This book explores how festivals and events affect urban places and public spaces, with a particular focus on their role in fostering inclusion. The ‘festivalisation’ of culture, politics and space in cities is often regarded as problematic, but this book examines the positive and negative ways that festivals affect cities by examining festive spaces as contested spaces. The book focuses on Western European cities, a particularly interesting context given the social and cultural pressures associated with high levels of in-migration and concerns over the commercialisation and privatisation of public spaces.

The key themes of this book are the quest for more inclusive urban spaces and the contested geographies of festival spaces and places. Festivals are often used by municipal authorities to break down symbolic barriers that restrict who uses public spaces and what those spaces are used for. However, the rise of commercial festivals and ticketed events means that they are also responsible for imposing physical and financial obstacles that reduce the accessibility of city parks, streets and squares.

Alongside addressing the contested effects of urban festivals on the character and inclusivity of public spaces, the book addresses more general themes including the role of festivals in culture-led regeneration. Several chapters analyse festivals and events as economic development tools, and the book also covers contested representations of festival cities and the ways related images and stories are used in place marketing.

A range of cases from Western Europe are used to explore these issues, including chapters on some of the world’s most significant and contested festival cities: Venice, Edinburgh, London and Barcelona. The book covers a wide range of festivals, including those dedicated to music and the arts, but also events celebrating particular histories, identities and pastimes. A series of fascinating cases are discussed - from the Venice Biennale and Dublin Festival of History, to Rotterdam’s music festivals and craft beer festivals in Manchester. The diverse and innovative qualities of the book are also evident in the range of urban spaces covered: obvious examples of public spaces – such as parks, streets, squares and piazzas – are addressed, but the book includes chapters on enclosed public spaces (e.g., libraries) and urban blue spaces (waterways) too. This reflects the interpretation of public spaces as socio-material entities: they are produced informally through their use (including for festivals and events), as well as through their formal design and management.

Festivals and the French Revolution—the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals, although most historians have been content either to ridicule them as ineffectual or to bemoan them as repugnant examples of a sterile, official culture. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew.

Historians have recognized the importance of the revolutionary festival as a symbol of the Revolution. But they have differed widely in their interpretations of what that symbol meant and have considered the festivals as diverse as the rival political groups that conceived and organized them. Against this older vision, Ozouf argues for the fundamental coherence and profound unity of the festival as both event and register of reference and attitude. By comparing the most ideologically opposed festivals (those of Reason and the Supreme Being, for instance), she shows that they clearly share a common aim, which finds expression in a mutual ceremonial and symbolic vocabulary. Through a brilliant discussion of the construction, ordering, and conduct of the festival Ozouf demonstrates how the continuity of the images, allegories, ceremonials, and explicit functions can be seen as the Revolution’s own commentary on itself.

A second and important aim of this book is to show that this system of festivals, often seen as destructive, was an immensely creative force. The festival was the mirror in which the Revolution chose to see itself and the pedagogical tool by which it hoped to educate future generations, Far from being a failure, it embodied, socialized, and made sacred a new set of values based on the family, the nation, and mankind—the values of a modern, secular, liberal world.

The Fetishists, originally published in Arabic as Al Majus, is considered the masterpiece of Ibrahim al-Koni, one of the most prolific and important writers in Arabic today. In The Fetishists, Al-Koni explores what happens when a writer asks the novel to speak of and for the Sahara, when rival cultures clash, and when communities seek to build a utopia on Earth as individuals struggle between a desire for material well-being (represented by gold dust) and a need for spiritual meaning. As the story opens, Sultan Oragh of Timbuktu, who has already lost most of his power to Fetishist Bambara leaders of the forestlands, fears he will lose his only daughter, Tenere, as a human sacrifice to their god Amnay. The sultan sends Tenere to seek refuge with fellow Tuareg nomads in the plain. But even in their traditional, nomadic community, a competition rages between jihadi militant Islam; moderate Anhi Islam, which is the ancient Tuareg Law; and the cults of gold dust and of traditional African folk religions.

In this epic novel, Al-Koni blends Tuareg folklore and history with intense, fond descriptions of daily life in the desert, creating a mirror for life anywhere. Through its tragic rendering of a clash between the Tuareg and traditional African civilizations, the novel profoundly probes the contradictions of the human soul as it takes the reader on a unique spiritual adventure inside the Tuareg world.

Here is a brief and authoritative account of human physical growth, beautifully written by one of the world's foremost experts. In Fetus into Man Professor Tanner tells the story of growth in language that is both accessible to the nonbiologist and acceptable to the biologist.

The book begins with the basics of growth: cell division, hormonal control and differential growth of body tissues. It then builds on these basics to provide a picture of individual growth--from the fetus in utero to the development of sex differences at puberty. Tanner pays special attention along the way to the psychological and social problems faced by children who mature either too soon or too late, and he concludes with a full description of the major growth disorders and current methods of treatment.

Fetus into Man will be an important reference for parents, educators, students of development, and indeed anyone who must deal with the growing child.

Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlor, daintily coughing a small spot of blood onto her white lace pillow, and a wretched poor man in a Bowery flophouse spreading a dread and deadly infection. Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She persuasively argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no “core” tuberculosis.

What we understand today as pulmonary tuberculosis would have been largely unintelligible to a physician or patient in the late nineteenth century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that “tuberculosis” and “consumption” were diagnosed, defined, and treated distinctively by both lay and professional health workers. Ott traces the shift from the pre-industrial world of 1870, in which consumption was conceived of primarily as a middle-class malaise that conferred virtue, heightened spirituality, and gentility on the sufferer, to the post-industrial world of today, in which tuberculosis is viewed as a microscopic enemy, fought on an urban battleground and attacking primarily the outcast poor and AIDS patients.

Ott’s focus is the changing definition of the disease in different historical eras and environments. She explores its external trappings, from the symptoms doctors chose to notice (whether a pale complexion or a tubercle in a dish) to the significance of the economic and social circumstances of the patient. Emphasizing the material culture of disease—medical supplies, advertisements for faraway rest cures, outdoor sick porches, and invalid hammocks—Ott provides insight into people’s understanding of illness and how to combat it. Fevered Lives underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in an extraordinarily readable cultural history.

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.

Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels—repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees “undecidability” as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.

His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.

The early decades of the nineteenth century in Imperial Russia embraced a sequence of catastrophic events—the assassination of Paul I, Napoleon’s invasion, the Decembrist rebellion, the cholera epidemic, the Polish uprising—along with radical changes in the fabric of society. Yet, far from exhausted by these convulsions, Russian literature blossomed as never before, producing the first in the long line of novels now regarded as masterpieces throughout the world. With all the sentimentality, nostalgia, and mythic echoes the term evokes, posterity has called this the golden age of Russian letters.

William Mills Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry (obshchestvo) of the time, then charts the various possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then the rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession, which was encouraged by copyright laws, journals and booksellers, and an increasing readership. Through an examination of three brilliant fictions—Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and Gogol’s Dead Souls—he explores the complicated interactions of literature and society as these writers “discovered” their own milieu and were discovered by it, confronting the fragility, exclusiveness, and potential for hypocrisy and self-delusion in Russian culture. Todd’s interdisciplinary approach will ensure his book’s appeal to students of comparative and other national literatures as well as of Russian culture.

In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture—the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences.

The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach—as explained in his introductory essay—are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula.

Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence.

The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.

Fiction, Film and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation 

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues “bad men” like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding “authentic” blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.

Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the “primary story” of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.

From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan’s films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray.

The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan’s films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan’s films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. While other filmmakers have tried to discover truth through the cinema, Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking. He shows how Nolan’s insistence on the priority of the fiction aligns his films with Hegel’s philosophy and understands Nolan as a thoroughly Hegelian filmmaker.

Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Thomas Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.

Pavel is a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavel argues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes us through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

What is meant by "romantic irony"? What is specifically romantic about this kind of irony? How does it relate to--and differ from--ordinary, traditional irony? Is it a variant of traditional irony, or an independent phenomenon? Are its lines of demarcation primarily historical or modal? How does it become manifest in a text? What is its impact on the art of narration?

These are the questions that Fictions of Romantic Irony addresses. It makes a new approach to romantic irony by envisaging it in a broad European context in relation both to earlier concepts of irony and to traditional uses of irony in narration. Fictions of Romantic Irony shows how irony was transformed in the hands of Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Through an analysis of six major European narratives of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it illustrates the reciprocal interplay of theory and practice, and the complex and central role that irony assumes as a shaping aesthetic factor. Using a wide perspective and an original synchronic disposition of texts within its historical framework, it identifies the distinctive philosophical and literary features of romantic irony.

Fictions of Romantic Irony presents an important theory of romantic irony, distinguishing it from traditional irony in the handling of fictional illusion and in the dynamics of the tripartite relationship between narrator, narrative and reader. It dispels many common, limiting fictions about romantic irony, and offers a robust understanding of its workings in narrative and its significance for modern fiction.

Recovering a lost feminist story of scandal and strength for a new generation

Out of print in the United States since its original publication in 1915, Susan Glaspell’s largely forgotten novel Fidelity tells the story of Ruth Holland, a young woman who returns to her small Midwestern hometown after eleven years’ absence. Forced home by the death of her father, Ruth must face a family and community that have largely turned against her following her affair with a married man.

Glaspell, mostly known as a playwright and for her founding of the Provincetown Players, was also an accomplished novelist. Inspired by events in Glaspell’s own life, Fidelity portrays Ruth’s struggle to find fulfillment, love, and purpose in a society that imposes rigid expectations and limitations on how a woman should live. Ruth is a woman torn between love and commitment to her family—and between love and commitment to herself. Glaspell’s narrative shifts between characters, offering glimpses through the community’s eyes of the ways that Ruth’s return forces residents to confront their beliefs and the impact that they have. In the vein of Chopin’s The Awakening and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Glaspell’s Fidelity holds an important place in the history of early twentieth-century feminist literature and is long overdue to be back in print.

Students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, under the guidance of Kevin McMullen, project manager of the Walt Whitman Archive, have resurrected this neglected novel. The text includes contemporary photographs of Susan Glaspell, a new introduction, and annotations throughout, which provide useful commentary for students and general readers alike.

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.

Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

A one-of-a-kind resource, the Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois is a definitive guide aimed at biologists, teachers, students, wildlife specialists, natural resource managers, conservationists, law enforcement officials, landowners, hobbyists, and everyone else eager to explore herpetology and nature in the Prairie State.

Frank X. Gaspar’s collection of poems is haunted by the presence of mystics and visionaries: Mohammed, Buddha, St. Paul, Augustine, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Milton, Rilke. A Field Guide to the Heavens is punctuated with designs of science, the wondering and rapt observations of the sky made at the eyepiece of a backyard telescope. We come to know Gaspar’s city streets, the neighbors and strangers that walk them, the wreckage of past lives, the ocean, the gardens, the orchards and alleys and parking lots, all spread out under the vast sky.

Field Manual of Michigan Flora is the most up-to-date guide available for all seed plants growing wild in Michigan. Significantly expanding and updating the three-volume Michigan Flora, the book incorporates the discoveries of numerous additional species, recent systematic research, and a vast trove of new information on the shifting distributions of Michigan species. It presents concise identification keys, information about habitats, and completely updated distribution maps for all the seed plants, native or naturalized, that have been recorded from the state, fully treating over 2,700 species. All non-native species are included with notes on their first discovery in the state and comments on invasive tendencies. Rare native species that appear to be declining or to have shrinking ranges are also noted. This book is an essential reference for anyone interested in appreciating Michigan's natural heritage and understanding our ever-changing environment.

Once in a great while, as the New York Times noted recently, a naturalist writes a book that changes the way people look at the living world. John James Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1838, was one. Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 Field Guide to the Birds was another. How does such insight into nature develop?

Pioneering a new niche in the study of plants and animals in their native habitat, Field Notes on Science and Nature allows readers to peer over the shoulders and into the notebooks of a dozen eminent field workers, to study firsthand their observational methods, materials, and fleeting impressions.

What did George Schaller note when studying the lions of the Serengeti? What lists did Kenn Kaufman keep during his 1973 “big year”? How does Piotr Naskrecki use relational databases and electronic field notes? In what way is Bernd Heinrich’s approach “truly Thoreauvian,” in E. O. Wilson’s view? Recording observations in the field is an indispensable scientific skill, but researchers are not generally willing to share their personal records with others. Here, for the first time, are reproductions of actual pages from notebooks. And in essays abounding with fascinating anecdotes, the authors reflect on the contexts in which the notes were taken.

Covering disciplines as diverse as ornithology, entomology, ecology, paleontology, anthropology, botany, and animal behavior, Field Notes offers specific examples that professional naturalists can emulate to fine-tune their own field methods, along with practical advice that amateur naturalists and students can use to document their adventures.

Field research—the collection of information outside a lab or workplace setting—requires skills and knowledge not typically taught in the classroom. Fieldwork demands exploratory inquisitiveness, empathy to encourage interviewees to trust the researcher, and sufficient aptitude to work professionally and return home safely. The Field Researcher’s Handbook provides a practical guide to planning and executing fieldwork and presenting the results.

Based on his experience conducting field research in more than fifty countries and teaching others a holistic approach to field research, David J. Danelo introduces the skills new researchers will need in the field, including anthropology, travel logistics planning, body language recognition, interview preparation, storytelling, network development, and situational awareness. His time as a combat veteran in the US Marine Corps further enhances his knowledge of how to be observant and operate safely in any environment. Danelo also discusses ethical considerations and how to recognize personal biases. This handbook is intended for researchers in a variety of academic disciplines but also for government, think-tank, and private-sector researchers.

A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric, and fieldwork

A variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric within the contexts of its use and circulation. Employing field methods more commonly used by ethnographers allows researchers to capture rhetoric in action and to observe the dynamic circumstances that shape persuasion in ordinary life.

Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion gathers new essays that describe and theorize this burgeoning transdisciplinary mode of field-based scholarship. Contributors document and support this ethnographic turn in rhetorical studies through sustained examination of the diverse trends, methods, tools, theories, practices, and possibilities for engaging in rhetorical field research.

This fascinating volume offers an introduction to these inquiries and serves as both a practical resource and theoretical foundation for scholars, teachers, and students interested in the intersection of rhetoric and field studies. Editors Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke have assembled scholars working in diverse field sites to map and initiate key debates on the practices, limitations, and value of rhetorical field methods and research. Working synthetically at the junction of rhetorical theory and field practices, the contributors to this collection build from myriad field-based cases to examine diverse theoretical and methodological considerations. The volume also serves as a useful reference for interdisciplinary qualitative researchers interested in doing research from a rhetorical or discursive perspective in various disciplines and fields, such as English, composition, communication, natural resources, geography, sociology, urban planning, anthropology, and more.

Fields of the Tzotzil is the first study of social processes in contemporary highland Maya communities to encompass a regional view of the highlands of Chiapas as a system. In viewing tradition, not as a survival of traits, but as a dynamic process of adaptation by local systems to their placement in larger social and economic systems, it lays to rest the theory that tribal peoples apparently are politically and economically isolated. In addition, its broad regional perspective sheds light on the problems of understanding the position of traditional ethnic groups in contemporary society.

The approach of the book is ecological in two senses. First, all the topics dealt with concern the traditional behavior of Indian groups as revealed in their relationship to the land. Second, the analysis seeks out factors that condition land use, not just locally, but as part of a larger system that includes influences of the market and the impact of nationalist agrarian policy. Thus, the author examines land inheritance patterns and food production, as well as the interethnic relations in the region in which Indians are subordinate to mestizos. He discusses in detail corn farming, craft specialization, wage labor, and Indian colonization efforts under the Mexican ejido—all factors that directly affect land use and are thus part of the environment in highland Chiapas.

The study is unique in its use of previously inaccessible historical source material and its use of novel methodological aids. Aerial photography was used in data collection, and the computer was used in ethnographic census analysis. The result is a book that reveals the Indian groups of Chiapas as apparent enclaves whose ethnicity is a dynamic, adaptive response to their position of marginal dependency. While their plight is extreme, it is nevertheless structurally similar to the position of ethnic groups in most large social systems.

The persistence of deep moral disagreements—across cultures as well as within them—has created widespread skepticism about the objectivity of morality. Moral relativism, moral pessimism, and the denigration of ethics in comparison with science are the results. Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take moral disagreement seriously and yet retain our aspirations for moral objectivity.

Michele Moody-Adams critically scrutinizes the anthropological evidence commonly used to support moral relativism. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the relevant anthropological literature, she dismantles the mystical conceptions of “culture” that underwrite relativism. She demonstrates that cultures are not hermetically sealed from each other, but are rather the product of eclectic mixtures and borrowings rich with contradictions and possibilities for change. The internal complexity of cultures is not only crucial for cultural survival, but will always thwart relativist efforts to confine moral judgments to a single culture. Fieldwork in Familiar Places will forever change the way we think about relativism: anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers alike will be forced to reconsider many of their theoretical presuppositions.

Moody-Adams also challenges the notion that ethics is methodologically deficient because it does not meet standards set by natural science. She contends that ethics is an interpretive enterprise, not a failed naturalistic one: genuine ethical inquiry, including philosophical ethics, is a species of interpretive ethnography. We have reason for moral optimism, Moody-Adams argues. Even the most serious moral disagreements take place against a background of moral agreement, and thus genuine ethical inquiry will be fieldwork in familiar places. Philosophers can contribute to this enterprise, she believes, if they return to a Socratic conception of themselves as members of a rich and complex community of moral inquirers.

Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America.

Although this close relationship and its consequences for private life bred many tensions and conflicts, the premises and conditions of that interdependent association persisted even into the nineteenth century. Wall sketches the subsequent changes and outlines the new arrangements of family and community life as the colonies moved toward the formation of a new nation.

Artists fighting racism and sexism from the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era

In 1943, the production of the Columbia Pictures film The Heat’s On halted for three days due to an on-set protest by featured performer Hazel Scott. Appalled by the racially demeaning and stereotypical depictions of Black women extras and dancers, Scott—one of the top African American performers of the era—forced the studio to relent. But her protest of Hollywood racism angered powerful white men in the industry, and despite her rising career, she was soon banished from American film.

Scott was far from the only Black woman in a creative field to use her professional success as leverage against prejudice. In The Fiercest Kind, cultural historian H. Zahra Caldwell explores the biographical narratives of five Black women at the top of their artistic crafts in the mid-20th century to understand how they pushed back against racism and sexism. From 1937–1963, pianist Hazel Scott, dancer Katherine Dunham, cartoonist Jackie Ormes, multihyphenate fine artist (graphic artist, painter, and sculptor) Elizabeth Catlett, and singer Lena Horne were among the most popular and nationally known Black women in their respective fields, spanning film, television, print media, and fine art. Generating creative works at the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era, they used their professional and personal lives to confront seemingly insurmountable repression through what Caldwell defines as “layered resistance.”

A Black feminist practice, layered resistance consists of four tactics: claiming and adapting cultural spaces for Black women; strategically crafting positive images of Black womanhood that directly challenge white supremacy; combining performance and/or visual representation with social and political activism; and choosing unconventional lifestyles that defy rigid gender and racial norms. These artists also lived in, worked in, and supported important Black spaces such as Harlem and Black Chicago. Using a methodology that combines textual analysis, archival research, and oral history, Caldwell understands this strategy within larger movements for Black freedom and equality that spanned the twentieth century and continue to the present day.  

Artists fighting racism and sexism from the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era

In 1943, the production of the Columbia Pictures film The Heat’s On halted for three days due to an on-set protest by featured performer Hazel Scott. Appalled by the racially demeaning and stereotypical depictions of Black women extras and dancers, Scott—one of the top African American performers of the era—forced the studio to relent. But her protest of Hollywood racism angered powerful white men in the industry, and despite her rising career, she was soon banished from American film.

Scott was far from the only Black woman in a creative field to use her professional success as leverage against prejudice. In The Fiercest Kind, cultural historian H. Zahra Caldwell explores the biographical narratives of five Black women at the top of their artistic crafts in the mid-20th century to understand how they pushed back against racism and sexism. From 1937–1963, pianist Hazel Scott, dancer Katherine Dunham, cartoonist Jackie Ormes, multihyphenate fine artist (graphic artist, painter, and sculptor) Elizabeth Catlett, and singer Lena Horne were among the most popular and nationally known Black women in their respective fields, spanning film, television, print media, and fine art. Generating creative works at the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era, they used their professional and personal lives to confront seemingly insurmountable repression through what Caldwell defines as “layered resistance.”

A Black feminist practice, layered resistance consists of four tactics: claiming and adapting cultural spaces for Black women; strategically crafting positive images of Black womanhood that directly challenge white supremacy; combining performance and/or visual representation with social and political activism; and choosing unconventional lifestyles that defy rigid gender and racial norms. These artists also lived in, worked in, and supported important Black spaces such as Harlem and Black Chicago. Using a methodology that combines textual analysis, archival research, and oral history, Caldwell understands this strategy within larger movements for Black freedom and equality that spanned the twentieth century and continue to the present day.  

Can a good school help its students overcome the adverse effects of economic disadvantage and family adversity? Recent educational assessment suggests that the answer may be a painful no. Here, however, is a book that contradicts the prevailing pessimism about the possibilities of education. In Fifteen Thousand Hours, Michael Rutter and his colleagues show conclusively that schools can make a difference.

In a three-year study of a dozen secondary schools in a large urban area, Rutter's team found that some schools were demonstrably better than others at promoting the academic and social success of their students. Moreover, there were clear and interesting differences between the schools that promote success and the schools that promote failure. As Rutter shows, these differences provide important clues to the kind of educational reform that might allow inner-city schools to act more uniformly as a positive and protective influence on students who must grow up in an otherwise disordered and difficult world.

For a dozen years during their formative period of development, children spend as many of their working hours at school as at home—some 15,000 hours in all. To suggest that this tremendous amount of time has no effect on development seems irrational. To settle for schools that simply act as institutions of containment for disadvantaged children seems a strategy of despair. The importance of this major book in education is its clear demonstration that these are not the only alternatives.

One of the first new interpretations of West Virginia’s origins in over a century—and one that corrects previous histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Every history of West Virginia’s creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century—one that corrects earlier histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia’s origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.

How can decisionmakers charged with protecting the environment and the public’s health and safety steer clear of false and misleading scientific research? Is it possible to give scientists a stronger voice in regulatory processes without yielding too much control over policy, and how can this be harmonized with democratic values? These are just some of the many controversial and timely questions that Sheila Jasanoff asks in this study of the way science advisers shape federal policy.

In their expanding role as advisers, scientists have emerged as a formidable fifth branch of government. But even though the growing dependence of regulatory agencies on scientific and technical information has granted scientists a greater influence on public policy, opinions differ as to how those contributions should be balanced against other policy concerns. More important, who should define what counts as good science when all scientific claims incorporate social factors and are subject to negotiation?

Jasanoff begins by describing some significant failures—such as nitrites, Love Canal, and alar—in administrative and judicial decisionmaking that fed the demand for more peer review of regulatory science. In analyzing the nature of scientific claims and methods used in policy decisions, she draws comparisons with the promises and limitations of peer review in scientific organizations operating outside the regulatory context. The discussion of advisory mechanisms draws on the author’s close scrutiny of two highly visible federal agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. Here we see the experts in action as they deliberate on critical issues such as clean air, pesticide regulation, and the safety of pharmaceuticals and food additives.

Jasanoff deftly merges legal and institutional analysis with social studies of science and presents a strong case for procedural reforms. In so doing, she articulates a social-construction model that is intended to buttress the effectiveness of the fifth branch.

The Fifth Prapāṭhaka of the Vādhūla Śrautasūtra includes a critical edition, followed by a translation and a commentary, of the fifth chapter (prapāṭhaka) of the Vādhūla Śrautasūtra. This chapter is dedicated to the description of the so-called “independent” animal sacrifice (nirūḍhapaśubandha) in Vedic ritual. This series of short monographs relates to particular aspects of the animal sacrifice described in the Veda and to problems of exegesis of Vedic texts.

The first part of this edition presents the translation and commentary, while the critical edition makes up the second part. The commentary highlights the peculiarities of the Vādhūla version of the nirūḍhapaśubandha. In the conclusion of the first part, the ancientness of the Vādhūla school is discussed, as well as its place within the corpus of Taittirīya texts.

Winner of the 3rd Annual Miguel Mármol Prize from Curbstone Press, Mary Helen Lagasse's The Fifth Sun is an inspiring story of an immigrant who struggles valiantly for a better life for herself and her family. A young Mexican woman, Mercedes, leaves her village to work as a housemaid in New Orleans. This fast-paced novel takes us through her adventures in New Orleans, her marriage, her struggle to raise her children, her deportation, and her attempt to re-cross the river and be reunited with her children.

The ancient Aztecs dwelt at the center of a dazzling and complex cosmos. From this position they were acutely receptive to the demands of their gods. The Fifth Sun represents a dramatic overview of the Aztec conception of the universe and the gods who populated it—Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent; Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror; and Huitzilopochtli, the Southern Hummingbird. Burr Cartwright Brundage explores the myths behind these and others in the Aztec pantheon in a way that illuminates both the human and the divine in Aztec life.

The cult of human sacrifice is a pervasive theme in this study. It is a concept that permeated Aztec mythology and was the central preoccupation of the aggressive Aztec state. Another particularly interesting belief explored here is the “mask pool,” whereby gods could exchange regalia and, thus, identities.

This vivid and eminently readable study also covers the use of hallucinogens; cannibalism; the calendars of ancient Mexico; tlachtli, the life-and-death ball game; the flower wars; divine transfiguration; and the evolution of the war god of the Mexica. A splendid introduction to Aztec religion, The Fifth Sun also contains insights for specialists in ethnohistory, mythology, and religion.

Winner, Book Award, Associaton for Borderland Studies, 2008

The U.S. and Mexican border regions have experienced rapid demographic and economic growth over the last fifty years. In this analysis, Joan Anderson and James Gerber offer a new perspective on the changes and tensions pulling at the border from both sides through a discussion of cross-border economic issues and thorough analytical research that examines not only the dramatic demographic and economic growth of the region, but also shifts in living standards, the changing political climate, and environmental pressures, as well as how these affect the lives of people in the border region.

Creating what they term a Border Human Development Index, the authors rank the quality of life for every U.S. county and Mexican municipio that touches the 2,000-mile border. Using data from six U.S. and Mexican censuses, the book adeptly illustrates disparities in various aspects of economic development between the two countries over the last six decades.

Anderson and Gerber make the material accessible and compelling by drawing an evocative picture of how similar the communities on either side of the border are culturally, yet how divided they are economically. The authors bring a heightened level of insight to border issues not just for academics but also for general readers. The book will be of particular value to individuals interested in how the border between the two countries shapes the debates on quality of life, industrial growth, immigration, cross-border integration, and economic and social development.

On a sweltering day in June 1974, a group of housewives, graduate students, and young professionals gathered in the Boston suburbs. Their mission: to produce the first issue of Exponent II, a “humble yet sincere” newspaper “poised on the dual platforms of Mormonism and Feminism.” They viewed their work as an act of devotion, not rebellion, and were naïve of the cold reception they would soon receive from LDS Church leaders. Nevertheless, the paper became a national platform connecting Mormon feminists. It provided a vital space for them to question and integrate different aspects of their dual—and sometimes dueling—identities. From the Equal Rights Amendment to queer identity, Exponent II has hosted some of the most urgent conversations of its time while also embracing life’s dailiness.

“The book rewards readers with interesting first-hand accounts of protests and pickets that are typically absent from academic discussions of the digital economy.” - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2021/03/17/book-review-the-fight-against-platform-capitalism-an-inquiry-into-the-global-struggles-of-the-gig-economy-by-jamie-woodcock/

So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations.

This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait returning to a focus on workers’ experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity.

Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism.

Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts chronicles a grassroots movement to overturn the state’s ban on interracial unions. Assembling information from court and church records, family histories, and popular literature, Amber D. Moulton recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify what, in the eyes of the state’s antislavery constituency, appeared to be an indefensible injustice.

Initially, activists argued that the ban provided a legal foundation for white supremacy in Massachusetts. But laws that enforced racial hierarchy remained popular even in Northern states, and the movement gained little traction. To attract broader support, the reformers recalibrated their arguments along moral lines, insisting that the prohibition on interracial unions weakened the basis of all marriage, by encouraging promiscuity, prostitution, and illegitimacy. Through trial and error, reform leaders shaped an appeal that ultimately drew in Garrisonian abolitionists, equal rights activists, antislavery evangelicals, moral reformers, and Yankee legislators, all working to legalize interracial marriage.

This pre–Civil War effort to overturn Massachusetts’ antimiscegenation law was not a political aberration but a crucial chapter in the deep history of the African American struggle for equal rights, on a continuum with the civil rights movement over a century later.