front cover of Alaska Politics and Public Policy
Alaska Politics and Public Policy
The Dynamics of Beliefs, Institutions, Personalities, and Power
Edited by Clive S. Thomas, with Laura Savatgy and Kristina Klimovich
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Politics in Alaska have changed significantly since the last major book on the subject was published more than twenty years ago, with the rise and fall of Sarah Palin and the rise and fall of oil prices being but two of the many developments to alter the political landscape.

This book, the most comprehensive on the subject to date, focuses on the question of how beliefs, institutions, personalities, and power interact to shape Alaska politics and public policy. Drawing on these interactions, the contributors explain how and why certain issues get dealt with successfully and others unsuccessfully, and why some issues are taken up quickly while others are not addressed at all. This comprehensive guide to the political climate of Alaska will be essential to anyone studying the politics of America’s largest—and in some ways most unusual—state.
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Beliefs and Holy Places
A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta
James S. Griffith
University of Arizona Press, 1992
The region once known as Pimería Alta—now southern Arizona and northern Sonora—has for more than three centuries been a melting pot for the beliefs of native Tohono O'odham and immigrant Yaquis and those of colonizing Spaniards and Mexicans. One need look no further than the roadside crosses along desert highways or the diversity of local celebrations to sense the richness of this cultural commingling.

Folklorist Jim Griffith has lived in the Pimería Alta for more than thirty years, visiting its holy places and attending its fiestas, and has uncovered a background of belief, tradition, and history lying beneath the surface of these cultural expressions. In Beliefs and Holy Places, he reveals some of the supernaturally sanctioned relationships that tie people to places within that region, describing the cultural and religious meanings of locations and showing how bonds between people and places have in turn created relationships between places, a spiritual geography undetectable on physical maps.

Throughout the book, Griffith shows how culture moves from legend to art to belief to practice, all the while serving as a dynamic link between past and future. Now as the desert gives way to newcomers, Griffith's book offers visitors and residents alike a rare opportunity to share in these rich traditions.
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Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America
An Interpretive Guide
Cheryl Claassen
University of Alabama Press, 2015
A comprehensive and essential field reference, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America reveals the spiritual landscape in the American Archaic period

Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America describes, illustrates, and offers nondogmatic interpretations of rituals and beliefs in Archaic America. In compiling a wealth of detailed entries, author Cheryl Claassen has created both an exhaustive reference as well as an opening into new archaeological taxonomies, connections, and understandings of Native American culture.
 
The material is presented in an introductory essay about Archaic rituals followed by two sections of entries that incorporate reports and articles discussing archaeological sites; studies of relevant practices of ritual and belief; data related to geologic features, artifact attributes, and burial settings; ethnographies; and pilgrimages to specific sites. Claassen’s work focuses on the American Archaic period (marked by the end of the Ice Age approximately 11,000 years ago) and a geographic area bounded by the edge of the Great Plains, Newfoundland, and southern Florida. This period and region share specific beliefs and practices such as human sacrifice, dirt mound burial, and oyster shell middens.
 
This interpretive guide serves as a platform for new interpretations and theories on this period. For example, Claassen connects rituals to topographic features and posits the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as a major stimulus to Archaic beliefs. She also expands the interpretation of existing data previously understood in economic or environmental terms to include how this same data may also reveal spiritual and symbolic practices. Similarly, Claassen interprets Archaic culture in terms of human agency and social constraint, bringing ritual acts into focus as drivers of social transformation and ethnogenesis.
 
Richly annotated and cross-referenced for ease of use, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America will benefit scholars and students of archaeology and Native American culture. Claassen’s overview of the archaeological record should encourage the development of original archaeological and historical connections and patterns. Such an approach, Claassen suggests, may reveal patterns of influence extending from early eastern Americans to the Aztec and Maya.
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front cover of Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages
Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages
A Cross-Cultural Survey
Mac Marshall, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1979
Essays on the use of alcoholic beverages within diverse societies and cultures
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Human Values and Beliefs
A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook
Ronald Inglehart, Miguel Basanez, and Alejandro Moreno
University of Michigan Press, 1998
For over twenty-five years Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues have been collecting survey data on the beliefs and opinions of people all over the world on a variety of topics. This work led Inglehart to expound his noted theory about the development of post-materialist values in developed countries and explore its effect on politics. This book, based on the most comprehensive of these surveys, the World Values Survey conducted in over forty countries from 1990-93, publishes for the first time all of the findings of this survey. The questions cover issues such as politics, economics, religion, family life, and gender roles, and reflect differences in response by age, gender, economic standing, and education.
This book provides a wealth of data that will appeal to social scientists, journalists, people in international business, and policy makers interested in understanding social, political, or cultural attitudes in different countries.
Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, and coauthor of Value Change in Global Perspective, as well as many other books and articles. Miguel Basanez is Professor of Political Science, Institutio Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, and director of MORI de Mexico. Alejandro Moreno is Professor of Political Science, Institutio Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico.
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Native American Language Ideologies
Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country
Edited by Paul V. Kroskrity and Margaret C. Field
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across Native American cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities--from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala--to show their role in sociocultural transformation.

These studies take up such active issues as "insiderness" in Cherokee language ideologies, contradictions of space-time for the Northern Arapaho, language socialization and Paiute identity, and orthography choices and language renewal among the Kiowa. The authors--including members of indigenous speech communities who participate in language renewal efforts--discuss not only Native Americans' conscious language ideologies but also the often-revealing relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use as embedded in community practice.

The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in Native American speech communities. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities--notably the emergent ideological process of iconization between a language and various national, ethnic, and tribal identities.

As fewer Native Americans continue to speak their own language, this timely volume provides valuable grounded studies of language ideologies in action--those indigenous to Native communities as well as those imposed by outside institutions or language researchers. It considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's Indian Country as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.
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Red Man's Religion
Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico
Ruth Murray Underhill
University of Chicago Press, 1972
Among the topics considered in this classic study are world origins and supernatural powers, attitudes toward the dead, the medicine man and shaman, hunting and gathering rituals, war and planting ceremonies, and newer religions, such as the Ghost Dance and the Peyote Religion.

"The distinctive contribution of [Red Man's Religion] is the treatment of topics, the insight and the perspective of the author, and her ability to transmit these to the reader. . . . Trais and aspects of religion are not treated as abstract entitites, to be enumerated and summated, assigned a geographic distribution, and then abandoned. No page is a dry recital; each is an illumination. Insight and wisdom are framed in poetic prose. An offering of information in such a medium merits gratitude."—American Anthropologist
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front cover of Regulating Menstruation
Regulating Menstruation
Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations
Edited by Etienne van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Menstruation, seen alternately as something negative—a "curse" or a failed conception—or as a positive part of the reproductive process to be celebrated as evidence of fertility, has long been a universal concern. How women interpret and react to menstruation and its absence reflects their individual needs both historically as well as in the contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political context in which they live. This unique volume considers what is known of women's options and practices used to regulate menstruation—practices used to control the periodicity, quantity, color, and even consistency of menses—in different places and times, while revealing the ambiguity that those practices present.

Originating from an Internet conference held in February 1998, this volume contains fourteen papers that have been revised and updated to cover everything from the impact of the birth control pill to contemporary views on reproduction to the pharmacological properties of various herbal substances, reflecting the historical, contemporary, and anthropological perspectives of this timely and complex issue.

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The Spiritual Churches Of New Orleans
Origins, Beliefs, And Rituals Of An African American
Claude F. Jacobs
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
The New Orleans Spiritual churches constitute a distinctive African-American belief system.  Influenced by Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Spiritualism, and Voodoo, the group is a New World syncretic faith, similar to Espiritismo, Santería, and Umbanda. The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans combines a historical account of the emergence of this religion with careful ethnographic description of current congregations.  At the same time, text and photographs eloquently convey the ecstasy at the heart of the Spiritual experience.

The Spiritual churches began in the 1920s as a women's movement.  Men later assumed leadership in an effort to legitimate the group within the New Orleans religious community and form associations with Spiritual churches elsewhere in the United States.

Unlike earlier researchers, who treated practices in the churches as expressions of black folk traditions, the authors see Spiritual ritual not as based on magic, but as the way the sacred is acted out within an African-American aesthetic.  During worship, members may be filled by the Holy Spirit, as in Pentecostal churches, or "entertain" spirits or spirit guides, as in Spiritualism or Voodoo.  Prophecy and healing are presented as the markers of this faith, and the Native American figure Black Hawk as a major symbol of empowerment.

Based on extensive interviews with church members, years of participant observation, and careful research in documentary sources, this book achieves rigorous conceptual clarity in a straightforward, engaging style.

The Authors: Claude F. Jacobs holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Tulane University.  He teaches at Oakland University.

Andrew J. Kaslow holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.  He is a consultant to international organizations.
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Who Is Antiracist?
Beliefs, Motivations, and Politics
George Yancey and Hayoung Oh
Temple University Press, 2025


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