BiblioVault - Books about Community

Kikkoman

Company, Clan, and Community

W. Mark Fruin

Harvard University Press, 1983

Kikkoman is the oldest and one of the most profitable among Japan's industrial giants, and its three hundred-year history is a lesson in successful adaptation to the complex, competitive international business arena. Mark Fruin places Kikkoman—producers of the best known and most widely used soy sauce products in the world—in the social and economic context of modern Japan.

The Kikkoman Corporation, the Mogi–Takanishi families that control it, and the city of Noda are three inseparable entities—company, clan, and community. Using a variety of sources along with the voluminous Kikkoman archives, Fruin reveals the institutional, social, and ideological bonds that affected the growth of all three. Kikkoman's metamorphosis from a traditional small family business into a modern corporation introduced new mass-production technologies, new legal and financial forms, new management methods, and the recruitment of a much larger labor force. How Kikkoman grew and prospered not only helps to explain the “miracle” of Japanese recovery after World War II, but also why this small underdeveloped nation became a dynamic industrial power in less than a century.

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Klezmer

Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia

Hankus Netsky

Temple University Press, 2017

Klezmer presents a lively and detailed overview of the folk musical tradition as practiced in Philadelphia's twentieth-century Jewish community. Through interviews, archival research, and recordings, Hankus Netsky constructs an ethnographic portrait of Philadelphia’s Jewish musicians, the environment they worked in, and the repertoire they performed at local Jewish lifestyle and communal celebrations.

Netsky defines what klezmer music is, how it helped define Jewish immigrant culture in Philadelphia, and how its current revival has changed klezmer’s meaning historically. Klezmer also addresses the place of musicians and celebratory music in Jewish society, the nature of klezmer culture, the tensions between sacred and secular in Jewish music, and the development of Philadelphia's distinctive “Russian Sher” medley, a unique and masterfully crafted composition.

Including a significant amount of musical transcriptions, Klezmer chronicles this special musical genre from its heyday in the immigrant era, through the mid-century period of its decline through its revitalization from the 1980s to today.

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Kurdistan on the Global Stage

Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

King, Diane E

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The Region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to the rest of the world.

Focusing on household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages, King explores the ways that residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and viceversa. The idea of patrilineal descent influences the meaning of refuge-seeking and migration as well as how identity and place are understood, how women and men interact, and how “politicking” is conducted.

In the new Kurdistan, old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where modern technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone. Households may have a startling combination of illiterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage.

King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography.

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