social behavior as a genetic trait subject to evolution. This is an ambitious book on a par with Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. Unlike the handful of pop-culture treatments out there, Aunger steers clear of the popular image of the meme as a VD-like brain parasite passed by word of mouth. That said, this book is that rare hybrid of crossover science writing that carries enough intellectual punch to warrant thoughtful peer review, and yet should appeal to those ambitious general readers who are in the market for a megadose of mind candy
from the Publishers Weekly
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Darwinizing Culture:
The Status of Memetics as a Science
edited by Robert Aunger
Oxford University Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0192632442
The publication in 1998 of Susan Blackmore's bestselling The meme machine re-awakened the debate over the highly controversial field of memetics and, in the past couple of years there has been an explosion of interest in 'memes'. However, the one thing noticeably missing has been any kind of proper debate over the validity of a concept regarded by many as scientifically suspect." "Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science pits leading intellectuals (both supporters and opponents of meme theory) against each other to battle it out, and state their case. With a Foreword by Daniel Dennett, and contributions from Dan Sperber, David Hull, Robert Boyd, Susan Blackmore, Henry Plotkin, and others, the result is a thrilling and challenging debate that will perhaps mark a turning point for the field, and for future research.
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Intertwined Lives:
Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Their Circle
by Lois W. Banner
Alfred A. Knopf, September 2003.
ISBN: 0679454357
Banner (American Beauty; In Full Flower; etc.) offers here a joint biography of two major figures in American anthropology. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met in 1922, when Benedict was a teaching assistant and Mead a student at Barnard College. Two years later, they were lovers. From the 1920s until Benedict's death in 1948, they remained friends and intellectual collaborators. For each, anthropological research and personal experience were interconnected; not only did a variety of co-workers become lovers and friends, but their sexual experiences shaped their theoretical positions on such questions as the "normalcy" of heterosexuality or the role of culture in defining deviancy. Banner's is the first work to use previously restricted private letters and papers of Mead and Benedict. She also draws heavily on recent decades of writing on lesbian history and queer theory. The results are uneven, mostly due to Banner's determination to find sexual abuse and lesbian subcultures in Benedict's youth and same-sex erotics in Mead's girlhood. Banner's "gaydar" works better when analyzing the variety of relationships the two women formed as adults, especially the way their own attractions morphed into fieldwork theorizing. While Banner plays fast-and-loose with some sources, this chronicle of the lives of two modern anthropology titans is bound to raise considerable academic interest. 28 b&w illus. not seen by PW.
from Publishers Weekly, Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Missing the Revolution:
Darwinism for Social Scientists
edited by Jerome H. Barkow
Oxford University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0195130022
Missing the Revolution is an invitation to social scientists who, in Barkow's view, have been missing the great evolution-revolution of our time to engage with Darwinian thought, which is now so large a part of the non-sociological study of human nature and society. Barkow asks the reader to put aside the preconceptions and stereotypes social scientists often have of the 'biological' and to take into account a powerful paradigm that is far away from those past generations who would invoke a vocabulary of 'genes' and 'Darwin' as justification for genocide. The evolutionary perspective, Barkow maintains, provides no particular support for the status quo, no rationalizations for racism or any other form of social inequality. 'Cultural' cannot possibly be opposed to 'biological' because culture and society are the only means we have of expressing our evolved psychology; social-cultural constructionism is not only compatible with evidence for his argument, Barkow has gathered together eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines to present applications of evolutionary psychology in a manner intended to illustrate their relevance to current concerns for social scientists.
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The Adapted Mind:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture
edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby
Oxford University Press, 1995.
ISBN: 0195101073
Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. Converging findings from a variety of disciplines are leading to the emergence of a fundamentally new view of the human mind, and with it a new framework for the behavioral and social sciences. First, with the advent of the cognitive revolution, human nature can finally be defined precisely as the set of universal, species-typical information-processing programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability. Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors--problems such as mate selection, language acquisition, cooperation, and sexual infidelity. Consequently, the traditional view of the mind as a general-purpose computer, tabula rasa, or passive recipient of culture is being replaced by the view that the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers, each of which imposes contentful structure on human mental organization and culture. The Adapted Mind explores this new approach--evolutionary psychology--and its implications for a new view of culture.
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The Vulnerable Observer:
Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart
by Ruth Behar
Beacon Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0807046310
These readable, insightful essays are linked by the tension between the traditional academic view of anthropology as objective science and accomplished anthropologist Behar's (Univ. of Michigan) desire to admit the subjectivity, or "vulnerability," that often plays a role in the work. One piece describes Behar's ambivalence about leaving her dying grandfather to do fieldwork on culture and death in a small village in Spain. There are touching remembrances of her grandfather, interesting meditations on the aging town of Santa Maria, and reflections on how the author's musings on her grandfather's death increased her understanding of Santa Maria's death rituals. Instead of striving for an unattainable objectivity in her studies, Behar owns up to her emotional baggage, airs it out, and uses it to her advantage. Another essay, perhaps the most compelling, describes her harrowing experience in a car accident that killed five people. The author, then nine years old, spent months immobilized in a body cast. Chastised for complaining, she buried her emotions, which resurfaced in adult life as sudden and crippling agoraphobia. Other essays address Behar's complex relationship with the state of Cuba (she is a Cuban Jew by birth), and how class and other factors form borders even when political borders are not imposed. In the last essay, a defense of "anthropology that breaks your heart,'' Behar describes a conference at which she defended her methods. Excerpts from her speech are interspersed with her thoughts at the time to create a complex, challenging piece. But the argument between objective and subjective views of anthropology is not completed in these pages. Ultimately, Behar's writings here are more personal essay than anthropological study, failing to clarify the application of her notion of anthropology that breaks your heart.
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Jews of the Dutch Caribbean:
Exploring Ethnic Identity on Curacao
by Alan F. Benjamin
Routledge Press, March 2002.
ISBN: 0415274397
Jews of the Dutch Caribbean addresses identity and ethnicity, through a detailed study of a little-known group in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. It asks readers to take a broad perspective on the contexts that play a role in ethnicity - including, for example, ecology, history, kinship, commerce, and language use in everyday life and, crucially, rituals. Drawing on ethnographic research to analyze ethnic identity, Benjamin takes a broad and innovative perspective, presenting ethnic identity as local as well as a transnational phenomenon, shaped by history and re-shaped through contemporary, everyday interactions.
from the publisher
This work will interest a variety of readers. It addresses identity and ethnicity, and describes a little-known group of Jews in the Dutch Caribbean with an intriguing history--indeed, members of one of the congregations worship at the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas.
This volume draws on ethnographic research among members of the two Jewish congregations in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles to extrapolate about ethnic identity generally. It treats ethnic identity as fluid and context-dependent rather than fixed. It takes a broad and innovative perspective, presenting ethnic identity as a local as well as a transnational phenomenon, shaped by history and re-shaped through contemporary, everyday interactions. Benjamin suggests that people form cognitive maps of the ethnic groups in the region they live, and index these identities through a variety of changing markers. Ethnic markers and boundaries are shaped by culture and experience, and often correspond to political-economic relations and differences in status and power. In the volume, special attention is paid to rituals. Each chapter includes an extensive description of a sacred or secular ritual practice, which is used to illustrate its theme. Finally, a notable feature of the volume is its reflective inquiry into research ethics. Benjamin suggests that fieldwork is relational as much as scientific, involving subjectivity, power differences, and trust.
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Any Time Is Trinidad Time:
Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness
by Kevin K. Birth
University Press of Florida, 1999.
ISBN: 0813017130
Explores cultural ideas of time in rural Trinidad and feelings of cooperation and conflict that result from using different models of time. Considers ethnic, class, and gender relationships in this context.
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Handbook of Psychological Anthropology
edited by Philip K. Bock
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994.
ISBN: 0313284334
Presents an overview of the research traditions that have contributed to the field, from the classical culture and personality studies of the 1930s to the development of modern cultural psychology, including approaches that stress cross-cultural (correlational) studies, variables of social structure, cognitive-linguistic analysis, emotional expression, and neo-Darwinian theory. Also covers topics that have intrigued members of various schools, from myth, dreams, and trance to initiation rites and the construction of the self, with emphasis on contemporary research and methodology.
Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The Male Body:
A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
by Susan R. Bordo
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999.
ISBN: 0374527326
A cheerful but probing look at the male form, seeking to prove that similar myths, fantasies, and pressures have been applied to men's and women's bodies, with some surprising parallel effects on the male and female mind. Bordo (English and Womens Studies/Univ. of Kentucky) begins her airing of the male body with her father's penis. That is, the fact that she could not imagine it leads the author to conclude that society has never bombarded us with male bodies in film, literature, magazines, and advertisements as it has done with the female form. In the vein of Roland Barthes, Bordo plows through some of the more disturbing and graphic myths of the phallus in modern times, using Philip Roth, Jockey ads, romance novels, and Seinfeld (among others) to infuse humor into such subjects as the pressure to ``perform,'' the stereotyped bermensch of hardened body and heart, and gender roles in the home. A recurring question is whether men and women react differently to images of the opposite sex, and Bardo answers with a resounding no. Gay culture and African-American culture, the author argues, have contributed greatly to the reintroduction of beauty to the male body, as their attitudes about public display and preening fashion have altered the mainstream American conception of masculinity. The modern man is bewildered by women's conflicting ideas as to what this male essence should be, the serene and sensitive ``nice guy'' or the aggressive beast and sexual machine that the mass media reifies as the only unadulterated man. The author occasionally moves too far afield, dedicating entire chapters to the Lewinsky affair and Lolita, but these too are written with style, humor, and insight. Bordo may get personal but is never too serious, and her work underlines some surprising commonalities and differences between the sexes without a whiff of demagoguery.
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Twilight Zones:
The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.
by Susan R. Bordo
University of California Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0520211022
Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the impact they have on our lives. She builds on the provocative themes introduced in her acclaimed work Unbearable Weight - which explores the social and political underpinnings of women's obsession with bodily image - to offer a singularly readable and perceptive interpretation of our image-saturated culture. As it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality, Bordo argues, we need to rehabilitate the notion that not all versions of reality are equally trustworthy. Looking to the body and bodily practices as an arena in which cultural fantasies and anxieties are played out, Bordo examines the mystique and the reality of empowerment through cosmetic surgery. Her incisive analysis of sexual harassment in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy, as well as in films such as Disclosure, challenges media-driven caricatures of sexuality. Bordo also sharply diagnoses the continuing marginalization of feminist thought, in particular the failure to read feminist work as cultural criticism. In a final powerful collaborative essay entitled "Missing Kitchens," Bordo and her sisters Binnie Klein and Marilyn Silverman explore notions of bodies, place, and space through a moving recreation of the topographies of their childhood.
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Psychological Aspects of Modernity
by Jerome Braun
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993.
ISBN: 0275942627
Braun's work has a strong psychological focus on the ramifications of social change--with emphasis on modernization for meeting the psychological needs of the people involved. What is unique about the work (it represents the collaboration of seven scholars in such fields as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and political science) is that it makes a serious attempt to provide a realistic and relevant framework of analysis for interpreting the way the human personality reacts to strain and pressure, including cultural and social change. As societies become increasingly bureaucratic, anonymous, and materialistic, and social relationships become increasingly segmented rather than holistic, it is important to study how basic human needs are fulfilled and how personalities are molded.
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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.
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Theorizing Masculinities
edited by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman
Sage Publications, 1994.
ISBN: 0803949030
Contents
Introduction
Psychoanalysis on Masculinity
Theorizing Masculinities in Contemporary Social Science
Ethnographies and Masculinities
Some Thoughts on Some Histories of Some Masculinities: Jews and Other Others
Theorizing Unities and Differences Between Men and Between Masculinities
Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity
Men, Feminism, and Men's Contradictory Experiences of Power
Theater of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities
The Making of Black English Masculinities
Gender Displays and Men's Power: The "New Man" and the Mexican Immigrant Man
Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity
The Male Body and Literary Metaphors for Masculinity
Weekend Warriors: The New Men's Movement
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Medicine and Morality in Haiti
by Paul Brodwin
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0521575435
People who become ill in rural Haiti may seek treatment from western doctors, herbalists or religious leaders. Examining the decisions guiding such choices, this study considers moral issues arising in a society where suffering is associated with guilt and conflicting ethical systems coexist.
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Biotechnology and Culture:
Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics
edited by Paul Brodwin
Indiana University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0253214289
As birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles arise over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies turn the traditional "facts of life" into matters of expert judgment and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the "gold standard" of the body, formerly taken for granted. Biotechnologies become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. Medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience: giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity.
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Manly Traditions:
The Folk Roots of American Masculinities
edited by Simon J. Bronner
Indiana University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0253217814
Men's "manly" traditions have been shaken in an age of "sensitivity." Some observers have even referred to a crisis of masculinity for a new generation of boys. In Manly Traditions, established scholars in the fields of folklore, men's studies, and gender studies identify the folkloric roots of what it means to be a man in America. In a lively volume they examine the traditions men inherit and adapt for their own purposes in contemporary life.
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Intentional Community:
An Anthropological Perspective
edited by Susan Love Brown
State Univ of New York Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0791452220
Although anthropologists have studied intentional communities in the past, they have seldom exerted a concerted effort to evaluate the intentional community in terms of the anthropological language of cultural change. Drawing from the work of Victor Turner, Gregory Bateson, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Intentional Community examines historic and contemporary intentional communities within the United States, leading to a better understanding of these communities, the larger nation-state of which they are a part, and the ways in which the two interact. Applying classical anthropological theory to elements of western society, the contributors discuss how the individuals function; the ways in which these communities come into being and disappear; the various forms these communities take; how their members reinterpret features of the larger culture; and the ways in which outsiders relate to people within them.
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Is Taiwan Chinese?:
The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities
by Melissa Brown
University of California Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0520231821
The "one China" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience--not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.
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Culture and Sexual Risk:
Anthropological Perspectives on AIDS
by Han ten Brummelhuis Gilbert Herdt, eds.
Gordon & Breach, 1995.
ISBN: 2884491317
In Culture and Sexual Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on AIDS, Han ten Brummelhuis and Gilbert Herdt provide the intense examination of sexual risk and its cultural configurations heretofore missing from the AIDS literature. The chapters on Western gay men speak to the pressing methodological, conceptual, and theoretical needs in HIV / AIDS research and also the understanding and documentation of gay men's lives within the emerging corpus of lesbian and gay studies. The chapters on the Philippines, Brazil, Haiti, and Africa provide an understanding of the cultural, political, and economic contexts surrounding the transmission and prevention of HIV / AIDS in these cultures. This book addresses many controversial themes that have emerged over the last few years: the ethics of sex research, the role of Western anthropologists in developing nations, the role of heterosexuals in AIDS research, and the impact of AIDS on the discipline of anthropology.
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Dreaming Behond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions
by Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkley
Beacon Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0807077208
Documented throughout time and across cultures, dreams experienced by those on the verge of death can offer profound insight into the process of dying and provide deep spiritual solace for the individual passing away. In Dreaming Beyond Death, Kelly Bulkeley and the Reverend Patricia Bulkley bring together their diverse areas of expertise to create a guide to pre-death dreams that offers practical advice and provides a broader understanding of this phenomenon.
Beginning with a look at dreams and dreaming in culture, history, psychology, and modern dream study, the authors show us that pre-death dreams tend toward three themes: dreams in which death is represented as a journey; dreams in which a guide appears; and dreams involving obstacles that parallel concerns of the dying in real life. They draw on Patricia's ten years of hospice counseling to take us through the pre-death dreams of several terminally ill people, show us how to explore the meanings of dreams, and tell us why these particular dreams gave their dreamers a sense of resolution and tranquility. The last chapter provides clear, practical advice for caregivers on how they can respectfully guide those close to death through their dreaming experience.
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Dreams: A Reader on Religious, Cultural and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming
edited by Kelly Bulkeley
Palgrave Publishers, Limited, 2001.
ISBN: 0312293348
This innovative collection covers the dream beliefs and practices of various religious and cultural traditions; the dream experiences and theories of particular individuals; and the methods used to investigate and understand dreaming. Contributors include Wendy Doniger, Barbara Tedlock, George Lakoff, J. Allan Hobson, Frederick Crews, Thomas Gregor, Bertram Cohler, and several other leading scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and psychology. Issues of gender, power, sexuality, language, truth, mysticism, healing, consciousness, modernization, the boundaries of Western Science, and the role of personal experience in scholarship are examined.
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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.
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http://www.aaanet.org/spa/bkauthab.htm -- April 7, 2007
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