front cover of Deaf History and Culture in Spain
Deaf History and Culture in Spain
A Reader of Primary Documents
Benjamin Fraser
Gallaudet University Press, 2009

In this landmark reader, Benjamin Fraser offers in five parts 44 Spanish documents dating from 1417 to the present, translated for the first time to trace the turbulent history of Deaf culture in Spain. Part I: The Birth of Oralism and Deafness as Metaphor illustrates the predominant impression of deafness as isolation, exemplified by Teresa de Cartagena writings in 1455-60 about deafness as an island. Part II: The Return to Deaf Education highlights writers who wished to restore “the Spanish ‘Art’” of educating deaf students. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro wrote The Spanish School of Deafmutes, or Method of Teaching Them to Write and Speak the Spanish Language in 1795. Yet, Madrid’s Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, which opened in 1805, taught deaf students using methodical signs adopted from France’s Abbé de l’Epée.

Readings in Part III :The Contemporary Deaf Experience reveal considerations from the 1970s to the ‘90s of Deaf culture and linguistics similar to those in the United States, typified by the works of Inés Polo and Félix-Jesús Pinedo Peydró. The fourth part, The Recognition of Deaf Language and Culture, marks the expansion of academic research in Spain. María Angeles Rodríguez González spearheaded Spanish Sign Language (LSE) linguistics in 1992 with her publication Sign Language. The final part, A Selection of Deaf Poetry, concludes these documents with verse  in Spanish spoken dialects rather than LSE, indicating that the evolution of the Deaf experience in Spain continues on its own path today.

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Deaf in America
Voices from a Culture
Carol A. Padden and Tom Humphries
Harvard University Press, 1988

Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf" to refer to deaf people who share a natural language—American Sign Language (ASL—and a complex culture, historically created and actively transmitted across generations.

Signed languages have traditionally been considered to be simply sets of gestures rather than natural languages. This mistaken belief, fostered by hearing people’s cultural views, has had tragic consequences for the education of deaf children; generations of children have attended schools in which they were forbidden to use a signed language. For Deaf people, as Padden and Humphries make clear, their signed language is life-giving, and is at the center of a rich cultural heritage.

The tension between Deaf people’s views of themselves and the way the hearing world views them finds its way into their stories, which include tales about their origins and the characteristics they consider necessary for their existence and survival. Deaf in America includes folktales, accounts of old home movies, jokes, reminiscences, and translations of signed poems and modern signed performances. The authors introduce new material that has never before been published and also offer translations that capture as closely as possible the richness of the original material in ASL.

Deaf in America will be of great interest to those interested in culture and language as well as to Deaf people and those who work with deaf children and Deaf people.

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The Deaf Way II Reader
Perspectives from the Second International Conference on Deaf Culture
Harvey Goodstein
Gallaudet University Press, 2006

This extraordinary volume features the very best of the scholarship presented at the Deaf Way II, the second international Deaf gathering in 2002 in Washington, DC. More than 100 contributors from countries as far afield as Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Great Britain, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and Thailand share their research on a broad spectrum of disciplines joined together by the common Deaf experience.

The Deaf Way II Reader addresses every facet of the human condition from a Deaf World perspective in 65 unique studies, including all plenary addresses. Editor Harvey Goostein has organized these articles in 12 parts: Advocacy and Community Development; Economics; Education; Family; Health and Mental Health; History; Language and Culture; Literature; Recreation, Leisure, and Sports; Sign Language and Interpreting; Technology; and Youth. Each treatise examines one aspect of the deaf experience within a particular community or country. Together, they reveal how deaf people throughout the world live, study, work, and play, as well as how they relate to their families and the dominant hearing societies in which most of them reside. The Deaf Way II Reader provides a fascinating compendium of current knowledge that can, in the words of Deaf Way II host I. King Jordan, “help make the world a better place for deaf people.”

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The Deaf Way
Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture
Carol J. Erting
Gallaudet University Press, 1994
The Deaf Way documents the vast scholarly and artistic endeavors that took place in July 1989 when more than 6,000 deaf people from around the world met at Gallaudet University to celebrate Deaf culture. More than 150 articles by world-renowned experts examine every aspect of Deaf life in societies across the globe. This outstanding volume is divided into ten distinct sections: Deaf Culture Around the World, Deaf History, The Study of Sign Language in Society, Diversity in the Deaf Community, Deaf Clubs and Sports, The Deaf Child in the Family, Education, Deaf/Hearing Interaction, Deaf People and the Arts, and Deaf People and Human Rights Issues.
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Defending the American Way of Life
Sport, Culture, and the Cold War
Toby C. Rider
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology.

The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism.

In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
 
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Defining Student Success
The Role of School and Culture
Lisa M. Nunn
Rutgers University Press, 2014
2020 Scholarly Contributions to Teaching and Learning Award from the ASA

The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates?  Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility.

Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education.

With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.
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Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism
The Politics of Trust in Argentina and Mexico
Matthew R. Cleary
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Some theorists claim that democracy cannot work without trust. According to this argument, democracy fails unless citizens trust that their governing institutions are serving their best interests. Similarly, some assert that democracy works best when people trust one another and have confidence that politicians will look after citizen interests. Questioning such claims, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism, by Matthew Cleary and Susan Stokes, suggests that skepticism, not trust, is the hallmark of political culture in well-functioning democracies. Drawing on extensive research in two developing democracies, Argentina and Mexico, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism shows that in regions of each country with healthy democracies, people do not trust one another more than those living in regions where democracy functions less well, nor do they display more personal trust in governments or politicians. Instead, the defining features of the healthiest democracies are skepticism of government and a belief that politicians act in their constituents' best interest only when it is personally advantageous for them to do so. In contrast to scholars who lament what they see as a breakdown in civic life, Cleary and Stokes find that people residing in healthy democracies do not participate more in civic organizations than others, but in fact, tend to retreat from civic life in favor of private pursuits. The authors conclude that governments are most efficient and responsive when they know that institutions such as the press or an independent judiciary will hold them accountable for their actions. The question of how much citizens should trust politicians and governments has consumed political theorists since America's founding. In Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism, Matthew Cleary and Susan Stokes test the relationship between trust and the quality of governance, showing that it is not trust, but vigilance and skepticism that provide the foundation for well-functioning democracies. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
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Demonizing the Queen of Sheba
Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam
Jacob Lassner
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Over the centuries, Jewish and Muslim writers transformed the biblical Queen of Sheba from a clever, politically astute sovereign to a demonic force threatening the boundaries of gender. In this book, Jacob Lassner shows how successive retellings of the biblical story reveal anxieties about gender and illuminate the processes of cultural transmission.

The Bible presents the Queen of Sheba's encounter with King Solomon as a diplomatic mission: the queen comes "to test him with hard questions," all of which he answers to her satisfaction; she then praises him and, after an exchange of gifts, returns to her own land. By the Middle Ages, Lassner demonstrates, the focus of the queen's visit had shifted from international to sexual politics. The queen was now portrayed as acting in open defiance of nature's equilibrium and God's design. In these retellings, the authors humbled the queen and thereby restored the world to its proper condition.

Lassner also examines the Islamization of Jewish themes, using the dramatic accounts of Solomon and his female antagonist as a test case of how Jewish lore penetrated the literary imagination of Muslims. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba thus addresses not only specialists in Jewish and Islamic studies, but also those concerned with issues of cultural transmission and the role of gender in history.
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Desert
Nature and Culture
Roslynn D. Haynes
Reaktion Books, 2013
 Sand. Cacti. Lizards. Mirages. Deserts call to mind exotic places, a sense of adventure and freedom, but also thirst and desolation. In Desert, Roslynn D. Haynes takes a fresh look at this geographical feature and cultural entity as it becomes an increasingly threatened environment.
 
Considering the immense geographical diversity of deserts from the Sahara to Antarctica, Haynes explores the intriguing and often bizarre ways plants and animals adapt to such a hostile environment, as well as the diverse peoples that have inhabited deserts and evolved unique lifestyles and cultures in response to their surroundings. She asks why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the deserts of the Middle East and traces the connections between the minimalism of desert existence and the pursuit of a spiritual dimension. Finally, she describes the allure deserts have exerted on the West, the significance of desolate landscapes in literature and film, and the revolution in artists’ responses to the desert as an empty space and as an inspiration for new visual techniques with which to view it. Ending with a look at how commercial and military interests threaten desert ecologies, Desert casts new light on our view of these seemingly barren places.
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The Devil's Book of Culture
History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico
By Benjamin Feinberg
University of Texas Press, 2003

Since the 1950s, the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, has drawn a strange assortment of visitors and pilgrims—schoolteachers and government workers, North American and European spelunkers exploring the region's vast cave system, and counterculturalists from hippies (John Lennon and other celebrities supposedly among them) to New Age seekers, all chasing a firsthand experience of transcendence and otherness through the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms "in context" with a Mazatec shaman. Over time, this steady incursion of the outside world has significantly influenced the Mazatec sense of identity, giving rise to an ongoing discourse about what it means to be "us" and "them."

In this highly original ethnography, Benjamin Feinberg investigates how different understandings of Mazatec identity and culture emerge through talk that circulates within and among various groups, including Mazatec-speaking businessmen, curers, peasants, intellectuals, anthropologists, bureaucrats, cavers, and mushroom-seeking tourists. Specifically, he traces how these groups express their sense of culture and identity through narratives about three nearby yet strange discursive "worlds"—the "magic world" of psychedelic mushrooms and shamanic practices, the underground world of caves and its associated folklore of supernatural beings and magical wealth, and the world of the past or the past/present relationship. Feinberg's research refutes the notion of a static Mazatec identity now changed by contact with the outside world, showing instead that identity forms at the intersection of multiple transnational discourses.

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Devotional Activism
Public Religion, Innovation and Culture in the Nineteenth-Century
Richard Schaefer
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Modern history has not been neutral in telling the story of religion. Since it presumes the centrality of human motives and machinations as the one and only means of explicating the unfolding of ‘events’, it has helped set the terms for what counts as a viable motive and what does not, and this is evident in the systematic unmasking of religion as only really ever about ‘something else’. By distilling more substantive/primary economic, political or other kinds of motives from the detritus of ‘religion’, the latter is thus consigned to the past as the primitive husk of more substantive and rational ways of thinking and acting. As a set of historical case studies, the essays collected here forgo that tendency, and suggest different possibilities for conceptualizing the fate of religion in the modern world. They chart a different course, one of faith and self-assertion.

The essays take up a variety of episodes from modern European and American history and explore, from various angles, three interrelated themes: 'public religion', and the role of Catholicism as a determined critic of modernity; religion as an impetus for innovation; and the tendency to reduce religion to culture.
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The Dialogic Emergence of Culture
Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim
University of Illinois Press, 1995
 Major figures in contemporary anthropology present a dialogic critique
        of ethnography. Moving beyond sociolinguistics and performance theory,
        and inspired by Bakhtin and by their own field experiences, the contributors
        revise notions of where culture actually resides. This pioneering effort
        integrates a concern for linguistic processes with interpretive approaches
        to culture.
      Culture and ethnography are located in social interaction. The collection
        contains dialogues that trace the entire course of ethnographic interpretation,
        from field research to publication. The authors explore an anthropology
        that actively acknowledges the dialogical nature of its own production.
        Chapters strike a balance between theory and practice and will also be
        of interest in cultural studies, literary criticism, linguistics, and
        philosophy.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Deborah Tannen, John Attinasi, Paul Friedrich, Billie
        Jean Isbell, Allan F. Burns, Jane H. Hill, Ruth Behar, Jean DeBernardi,
        R. P. McDermott, Henry Tylbor, Alton L. Becker, Bruce Mannheim, Dennis
        Tedlock
 
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Diasporic Mediations
Between Home and Location
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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Dictablanda
Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968
Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
In 1910 Mexicans rebelled against an imperfect dictatorship; after 1940 they ended up with what some called the perfect dictatorship. A single party ruled Mexico for over seventy years, holding elections and talking about revolution while overseeing one of the world's most inequitable economies. The contributors to this groundbreaking collection revise earlier interpretations, arguing that state power was not based exclusively on hegemony, corporatism, or violence. Force was real, but it was also exercised by the ruled. It went hand-in-hand with consent, produced by resource regulation, political pragmatism, local autonomies and a popular veto. The result was a dictablanda: a soft authoritarian regime.

This deliberately heterodox volume brings together social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to offer a radical new understanding of the emergence and persistence of the modern Mexican state. It also proposes bold, multidisciplinary approaches to critical problems in contemporary politics. With its blend of contested elections, authoritarianism, and resistance, Mexico foreshadowed the hybrid regimes that have spread across much of the globe. Dictablanda suggests how they may endure.

Contributors
. Roberto Blancarte, Christopher R. Boyer, Guillermo de la Peña, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Paul Gillingham, Rogelio Hernández Rodríguez, Alan Knight, Gladys McCormick, Tanalís Padilla, Wil G. Pansters, Andrew Paxman, Jaime Pensado, Pablo Piccato, Thomas Rath, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Benjamin T. Smith, Michael Snodgrass

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Dilemmas Of American Self
John P. Hewitt
Temple University Press, 1991
Charles Horton Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 1990 "According to Hewitt, the essence of modernity is tension between community and society. This ambitious, sophisticated, and well-written book is a tonic for those who weary of simplistic sermons on the condition of American culture." --Choice This book explores stability and change in American social character and identity, and offers a theory about what it means to be an individual within contemporary American society. Skeptical of the widely-accepted thesis that the self, at least in America, has drastically changed, John P. Hewitt assumes that there is more historical continuity and that the culture is filled with internal contradictions. Combining the insights of social psychology, with those of writers who have offered critiques of the larger society and its influences on the individual, he revises our understanding of the person in American society. Hewitt examines the theories of such authors as David Riesman, Allen Wheelis, Christopher Lasch, Erving Goffman, Carl Rogers, Ralph Turner, and others. He treats their emphasis on the decline of transformation of the self not as social theory to be tested, but as cultural text that reveals some of the main historical and contemporary features and fault lines of American culture. "American culture is best characterized not as relentlessly individualistic or as lacking in the capacity to conceive of or discuss community, but as torn between individualism and communitarianism, thus creating serious felt difficulties of social adjustment and personal meaning." Proposing a symbolic interactionist theory of culture, Hewitt emphasizes inherent polarities of meaning and dilemmas of conduct that shape the experience of self: conformity versus rebellion, staying versus leaving, and dependence versus independence. He constructs a theory of identity that views personal identity and social identity as contending means for securing the continuity and integration of the self, and applies the theory to American society by depicting autonomous, exclusivist, and pragmatic strategies of self-construction. "This theoretically sophisticated work is very ably organized and marked by superior scholarly and expository craftsmanship. It will be hailed, I believe, as an important contribution to symbolic interactionism and the sociology and social psychology of everyday life. Hewitt's treatment of self, identity, conformity, differentiation, community, and modernity is a fine example of creative scholarship." --Charles H. Page, University of Massachusetts (Emeritus) "Hewitt has set himself the ambitious task of providing a symbolic interactionist analysis of culture, society, and self, and has succeeded admirably in the effort. I found his rich description of cultural types to be especially insightful. It is no exaggeration to characterize this book as a landmark work in the development of symbolic interactions." --Morris Rosenberg, University of Maryland-College Park
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Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools
Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge
Cati Coe
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In working to build a sense of nationhood, Ghana has focused on many social engineering projects, the most meaningful and fascinating of which has been the state's effort to create a national culture through its schools. As Cati Coe reveals in Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, this effort has created an unusual paradox: while Ghana encourages its educators to teach about local cultural traditions, those traditions are transformed as they are taught in school classrooms. The state version of culture now taught by educators has become objectified and nationalized—vastly different from local traditions.

Coe identifies the state's limitations in teaching cultural knowledge and discusses how Ghanaians negotiate the tensions raised by the competing visions of modernity that nationalism and Christianity have created. She reveals how cultural curricula affect authority relations in local social organizations—between teachers and students, between Christians and national elite, and between children and elders—and raises several questions about educational processes, state-society relations, the production of knowledge, and the making of Ghana's citizenry.
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Disability Arts and Culture
Methods and Approaches
Edited by Petra Kuppers
Intellect Books, 2019
A practical, accessible introduction to the study of disability art and culture around the world.

What does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? Disability Arts and Culture seeks the answer to this question and more in an exploration of disability studies within the arts and beyond. In this collection, international scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches alongside textual and discourse analysis to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world. Chapters explore deaf theater productions, representations of disability on screen, community engagement projects, disabled bodies in dance, and more, in a comprehensive overview of disability studies that will benefit both practitioner and scholar.
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Discourses of the Vanishing
Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
Marilyn Ivy
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance.

Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
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Discover Romanian
An Introduction to the Language and Culture
RODICA BOTOMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1995
Discover Romanian's thorough treatment of both language and culture makes it an effective learning tool in classroom and individualized settings.

This comprehensive introduction to Romanian for English-speaking students emphasizes communication with a complete treatment of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a focus on the four major language skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Cultural information, an integral part of the textbook, is presented both formally, in sections on culture and civilization, and informally, as the setting for dialogues and exercises. Tables of verb conjugations and a glossary round out the book's primary materials.

Straightforward and accessible, Discover Romanian is an essential textbook for all those teaching and learning the language and provides important information for those seeking to understand Romanian culture.
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Discovering the Dutch
On Culture and Society of the Netherlands
Edited by Emmeline Besamusca and Jaap Verheul
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
What are the most salient and sparking facts about the Netherlands? This updated edition of Discovering the Dutch tackles the heart of the question of Dutch identity through a number of essential themes that span the culture, history and society of the Netherlands. Running the gamut from the Randstad to the Dutch Golden Age, from William of Orange to Anne Frank, this volume uses a series of vignettes written by academic experts in their fields to address historical and contemporary topics such as immigration, tolerance, and the struggle against water, as well as issues of culture - painting, literature, architecture, and design among them. All chapters are written by academic experts in their fields who have extensive experience in explaining the many features of ŸDutchnessŒ to a foreign audience. Each chapter comes to life in vignettes that illustrate characteristic historical figures or essential aspects in Dutch culture and society from William of Orange and Anne Frank to Dutch cheese and the inevitable coffeeshop.
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Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity
Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds.
Duke University Press, 1996
Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology.
This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts.
In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg

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Divergent Modernities
Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Julio Ramos
Duke University Press, 2001
With a Foreword by José David Saldívar

Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English—and now published with new material—Ramos’s study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative inter-American cultural criticism.
With his focus on the nineteenth century, Ramos begins his genealogy of an emerging Latin Americanism with an examination of Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento and Chilean Andrés Bello, representing the “enlightened letrados” of tradition. In contrast to these “lettered men,” he turns to Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who, Ramos suggests, inaugurated a new kind of intellectual subject for the Americas. Though tracing Latin American modernity in general, it is the analysis of Martí—particularly his work in the United States—that becomes the focal point of Ramos’s study. Martí’s confrontation with the unequal modernization of the New World, the dependent status of Latin America, and the contrast between Latin America’s culture of elites and the northern mass culture of commodification are, for Ramos, key elements in understanding the complex Latin American experience of modernity.
Including two new chapters written for this edition, as well as translations of three of Martí’s most important works, Divergent Modernities will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand development and modernity across the Americas.

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Divided Korea
Toward a Culture of Reconciliation
Roland Bleiker
University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In 2002, North Korea precipitated a major international crisis when it revealed the existence of a secret nuclear weapons program and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Earlier in the year, George W. Bush had declared North Korea part of the “axis of evil,” and soon afterward his administration listed the country as a potential target of a preemptive nuclear strike. Pyongyang’s angry reaction ensured the complete deterioration of relations on the Korean peninsula, where only two years before the leaders of North and South Korea had come together in a historic summit meeting.

Few international conflicts are as volatile, protracted, or seemingly insoluble as the one in Korea, where mutual mistrust, hostile Cold War attitudes, and the possibility of a North Korean economic collapse threaten the security of the entire region. For Roland Bleiker, this persistently recurring pattern suggests profound structural problems within and between the two Koreas that have not been acknowledged until now. Expanding the discussion beyond geopolitics and ideology, Bleiker places peninsular tensions in the context of an ongoing struggle over competing forms of Korean identity. Divided Korea examines both domestic and international attitudes toward Korean identity, the legacy of war, and the possibilities for-and anxieties about-unification.

Divided Korea challenges the prevailing logic of confrontation and deterrence, embarking on a fundamental reassessment of both the roots of the conflict and the means to achieve a more stable political environment and, ultimately, peace. In order to realize a lasting solution, Bleiker concludes, the two Koreas and the international community must first show a willingness to accept difference and contemplate forgiveness as part of a broader reconciliation process.


Roland Bleiker is professor of international relations at the University of Queensland. From 1986 to 1988 he served as chief of office for the Swiss delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom.

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A Doctor's Dozen
Twelve Strategies for Personal Health and a Culture of Wellness
Catherine Florio Pipas
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Burnout affects a third of our population and over half of our health professionals. For the second group, the impact is magnified, as consequences play out not only on a personal level, but also on a societal level and lead to medical errors, suboptimal care, low levels of patient satisfaction, and poor clinical outcomes. Achieving wellbeing requires strategies for change. In this book, Dr. Pipas shares twelve lessons and strategies for improved health that she has learned from patients, students, and colleagues over her twenty years working as a family physician. Each lesson is based on observation and research, and begins with a story of an exemplary patient whose challenges and successes reflect the theme of the lesson. Along with the lessons, the author offers plans for action, which taken together create the framework for a healthy life. Each lesson concludes with resources and a “health challenge.”
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Domestic Violence at the Margins
Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture
Sokoloff, Natalie J.
Rutgers University Press, 2005
"This is a thoughtful and scholarly addition to the unfortunately scarce literature on domestic violence and oppression in all its forms."—Jacquelyn C. Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing

"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women

"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of Justice

This groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.

Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.

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The Dread Disease
Cancer and Modern American Culture
James T. Patterson
Harvard University Press, 1987

Cancer is that “loathsome beast, which seized upon the breast, drove its long claws into the surrounding tissues, derived its sustenance by sucking out the juices of its victims, and never even relaxed its hold in death,” a turn-of-the-century physician recorded. Even today cancer affects the popular imagination with dread. In a subtle and penetrating cultural history, James Patterson examines reactions to the disease through a century of American life.

The modern American preoccupation with cancer was apparent during the widely publicized illness and death from that ailment of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885. Awareness of the disease soon figured heavily in the public consciousness, and individual reactions to it continue to reveal broader tensions within American society. Patterson examines responses to cancer by researchers and physicians, quacks and faith healers, by the multitude who have heard sensational media reports of “cures,” as well as by many who have had firsthand experiences with the disease.

Optimistic attitudes of many experts contrast sharply with the skepticism of large segments of the population—often the less wealthy and the less educated—that reject the claims of medical science and resist the advice or, some argue, the paternalistic dictates of the government-supported cancer research establishment.

Expanding expectations of a cure from a confident medical profession; the rise of a government-supported Cancer Establishment managing a large research empire; the emergence of a “cancer counterculture”; a new emphasis on prevention through control of the environment and the self; and the private fears and pessimism of millions of Americans form a telling history of American social patterns. Whether the issue is smoking, pollution, or regular checkups, attitudes toward cancer reflect more general views on medicine, public policy, and illness, as well as on death and dying. This century has witnessed both a biomedical revolution and a vastly increased role of the state in the private lives of citizens; but not everyone has bought the medical package, and many have little faith in government intervention.

Readers interested in the cultural dimensions of science and medicine as well as historians, sociologists, and political scientists will be enlightened and challenged by The Dread Disease.

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Dreaming in Christianity and Islam
Culture, Conflict, and Creativity
Edited and with an Introduction by Kelly Bulkeley, Kate Adams, and Patricia M. Davis
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Throughout history to the present day, religion has ideologically fueled wars, conquests, and persecutions. Christianity and Islam, the world's largest and geopolitically powerful faiths, are often positioned as mortal enemies locked in an apocalyptic "clash of civilizations." Rarely are similarities addressed.

Dreaming in Christianity and Islam, the first book to explore dreaming in these religions through original essays, fills this void. The editors reach a plateau by focusing on how studying dreams reveals new aspects of social and political reality. International scholars document the impact of dreams on sacred texts, mystical experiences, therapeutic practices, and doctrinal controversies.

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Dummy Up And Deal
Inside The Culture Of Casino Dealing
H. Lee Barnes
University of Nevada Press, 2011

The glitter and excitement that tourists associate with casinos is only a facade. To the gaming industry's front-line employees, its dealers, the casino is a far less glamorous environment, a workplace full of emotional tension, physical and mental demands, humor and pathos. Author H. Lee Barnes, who spent many years as a dealer in some of Las Vegas's best-known casinos, shows us this world from the point of view of the table-games dealer. Told in the voices of dozens of dealers, male and female, young and old, Dummy Up and Deal takes us to the dealer's side of the table. We observe the "breaking in" that constitutes a dealer's training, where the hands learn the motions of the game while the mind undergoes the requisite hardening to endure long hours of concentration and the demands of often unreasonable and sometimes abusive players. We discover how dealers are hired and assigned to shifts and tables, how they interact with each other and with their supervisors, and how they deal with players—the winners and the losers, the "Sweethearts" and the "Dragon Lady," the tourists looking for a few thrills and the mobsters showing off their "juice." We observe cheaters on both sides of the table and witness the exploits of such high-rollers as Frank Sinatra and Colonel Parker, Elvis's manager. And we learn about the dealers' lives after-hours, how some juggle casino work with family responsibilities while others embrace the bohemian lifestyle of the Strip and sometimes lose themselves to drugs, drink, or sex. It's a life that invites cynicism and bitterness, that can erode the soul and deaden the spirit. But the dealer's life can also offer moments of humor, encounters with generous and kindly players, moments of pride or humanity or professional solidarity. Barnes writes with the candor of a keen observer of his profession, someone who has seen it all—many times—but has never lost his capacity to wonder, to sympathize, or to laugh. Dummy Up and Deal is a colorful insider's view of the casino industry, a fascinating glimpse behind the glitter into the real world of the casino worker.

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Dust
The Archive and Cultural History
Carolyn Steedman
Rutgers University Press, 2002

In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.

Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences; she calls this practice "archivization." By definition, the archive is the repository of "that which will not go away," and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the "matter of history" can never go away or be erased.

This unique work will be welcomed by all historians who want to think about what it is they do.

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