As the patron of travelers, Saint Christopher inspired one of the most popular cults in the medieval era, which spread across Europe and especially the Iberian Peninsula. Artistic renderings of the saint were found near the doors of most Spanish Gothic churches, and paratheatrical representations of Saint Christopher were also commonplace in religious processions. His conversion and martyrdom were often staged between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries.
In the theater, Juan de Benavides’s Vida y muerte de San Cristóbal is one of two known comedias dealing with the saint, but it was heavily censored after its premiere. The immense popularity of St. Christopher and other primitive saints first drew the attention of the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, when the Catholic Church attempted to suppress the influence of the earlier saints due to their fantastical nature. The stories of these saints were censored, rewritten or even omitted in the post-Tridentine martyrologies. This publication is the first critical edition of the only extant copy of Benavides’s playscript. The circumstances surrounding Benavides’s play continue a dialogue about such important topics as censorship and the influence of the church over artistic production.
“Signed language interpreting is about access,” states author Jeremy L. Brunson at the outset of his new book, and no manifestation of access for deaf people can be considered more complex than video relay services (VRS). In Video Relay Service Interpreters: Intricacies of Sign Language Access, Brunson delineates exactly how complicated the service can be, first by analyzing sign language interpreting as a profession and its relation to both hearing and deaf clients. He describes how sign language interpreters function in Deaf communities and how regulatory processes imposed by VRS providers can constrain communication access based on each individual’s needs.
Brunson proceeds by acclimating readers to the environment of VRS and how the layout of the typical physical plant alters the practice of interpreting. The focus then falls upon intended VRS users, providing insights into their expectations. Interpreters shared their experiences with Brunson in 21 formal interviews and discussions. Many remarked on the differences between face-to-face interpreting and VRS training, which often runs counter to the concept of relating informally with deaf clients as a way to expand access. This thoughtful, sociological study outlines texts that originate between users and interpreters and how they can be used to develop VRS access. Video Relay Service Interpreters concludes with the implications of VRS interpreting for sign language interpreting in general and suggests where scholarship will lead in the future.
The videos on this site are designed to be used with the textbook (9780472033423 or 9780472124770). The book must purchased separately at https://www.press.umich.edu/363197/academic_interactions or via another retailer). Video access is only available through our online platform: https://michelt.ublish.com.
The ability to understand and be understood when communicating with professors and with native speakers is crucial to academic success. The Academic Interactions videos focus on actual academic speaking events, particularly classroom interactions and office hours, and give students practice improving the ways that they communicate in a college/university setting.
The Academic Interactions textbook addresses skills like using names and names of locations correctly on campus, giving directions, understanding instructors and their expectations, interacting during office hours, participating in class and in seminars, and delivering formal and informal presentations. In addition, advice is provided for communicating via email with professors and working in groups with native speakers (including negotiating tasks in groups).
Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Liberalism, in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, came to Austria much later than it came to western Europe, for it was not until the 1840s that the industrial revolution reached the Hapsburg Empire, bringing in its train miserable working conditions and economic upheaval, which created bitter resentment among the working classes and a longing for a Utopia that would cure the ills of mankind.
This new-found liberalism, largely self-contained and uninfluenced by liberal movements outside the empire, centered mainly in the idea of individual freedom and constitutional monarchism. In the end, the revolution failed because the moderates proved too weak to control the radical excesses, and the radicals in growing desperation tried to turn the rebel idea into a democratic and, at the extreme, a republican one. Fear of this extremism finally drove the moderates into the counterrevolutionary camp.
Since the Viennese rebels fought to achieve many of the goals fundamental to democracy, historians have generally tended to idealize the revolutionaries and forget their shortcomings. R. John Rath has sought to evaluate the revolution from the point of view of the political ideologies of 1848 rather than those of the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, he has clearly and objectively stated the case for both the left and the right, pointing out the failures and shortcomings of each.
At its publication, this was the first detailed English-language book on the Viennese Revolution of 1848 in more than a hundred years. The author has not confined himself to the bare bones of history. In his descriptions of the times and lively portrayals of the chief actors of the revolution, he has vividly restaged a drama of an ideal that failed.
During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.
With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.
Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam's smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?
Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.
Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?
Alexander Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.
In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.
Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.
This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.
Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.
In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.
Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.
This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.
Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.
Haunting questions remain about our involvement in Vietnam. Perhaps the most persistent of these is whether President Kennedy would have ended American involvement in Vietnam if he had lived.
For many Americans, Oliver Stone's film JFK left no doubt that before his assassination Kennedy had determined to quit Vietnam. Yet the historical record offers a more complex answer. In this fresh look at the archival evidence, noted scholars take up the challenge to provide us with their conclusions about the early decisions that put the United States on the path to the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War. The tensions and turmoil that accompanied those decisions reveal the American presidency at the center of a storm of conflicting advice.
The book is divided into four sections. Parts one and two delve into the political and military contexts of the early decisions. Part three raises the intriguing questions of Kennedy's and Johnson's roles in the conflict, particularly the thorny issue of whether Kennedy did, in fact, intend to withdraw from Vietnam and whether Johnson reversed that policy. Part four reveals an uncanny parallel between early Soviet policy toward Hanoi and U.S. policy toward Saigon.
One of the most decorated groups that served in the Vietnam War, Chicanos fought and died in numbers well out of proportion to their percentage of the United States' population. Yet despite this, their wartime experiences have never received much attention in either popular media or scholarly studies. To spotlight and preserve some of their stories, this book presents substantial interviews with Chicano Vietnam veterans and their families that explore the men's experiences in combat, the war's effects on the Chicano community, and the veterans' postwar lives.
Lea Ybarra groups the interviews topically to bring out different aspects of the Chicano vets' experiences. In addition to discussing their involvement in and views on the Vietnam War, the veterans also reflect on their place in American society, American foreign policy, and the value of war. Veterans from several states and different socioeconomic classes give the book a broad-based perspective, which Ybarra frames with sociological material on the war and its impact on Chicanos.
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.
Madisonville was one of the key settlements of the Ohio Valley Fort Ancient people and was the subject of James Griffin’s 1943 classic, The Fort Ancient Aspect. It is a site rich in burials and artifacts documenting the earliest European influences. Drooker re-explores a century of excavation to explain how Contact Period events affected Madisonville inhabitants and their links to eastern Fort Ancient, northern Ohio, Iroquoian, Oneota, and Mississipian groups.
Through careful analysis of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Omar Swartz argues that Kerouac’s influence on American society is largely rhetorical. Kerouac’s significance as a cultural icon can be best understood, Swartz asserts, in terms of traditional rhetorical practices and principles.
To Swartz, Kerouac is a rhetor who symbolically reconstructs his world and offers arguments and encouragements for others to follow. Swartz proposes that On the Road constitutes a “rhetorical vision,” a reality-defining discourse suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and change. Swartz asserts that the reader of Kerouac’s On theRoadbecomes capable of responding to the larger, confusing culture in a strategic manner. Kerouac's rhetorical vision of an alternative social and cultural reality contributes to the identity of localized cultures within the United States.
“I imagine everyone has a center of gravity,” says Ellen Bromfield Geld. “Something which binds one to the earth and gives sense and direction to what one does.” For Ellen, this center is a writing table before a window that looks out upon groves of pecan trees and mahogany-colored cattle in seas of grass. The place is Fazenda Pau D’Alho, Brazil, where she and her husband, Carson, have lived and farmed since 1961.
Healing the ravaged coffee plantation, rearing five children, exploring the outposts, the Gelds have created a dynamic yet peaceful life far from Ellen’s native Ohio. Their practice of sustainable agriculture, and Ellen’s plea for the preservation of Brazil’s remaining wilderness areas, reflect the legacy of her father, the novelist and farm visionary Louis Bromfield. Their shared vision is crystallized in her account of a cattle drive across the Pantanal, the vast flood plain on Brazil’s side of the Paraguay River. She describes a two-hundred year symbiosis between ranchers and a fragile ecosystem that is being threatened by development.
View from the Fazenda is distilled from fifty years of living in Brazil, weaving daily life on the farm into her quest to understand a nation. It portrays a true melting pot of people who—as conquerers, immigrants, or slaves, their blood and history mingled with those of native Indians—have created the character of Brazil. This huge, diverse county, living in several eras at the same time, is ever changing through its people’s amazing ability to “find a way.”
Ellen Bromfield Geld evokes the land and people of Brazil and offers readers an invigorating glimpse into a soulful life. “It seems to me that being a bit of a poet is perhaps the only way one can survive as a farmer,” she explains. “For in the end, more than anything, farming is a way of life you either love or become bitter enduring.”
Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct.
Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.
Published in 1918, The View of Life is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed diverse topics across his essayistic writings, which influenced scholars in aesthetics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, certain core issues emerged over the course of his career—the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms, and the nature and conditions of authentic individuality, including the role of mindfulness regarding mortality. Composed not long before his death, The View of Life was, Simmel wrote, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety.
Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s Being and Time and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
With the Midwest under water, America had a chance to see how effectively it had “improved” its rivers. We’ve straightened and dredged them, revetted and rerouted them, made massive efforts to control them, yet our actions have been less than successful. Too often, physical changes made to a river conflict with natural processes, resulting in damage rather than alleviating it. Applying available knowledge on how rivers form and act could prevent such problems. Luna B. Leopold seeks to organize such knowledge. Widely regarded as the most creative scholar in the field of river morphology, Leopold presents a coherent description of the river, its shape, size, organization, and action, along with a consistent theory that explains much of the observed character of channels.
The laws of physics that govern rivers allow for variations, many of them dictated by random chance. Thus, a river’s adaptation, as Leopold describes it, tends toward the most probable form, the one with the least variance among hydraulic parameters. We see how this probabilistic tendency plays out as Leopold views the river as a whole from headwater to mouth, in the drainage net, in the behavior of meanders, and in aspects of sediment transport.
Grounded in hydraulics, geomorphology, and surveying, as well as in extensive fieldwork on rivers in the eastern and Rocky Mountain states, Leopold’s view of a river is at once technical and personal, providing both a firm foundation for understanding the behavior of rivers—including instructions for getting started in backyard hydrology—and a wealth of firsthand observations by a thoughtful and experienced scientist. It will be of immediate interest and great use as we seek to develop, preserve, and appreciate our most fluid natural resource.
What brought the ape out of the trees, and so the man out of the ape, was a taste for blood. This is how the story went, when a few fossils found in Africa in the 1920s seemed to point to hunting as the first human activity among our simian forebears—the force behind our upright posture, skill with tools, domestic arrangements, and warlike ways. Why, on such slim evidence, did the theory take hold? In this engrossing book Matt Cartmill searches out the origins, and the strange allure, of the myth of Man the Hunter. An exhilarating foray into cultural history, A View to a Death in the Morning shows us how hunting has figured in the western imagination from the myth of Artemis to the tale of Bambi—and how its evolving image has reflected our own view of ourselves.
A leading biological anthropologist, Cartmill brings remarkable wit and wisdom to his story. Beginning with the killer-ape theory in its post–World War II version, he takes us back through literature and history to other versions of the hunting hypothesis. Earlier accounts of Man the Hunter, drafted in the Renaissance, reveal a growing uneasiness with humanity’s supposed dominion over nature. By delving further into the history of hunting, from its promotion as a maker of men and builder of character to its image as an aristocratic pastime, charged with ritual and eroticism, Cartmill shows us how the hunter has always stood between the human domain and the wild, his status changing with cultural conceptions of that boundary.
Cartmill’s inquiry leads us through classical antiquity and Christian tradition, medieval history, Renaissance thought, and the Romantic movement to the most recent controversies over wilderness management and animal rights. Modern ideas about human dominion find their expression in everything from scientific theories and philosophical assertions to Disney movies and sporting magazines. Cartmill’s survey of these sources offers fascinating insight into the significance of hunting as a mythic metaphor in recent times, particularly after the savagery of the world wars reawakened grievous doubts about man’s place in nature.
A masterpiece of humanistic science, A View to a Death in the Morning is also a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human, to stand uncertainly between the wilderness of beast and prey and the peaceable kingdom. This richly illustrated book will captivate readers on every side of the dilemma, from the most avid hunters to their most vehement opponents to those who simply wonder about the import of hunting in human nature.
Conventional notions of avant-garde art suggest innovative artists rebelling against artistic convention and social propriety, shocking unwilling audiences into new ways of seeing and living. Viewers in Distress tells a different story. Beginning in the tumultuous 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, rebellious spectators in American and British theaters broke with theater decorum and voiced their radical interpretations of shows that were not meant to be radical. In doing so, audiences tried to understand the complex racial, gender, and religious politics of their times, while insisting that liberal societies fulfill their promise of dignity for all. Stefka Mihaylova argues that such non-conforming viewing amounts to an avant-garde of its own: a bold reimagining of how we live together and tell stories of our lives together, aimed to achieve liberalism’s promise. In telling this story, she analyzes the production and reception politics of works by Susan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, Forced Entertainment, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, and Young Jean Lee, as well as non-theatrical controversies such as the conflict over Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015. At the core of spectators’ discontent, this book suggests, is an effort to figure out how to get along with people different from ourselves in the diverse U.S. and British societies in which we live.
African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in 1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema.
Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes.
Contributors: Ralph A. Austen and Mahir Şaul, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Birgit Meyer, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, Vincent Bouchard, Laura Fair, Jane Bryce, Peter Rist, Stefan Sereda, Lindsey Green-Simms, and Cornelius Moore
Early in its history, anthropology was a visual as well as verbal discipline. But as time passed, visually oriented professionals became a minority among their colleagues, and most anthropologists used written words rather than audiovisual modes as their professional means of communication. Today, however, contemporary electronic and interactive media once more place visual anthropologists and anthropologically oriented artists within the mainstream. Digital media, small-sized and easy-to-use equipment, and the Internet, with its interactive and public forum websites, democratize roles once relegated to highly trained professionals alone. However, having access to a good set of tools does not guarantee accurate and reliable work. Visual anthropology involves much more than media alone.
This book presents visual anthropology as a work-in-progress, open to the myriad innovations that the new audiovisual communications technologies bring to the field. It is intended to aid in contextualizing, explaining, and humanizing the storehouse of visual knowledge that university students and general readers now encounter, and to help inform them about how these new media tools can be used for intellectually and socially beneficial purposes.
Concentrating on documentary photography and ethnographic film, as well as lesser-known areas of study and presentation including dance, painting, architecture, archaeology, and primate research, the book's fifteen contributors feature populations living on all of the world's continents as well as within the United States. The final chapter gives readers practical advice about how to use the most current digital and interactive technologies to present research findings.
“In recent decades, the deficiencies of our system of medical education and medical care have become clearer and more comprehensible to an expanding and highly vocal segment of the public. Many educators share the uneasiness and recognize the need for change.” These words from Dr. John Knowles's Preface define the context of this collection of thought-provoking essays, originally presented in 1966 as a series of lectures sponsored jointly by the Lowell Institute of Boston and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Written by seven men distinguished in the fields of medicine, education, and government, they are addressed to everyone, expert and layman alike, concerned with the quality of medical care in the United States. The ultimate aim of medicine is to enhance the quality of life by the prevention of disease and the comprehensive care of the sick. Technological advances continually provide us with new and better tools, but medicine is plagued by rising costs, inefficient use of facilities and personnel, and critical shortages of manpower. Each author, from his particular point of view, recognizes the need to bring medicine into contact with the social sciences, and presents concrete proposals for government aid and curriculum reform.
Looking at the narrative accounts of mob violence produced by vigilantes and their advocates as “official” histories, Lisa Arellano shows how these nonfiction narratives conformed to a common formula whose purpose was to legitimate frontier justice and lynching.
In Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, Arellano closely examines such narratives as well as the work of Western historian and archivist Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was sympathetic to them, and that of Ida B. Wells, who wrote in fierce opposition to lynching. Tracing the creation, maintenance, and circulation of dominant, alternative, and oppositional vigilante stories from the nineteenth-century frontier through the Jim Crow South, she casts new light on the role of narrative in creating a knowable past.
Demonstrating how these histories ennobled the actions of mobs and rendered their leaders and members as heroes, Arellano presents a persuasive account of lynching’s power to create the conditions favorable to its own existence.
After spending three years in The National Theatre of the Deaf performing plays by hearing authors featuring hearing characters, Willy Conley realized that he wanted to write plays with deaf, hard-of- hearing, and hearing characters created from the Deaf perspective. Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays presents the result of his desire in twelve masterful plays.
“I write for the eye, always searching for live, mobile, provocative images that would fill and illuminate the entire stage space with the complexities, the pathos, and the humor involved when deaf and hearing cultures merge or collide,” writes Conley in his introduction. His plays depict a wide range of Deaf characters, including two brothers locked in a tragic rivalry familiar to families of all backgrounds; the broadly comedic Deaf Guide and hearing Techie interspersing laughs with cultural lessons in their Museum of Signs for People with Communication Disorders; Everyone searching for her Good Deeds as she faces imminent Death in an updating of the classic morality play, plus many others. These works explore a broad palette of circumstances with and without hearing characters, allowing Deaf characters to interact minus the direct influence that the dominant culture might exert. Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays presents the drama and passion of a master playwright who, through his perceptions, reveals facets of the Deaf character in all of us.
The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getúlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building.
Since colonial times, the Northeast has been an agricultural region based primarily on sugar production. The area’s population was composed of former slaves and free men of African descent, indigenous Indians, European whites, and mulattos. The image of the nordestino was, for many years, linked with the predominant ethnic group in the region, the Afro-Brazilian. For political reasons, however, the conception of the nordestino later changed to more closely resemble white Europeans.
Blake delves deeply into local archives and determines that politicians, intellectuals, and other urban professionals formulated identities based on theories of science, biomedicine, race, and social Darwinism. While these ideas served political, social, and economic agendas, they also inspired debates over social justice and led to reforms for both the region and the people. Additionally, Blake shows how debates over northeastern identity and the concept of the nordestino shaped similar arguments about Brazilian national identity and “true” Brazilian people.
What do you think of when you think of the Vikings? Fierce warriors? Sailors of magnificent dragon-prowed ships who terrorized North-Western Europe? Do you think of darkened halls thick with smoke and song?
Like all people those researchers now consider to be Viking were much more complex than the modern world sees them as. This coloring book is meant to show that. It is designed to provide scenes of the beauty of the early medieval world the Vikings inhabited. It is in this context that Viking cultures developed. You will find artifacts and animals, plants and landscapes within these pages to explore. Species that held some use to the Vikings, such as those that provided fur in particular have been focused on. Reconstructed scenes are inspired by the diverse world experienced in the north. There are no horned helmets here. The real Vikings were much more practical than that.
In spite of the hopes raised and achievements attained by the “Green Revolution,” the less developed rural countries of the world still must struggle for economic growth. Social scientists now focus on the human dimension of development. They search for change agents—men and women who have the initiative to cast aside traditional techniques and who are willing to introduce modern methods to their communities.
The Village Entrepreneur is a timely update on the new strategy of development. With financial backing from the Ford Foundation and the Indian government, Wayne G. Broehl and his associates undertook a comprehensive study of the village entrepreneur in South India. They interviewed hundreds of rural businessmen and attempted to pinpoint the qualities that distinguished change agents from their tradition-bound comrades. Further, they attempted to define the ways in which these agents can be used as conduits of progress. A significant section of the book describes a pilot program established to engender innovative attitudes. The book also provides a working model that will help apply the concept of change agents to other fields and other countries.
A categorical, but controversial, assumption of this work is that change is the sine qua non of development. Broehl believes that such change will necessarily be both economic and social and is likely to be political as well. Realistically presented and forcefully expressed, his findings are a strong contribution to recent development theory.
The Village Homes neighborhood in Davis, California is one of the few long-standing examples of sustainable community design. Mark Francis has been studying Village Homes for more than two decades and brings together existing research and writing on the community, studies about the children of Village Homes he conducted throughout the 1980s, and interviews with many parties involved with the project including designers, residents, gardeners, and maintenance people. Mark Francis takes a critical look at Village Homes, addressing its failures as well as its successes, and examines the question of why, despite its success, this development has not been replicated.
In August 1870, during a fair in the isolated French village of Hautefaye, a gruesome murder was committed in broad daylight that aroused the indignation of the entire country. A young nobleman, falsely accused of shouting republican slogans, was savagely tortured for hours by a mob of peasants who later burned him alive. Rumors of cannibalism stirred public fascination, and the details of the case were dramatically recounted in the popular press. While the crime was rife with political significance, the official inquiry focused on its brutality. Justice was swift: the mob’s alleged ringleaders were guillotined at the scene of the crime the following winter.
The Village of Cannibals is a fascinating inquiry by historian Alain Corbin into the social and political ingredients of an alchemy that transformed ordinary people into executioners in nineteenth-century France. Corbin’s chronicle of the killing is significant for the new light it sheds on the final eruption of peasant rage in France to end in murder. No other author has investigated this harrowing event in such depth or brought to its study such a wealth of perspectives.
Corbin explores incidents of public violence during and after the French Revolution and illustrates how earlier episodes in France’s history provide insight into the mob’s methods and choice of victim. He describes in detail the peasants’ perception of the political landscape and the climate of fear that fueled their anxiety and ignited long-smoldering hatreds. Drawing on the minutes of court proceedings, accounts of contemporary journalists, and testimony of eyewitnesses, the author offers a precise chronology of the chain of events that unfolded on the fairground that summer afternoon. His detailed investigation into the murder at Hautefaye reveals the political motivations of the murderers and the gulf between their actions and the sensibilities of the majority of French citizens, who no longer tolerated violence as a viable form of political expression. The book will be welcomed by scholars, students, and general readers for its compelling insights into the nature of collective violence.
In the village of the ghost bells, the church chimes ring—even though the church has no bells. One of the neighbors wants to buy dreams—or is she a dream that someone else is dreaming? Where and why do dreams become nightmares?
These are only some of the fascinating questions raised in Village of the Ghost Bells, Edla Van Steen’s second novel. First published in 1983 as Coraçôes mordidos, the novel tells the story of the would-be utopian community built on an old plantation of the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil. Its atmosphere is dreamlike, often verging on the supernatural, and strange events signal the transformation of the utopian dream into a nightmare. Ultimately destroyed by greed, corruption, and exploitation, the community becomes a microcosm of the Brazilian socioeconomic system, in which it takes all of a person’s warmth, idealism, passion, and humor to survive the bleak environment.
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