A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY49 start with J start with J
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been a major influence on a wide range of twentieth-century thought, even as the breadth, complexity, and obscurity of his work has intimidated students and deterred casual readers. That situation hasn’t been helped by uneven translations into English that have led to a popular conception of his intellectual enterprise that can at times be profoundly mistaken.
In this brief, clearly written introduction to Lacan and his work, Martin Murray presents an up-to-date survey of his key concepts, their development, and their influence on fields such as anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Arguing strongly that we should move beyond the traditional focus on Lacan’s early work, which favored a linguistic approach, Murray offers instead a more comprehensive overview of the whole arc of Lacan’s thought. The result is a rigorous, yet accessible, account of one of the key intellectual figures of the twentieth century.
Faced with economic hardship in Africa, Issa has left his home in Niger and his new wife, Khadija, to seek his fortune in America. Devout Muslims, the couple has entered into a "modern" marriage: Khadija is permitted to run her own business, and Issa has agreed not to take additional wives. Issa quickly adapts to his new surroundings, however, and soon attracts several girlfriends. Aided by a network of immigrants, he easily slips through gaps in the "system" and extends his stay in America indefinitely. Following a circuit of African-American cultural festivals across America, he marvels at African-Americans' attitudes toward Africa, and wonders if he'll ever return to Niger. Meanwhile, Khadija also struggles to make it—to become a "Jaguar"—as she combats loneliness, hostile in-laws, and a traditional, male-dominated society. The eventual success of her dry goods shop and her growing affection for a helpful Arab merchant make her wonder if she'll ever join Issa in America.
Drawing on his own decades of experience among Africans both in Niger and in New York, Paul Stoller offers enormous insight into the complexities of contemporary Africa. Alive with detail, Jaguar is a story of triumph and disappointment, of dislocation and longing, and of life lived in a world that no longer recognizes boundaries.
In contrast to western notions of the soul as the essence or most native part of a human being, the Tzeltal-speaking Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, regard the soul first and foremost as an Other. Made up of beings that personify the antithesis of their native selves—animals such as hummingbirds or jaguars, atmospheric phenomena like lightning bolts or rainbows, or spirits of European appearance such as Catholic priests or evangelical musicians—Tzeltal souls represent the maximum expression of that which is alien. And because their souls enfold that which is outside and Other, the Tzeltal contain within themselves the history of their relationship with Europeans from the beginning of the Spanish conquest to the present time. Thus, to understand the Indian self opens a window into the Tzeltal conception of culture and community, their notions of identity and alterity, and their interpretation of interethnic relations and types of historical memory.
In this pathfinding ethnography, which was originally published in Spanish in 1996 as Ch'ulel: una etnografía de las almas tzeltales and is now extensively rewritten and amplified in English, Pedro Pitarch offers a new understanding of indigenous concepts of the soul, personhood, and historical memory in highland Chiapas. Exploring numerous aspects of indigenous culture and history—medicine and shamanism, geography and cosmology, and politics and kinship among them—he engages in a radical rethinking of classic issues in Mesoamerican anthropology, such as ethnicity and alterity, community and tradition, and change and permanence.
Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.
The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.
López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public.
Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.
For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?
In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.
Originally published by Scribner
2000 ISBN: 0-684-80000-4
Java is the most populous island of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world. Yet despite its importance, outsiders know little about the country or its people. With the help of Indonesian students and scholars, Walter L. Williams has collected and translated the life histories of twenty-seven Javanese women and men. The people interviewed tell how they have coped with rapid social and economic change, and the transformation of their traditions. Williams has carefully selected the individuals he includes to represent a wide diversity of Java's people. We hear from fascinating men and women of various religions, from the rich and the poor, and from different ethnic backgrounds. Diversity is a constant theme, as evidenced by a poor pedicab driver who can barely scrape along, by a rich businesswoman who explains how she balances her professional and domestic roles, by an educated and respected homosexual school principal, and by an illiterate mother of fourteen children. All of them present in their lives a unique Javanese approach to living.
These oral histories were derived from elderly people, who have a larger perspective on the changes they have seen in their lifetimes. The focus of the first section of the book is the way people have adapted in their daily lives to massive social and economic changes. In the middle section, we hear from the Javanese who represent traditional values in the midst of change. Finally, we hear from educators and parents who tell us of their concerns for Indonesian youth and the future of Indonesia.
This is the tale of Father Blas Valera, the child of a native Incan woman and Spanish father, caught between the ancient world of the Incas and the conquistadors of Spain. Valera, a Jesuit in sixteenth-century Peru, believed in what to his superiors was pure heresy: that the Incan culture, religion, and language were equal to their Christian counterparts.
As punishment for his beliefs he was imprisoned, beaten, and, finally, exiled to Spain, where he died at the hands of English pirates in 1597.
Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten, until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private Neapolitan collection. The documents claimed, among other things, that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he had returned to Peru; and, intriguingly, while there had taught his followers that the Incas used a secret phonetic quipu-a record-keeping device of the Inca empire-to record history.
Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to bitter disputes over how they should be assessed. Are they forgeries, authentic documents, or something in between? If genuine, they will radically reform our view of Inca culture and Valera. The author insightfully examines the evidence, showing how fact and fiction intertwine, and brings the dimly understood history of this author-priest to light.
While only a small fraction of youths in a neighborhood are active members of a gang, most young men must learn the styles, ways of communicating, and local geography of gangs in order to survive. Due to the absence of gang prevention programs sponsored by the government or outside non-governmental organizations, Catholic and Pentecostal churches have developed their own ways to confront gang violence in their communities. Youths who participate in church organizations do so not only to alter and improve their communities but also to gain emotional and institutional support.
Offering firsthand accounts of these youths and how they make use of religious discourse, narrative practices, or the inscription of tattooed images and words on the body to navigate dangerous social settings, Jesus and the Gang is an unflinching look at how these young men turn away from perpetuating the cycle of violence and how Christianity serves a society where belonging is surviving.
This book will appeal to readers with an interest in Latin American studies, urban anthropology, and youth studies. With its focus on the lives of young men and women, it’s also a compelling read for anyone interested in the plight of urban youth trying to escape the gang life.
Drawing on ethnographic field work she conducted among Christians in her home state of North Carolina, Claudia Gould crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them draw us into the complex essence of religious experience among southern American Christians.
Reconstructions of Jesus occurred in Asia long before the Western search for the historical Jesus began in earnest. This enterprise sprang up in seventh-century China and seventeenth-century India, encouraged by the patronage and openness of the Chinese and Indian imperial courts. While the Western quest was largely a Protestant preoccupation, in Asia the search was marked by its diversity: participants included Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Catholics, and members of the Church of the East.
During the age of European colonialism, Jesus was first seen by many Asians as a tribal god of the farangis, or white Europeans. But as his story circulated, Asians remade Jesus, at times appreciatively and at other times critically. R. S. Sugirtharajah demonstrates how Buddhist and Taoist thought, combined with Christian insights, led to the creation of the Chinese Jesus Sutras of late antiquity, and explains the importance of a biography of Jesus composed in the sixteenth-century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He also brings to the fore the reconstructions of Jesus during the Chinese Taiping revolution, the Korean Minjung uprising, and the Indian and Sri Lankan anti-colonial movements.
In Jesus in Asia, Sugirtharajah situates the historical Jesus beyond the narrow confines of the West and offers an eye-opening new chapter in the story of global Christianity.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.”
Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive—what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite—which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish—exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies—the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction.
Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky’s project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity.
Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue instead that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents. The book shows the vast canvas of history and culture as well as the social pressures and strategies that have helped shape Jewish families, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.
Research reveals a clear connection between the legal and social status of the Jews in Palestine in the 18th century and their ties with the Diaspora. The Jews who had immigrated to Palestine in that period were mostly poor and elderly. The country was economically backward and politically unstable, which made it impossible for the immigrants to support themselves through productive work. Therefore they lived off the contributions of their brethren overseas. Taxes and fees imposed by the Ottoman rulers increased the financial desperation of the Jews in Palestine. Prohibitions against young unmarried immigrant men and women made for an unstable population largely of old men, many of whom died shortly after immigrating. Families succumbed to disease, earthquakes, and famine, but in the face of these problems, the Jewish communities in Palestine persevered.
When Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1860s, delicately hand-tinted photographic prints of Japanese people and landscapes were among its earliest and most popular exports. Renowned European photographers Raimund von Stillfried and Felice Beato established studios in Japan in the 1860s; the work was soon taken up by their Japanese protégés and successors Uchida Kuichi, Kusakabe Kimbei, and others. Hundreds of these photographs, collected by travelers from the Boston area, were eventually donated to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they were archived for their ethnographic content and as scientific evidence of an "exotic" culture.
In this elegant volume, visual anthropologist David Odo examines the Peabody’s collection of Japanese photographs and the ways in which such objects were produced, acquired, and circulated in the nineteenth century. His innovative study reveals the images' shifting and contingent uses—from tourist souvenir to fine art print to anthropological “type” record—were framed by the desires and cultural preconceptions of makers and consumers alike. Understood as both images and objects, the prints embody complex issues of history, culture, representation, and exchange.
Most recent books about Chiapas, Mexico, focus on political conflicts and the indigenous movement for human rights at the macro level. None has explored those conflicts and struggles in-depth through an individual woman's life story. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico now offers that perspective in one woman's own words. Anthropologist Christine Eber met "Antonia" in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising.
Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhó, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.
In this book, Charles Stépanoff draws on ethnographic literature and his fieldwork in Siberia to reveal the immense contribution to human imagination made by shamans and the cognitive techniques they developed over the centuries.
Indigenous shamans are certain men and women who are able to travel in spirit in ways that appear mysterious to Westerners but which rely on the human capacity of imagination. They perceive themselves simultaneously in two types of space—one visible, the other virtual—putting them in contact and establishing links with nonhuman beings in their surroundings. Shamans share their experience of spirit travel with their patients, families, or the wider community, allowing them to experience this odyssey through the invisible together.
This work will appeal to anthropologists and to anyone with an interest in learning about the power of imagination from the masters of the invisible, the shamans of the Far North.
Because Gardner’s primary research since 1962 has been with hunter-gatherers, much of his story transpires either in the equatorial jungle of south India or more than one hundred miles beyond the end of the road in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Other ventures transport readers to Japan and back to India, allowing them to savor ancient sights and sounds. Gardner closes the book with a journey of quite another sort, as he takes us into the world of nature, Taoist philosophy, and the experimental treatment of advanced cancer.
Throughout this fast-moving book, Gardner deftly describes the goals and techniques of his research, as well as his growing understanding of the cultures to which he was exposed. Few personal accounts of fieldwork describe enough of the research to give a complete sense of the experience in the way this book does. Anyone with an interest in travel and adventure, including the student of anthropology as well as the general reader, will be totally intrigued by Gardner’s story, one of a daily existence so very different from our own.
Combining biography, poetry, and anthropology, Wilmsen vividly portrays the intense realities of life in the Kalahari and carries the reader across space and time as events in the present trigger emotions and memories. Images of apartheid, for example, evoke memories of Wilmsen's childhood in the segregated South. Poems, journal entries, and moving accounts of deepening personal relationships all intertwine as Wilmsen conveys the experiences he shares with his "subjects" in spite of vast differences in their backgrounds—extreme thirst under the desert sun, grief over the death of a child, and the constant irritation of ubiquitous flies.
"Our understanding of other peoples," he writes, "lies not in themselves or in anything that they do but in our experience of them. Experience that is lived partly in their world and partly in a shell of our world that we wear when we meet them."
Sophisticated, lyrical, and passionately written, Journeys with Flies will inspire all those who travel to places far from home.
Palechor's lively memoir is complemented by Jimeno's reflections on autobiography as an anthropological tool and on the oppressive social and political conditions faced by Colombia's indigenous peoples. A faithful and fluent transcription of Palechor's life story, this work is a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the contemporary indigenous rights movements in Colombia.
As concrete examples, Clark analyzes four court disputes in depth, showing that the concept of local autonomy has very different meanings and implications in each of them. These cases—Boston's defense of resident-preference hiring policies, conflict over urban land-use zoning in Toronto, a Chicago's suburb's fight against a sewage treatment plant, and the evolution of the City of Denver's power since 1900—demonstrate that legal reasoning is not impervious to other kinds of reasoning, and the solutions provided by the courts are not unique. To ground his explorations, Clark investigates both liberalism and structuralism, showing that both are inadequate bases for determining social policy. He mounts provocative critiques of the works of de Tocqueville, Nozick, Tiebout, and Posner on the one hand and Castells and Poulantzas on the other.
This ambitious and important work will command the interest of geographers, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars.
Julian Steward and the Great Basin is a critical assessment of Steward’s work, the factors that influenced him, and his deep effect on American anthropology. Steward (1902–1972) was one of the foremost American exponents of cultural ecology, the idea that societies evolve in adaptation to their human and natural environments. He was also central in shaping basic anthropological constructs such as "hunter-gatherer" and "adaptation." But his fieldwork took place almost entirely in the Great Basin.
In one sense, the phases of Steward’s career epitomize the successive schools of anthropological theory and practice. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his work ranging from early efforts at documenting trait distributions to his later role in the development of social transformation theory, area studies, and applied anthropology.
Julian Steward and the Great Basin also corrects long-standing misperceptions that originated with Steward about lifeways of the Indians living between the Great Plains and California. It charts new directions for research, demanding a more exacting study of environmental conditions, material adaptations, and organizational responses, as well as an appreciation of the ideological and humanistic dimensions of Basin Life.
Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.
Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.
John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.
Like all of Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth—which Harrison sees as more protracted than ever—is a luxury that requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions. “While genius liberates the novelties of the future,” Harrison writes, “wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down.”
A heady, deeply learned excursion, rich with ideas and insights, Juvenescence could only have been written by Robert Pogue Harrison. No reader who has wondered at our culture's obsession with youth should miss it.
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