BiblioVault - Books about Culture

The Habsburgs

Dynasty, Culture and Politics

Paula Sutter Fichtner

Reaktion Books, 2014

The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 not only sparked the beginning of World War I—it also initiated the beginning of the end of the six-hundred-year-old Habsburg dynasty, which fell apart when the war ended, changing Europe forever. But how did the Habsburgs come to play such a decisive role in the fate of the continent? Paula Sutter Fichtner seeks to answer this question in this comprehensive account of the longest-lived European empire.

Tracing the origins of the house of Habsburg to the tenth century, Fichtner identifies the principal characters in the story and explores how they were able to hold together such a culturally diverse and multiethnic state for so many centuries. She takes account of the intertwining of culture, politics, and society, revealing the strategies that enabled the dynasty’s extraordinarily long life: its dazzling mix of cultural propaganda, public performances, and cunning political maneuvering. She points out the irony that one of the crowd-pleasing performances that had enabled the Habsburg success—visiting beds of the injured—led to Ferdinand’s death and the empire’s downfall. Breathing fresh life into the history of the Habsburg reign, this accessible and authoritative history charts one of the pivotal foundation stories of modern Europe.

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Hair Raising

Beauty, Culture, and African American Women

Rooks, Noliwe M

Rutgers University Press, 1996

We all know there is a politics of skin color, but is there a politics of hair?In this book, Noliwe Rooks explores the history and politics of hair and beauty culture in African American communities from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. She discusses the ways in which African American women have located themselves in their own families, communities, and national culture through beauty advertisements, treatments, and styles. Bringing the story into today's beauty shop, listening to other women talk about braids, Afros, straighteners, and what they mean today to grandmothers, mothers, sisters, friends, and boyfriends, she also talks about her own family and has fun along the way. Hair Raising is that rare sort of book that manages both to entertain and to illuminate its subject.

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Healing Logics

Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems

Erika Brady

Utah State University Press, 2001

Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine—such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues—than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine," "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systmes from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. Healing Logics explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact—in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.

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Healing the Land and the Nation

Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947

Sandra M. Sufian

University of Chicago Press, 2007

A novel inquiry into the sociopolitical dimensions of public medicine, Healing the Land and the Nation traces the relationships between disease, hygiene, politics, geography, and nationalism in British Mandatory Palestine between the world wars. Taking up the case of malaria control in Jewish-held lands, Sandra Sufian illustrates how efforts to thwart the disease were intimately tied to the project of Zionist nation-building, especially the movement’s efforts to repurpose and improve its lands. The project of eradicating malaria also took on a metaphorical dimension—erasing anti-Semitic stereotypes of the “parasitic” Diaspora Jew and creating strong, healthy Jews in Palestine. Sufian shows that, in reclaiming the land and the health of its people in Palestine, Zionists expressed key ideological and political elements of their nation-building project.

Taking its title from a Jewish public health mantra, Healing the Land and the Nation situates antimalarial medicine and politics within larger colonial histories. By analyzing the science alongside the politics of Jewish settlement, Sufian addresses contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population in a decidedly innovative way. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the Middle East, Jewish studies, and environmental history, as well as to those studying colonialism, nationalism, and public health and medicine.

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Health, Culture, and Community

Benjamin D. Paul

Russell Sage Foundation, 1955

This casebook documents public reactions to health programs and health situations in sixteen widely differing communities of the world. Some of the studies record successes, others failures. Of interest to anyone concerned with preventive medicine, public health, community betterment, or cultural problems involving peoples of different backgrounds and beliefs.

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Heartless Immensity

Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America

Anne Baker

University of Michigan Press, 2010

As the size of the United States more than doubled during the first half of the nineteenth century, a powerful current of anxiety ran alongside the well-documented optimism about national expansion. Heartless Immensity tells the story of how Americans made sense of their country’s constantly fluctuating borders and its annexation of vast new territories. Anne Baker looks at a variety of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, schoolbooks, as well as visual and literary works of art. These cultural artifacts suggest that the country’s anxiety was fueled primarily by two concerns: fears about the size of the nation as a threat to democracy, and about the incorporation of nonwhite, non-Protestant regions. These fears had a consistent and influential presence until after the Civil War, functioning as vital catalysts for the explosion of literary creativity known as the “American Renaissance,” including the work of Melville, Thoreau, and Fuller, among others.

Building on extensive archival research as well as insights from cultural geographers and theorists of nationhood, Heartless Immensity demonstrates that national expansion had a far more complicated, multifaceted impact on antebellum American culture than has previously been recognized. Baker shows that Americans developed a variety of linguistic strategies for imagining the form of the United States and its position in relation to other geopolitical entities. Comparisons
to European empires, biblical allusions, body politic metaphors, and metaphors derived from science all reflected—and often attempted to assuage—fears that the nation was becoming either monstrously large or else misshapen in ways that threatened cherished beliefs and national self-images.

Heartless Immensity argues that, in order to understand the nation’s shift from republic to empire and to understand American culture in a global context, it is first necessary to pay close attention to the processes by which the physical entity known as the United States came into being. This impressively thorough study will make a valuable contribution to the fields of American studies and literary studies.

Anne Baker is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

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Hegemony and Culture

Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba

David D. Laitin

University of Chicago Press, 1986

In this ambitious work, David D. Laitin explores the politics of religious change among the Yoruba of Nigeria, then uses his findings to expand leading theories of ethnic and religious politics.

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Hellenicity

Between Ethnicity and Culture

Jonathan M. Hall

University of Chicago Press, 2002

In today's cosmopolitan world, ethnic and national identity has assumed an ever-increasing importance. But how is this identity formed, and how does it change over time?

With Hellenicity, Jonathan M. Hall explores these questions in the context of ancient Greece, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence to determine when, how, why, and to what extent the Greeks conceived themselves as a single people. Hall argues that a subjective sense of Hellenic identity emerged in Greece much later than is normally assumed. For instance, he shows that the four main ethnic subcategories of the ancient Greeks—Akhaians, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians—were not primordial survivals from a premigratory period, but emerged in precise historical circumstances during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Furthermore, Hall demonstrates that the terms of defining Hellenic identity shifted from ethnic to broader cultural criteria during the course of the fifth century B.C., chiefly due to the influence of Athens, whose citizens formulated a new Athenoconcentric conception of "Greekness."

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Heritage or Heresy

Archaeology and Culture on the Maya Riviera

Cameron Jean Walker

University of Alabama Press, 2008

How can we effectively interpret and present one culture to another without stereotypes or over-simplifications? What is the best way to present an authoritative version of a national heritage without also endangering ancient sites or being insensitive to the local customs, beliefs, and religious practices of the indigenous peoples?

This volume addresses the ongoing thrust in archaeology to take the next step after preserving the past: interpreting that past for the future. That future audience includes both local citizens and tourists who may have little background in archaeology, anthropology, or the history of the culture featured. Walker presents the key components of the anthropological study of tourism as a global phenomenon, with particular emphasis on the more prominent arguments for how and why tourism is a universal and meaningful human activity. The highly controversial topic of authenticity is examined, with special attention given to how "authentic" has been defined and how it relates to the ways in which archaeological sites, artifacts, and cultural traditions are presented--or not presented--to the visiting public. The ephemeral promise of “authenticity” drives the heritage tourism industry, which is a key consideration for the long term economy of the Maya Riviera and elsewhere. Through analysis of seven archaeological sites on the Yucatan peninsula that are open to heritage touring, Walker reveals the planned growth of the Maya Riviera since the early 1970s and examines the impact of international tourism on both ancient structures and the contemporary Maya people and culture.

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Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature

The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness

Donald E. Brown

University of Arizona Press, 1988

"Here is a book that I can strongly recommend for a variety of reasons. It is well written, it is scholarly, but its greatest appeal lies in the posing of an important question and in the offering of a satisfying (to this reviewer, at least) answer."—Journal of Historical Geography

"This is an intriguing and stimulating study of historical differences in the indigenous historiography of parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe."—American Anthropologist.

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Hispanic Nation

Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity

Geoffrey Fox

University of Arizona Press, 1997

A new ethnic identity is being constructed in the United States: the Hispanic nation. Overcoming age-old racial, regional, and political differences, Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Spanish-language origins are beginning to imagine themselves as a single ethnic community-which by the turn of the century may become the United States' largest and most influential minority.

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History Within

The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules

Marianne Sommer

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Personal genomics services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com now offer what once was science fiction: the ability to sequence and analyze an individual’s entire genetic code—promising, in some cases, facts about that individual’s ancestry that may have remained otherwise lost. Such services draw on and contribute to the science of human population genetics that attempts to reconstruct the history of humankind, including the origin and movement of specific populations. Is it true, though, that who we are and where we come from is written into the sequence of our genomes? Are genes better documents for determining our histories and identities than fossils or other historical sources?

Our interpretation of gene sequences, like our interpretation of other historical evidence, inevitably tells a story laden with political and moral values. Focusing on the work of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Sorell Huxley, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, and human population genetics, History Within asks how the sciences of human origins, whether through the museum, the zoo, or the genetics lab, have shaped our idea of what it means to be human. How have these biologically based histories influenced our ideas about nature, society, and culture? As Marianne Sommer shows, the stories we tell about bones, organisms, and molecules often change the world.

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The Holocaust as Culture

Imre Kertész

Seagull Books, 2011

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.

In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self.

The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

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Homesickness

Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China

Carlos Rojas

Harvard University Press, 2015

The collapse of China’s Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution.

Rojas focuses on a condition he calls “homesickness”—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the “home,” conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.

Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.

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Hong Kong Art

Culture and Decolonization

David Clarke

Duke University Press, 2002

Hong Kong Art is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary art from Hong Kong presented within the changing social and political context of the territory’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. Tracing a distinctive and increasingly vibrant art scene from the late 1960s through the present, David Clarke discusses a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations, as well as other kinds of visual production such as architecture, fashion, graphic design, and graffiti.
Clarke shows how a sense of local identity emerged in Hong Kong as the transition approached and found expression in the often politicized art produced. Given the recent international exposure of mainland Chinese contemporary art, this book considers the uniqueness of the art of China’s most cosmopolitan city. With a modern visual culture that was flourishing even when the People’s Republic was still closed to the outside world, Hong Kong has established itself as an exemplary site for both local and transnational elements to formulate into brilliant and groundbreaking art.
The author writes about individual artists and art works with a detail that will appeal to artists, curators, and art historians, as well as to postcolonial scholars, cultural studies scholars, and others.

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Hong Kong

Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

Ackbar Abbas

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

How the Workers Became Muslims

Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe

Ferruh Yilmaz

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Writing in the beginning of the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe explored possibilities for a new socialist strategy to capitalize on the period’s fragmented political and social conditions. Two and a half decades later, Ferruh Yilmaz acknowledges that the populist Far Right—not the socialist movement—has demonstrated greater facility in adopting successful hegemonic strategies along new structural lines Laclau and Mouffe imagined. Right-wing hegemonic strategy, Yilmaz argues, has led to the reconfiguration of internal fault lines in European societies.

Yilmaz’s primary case study is Danish immigration discourse, but his argument contextualizes his study in terms of questions of current concern across Europe, where right-wing groups that were long on the fringes of “legitimate” politics have managed to make significant gains with populations traditionally aligned with the Left. Specifically, Yilmaz argues that sociopolitical space has been transformed in the last three decades such that group classification has been destabilized to emphasize cultural rather than economic attributes.

According to this point-of-view, traditional European social and political splits are jettisoned for new “cultural” alliances pulling the political spectrum to the right, against the “corrosive” presence of Muslim immigrants, whose own social and political variety is flattened into an illusion of alien sameness.

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How to Have Theory in an Epidemic

Cultural Chronicles of AIDS

Paula A. Treichler

Duke University Press, 1999

Paula A. Treichler has become a singularly important voice among the significant theorists on the AIDS crisis. Dissecting the cultural politics surrounding representations of HIV and AIDS, her work has altered the field of cultural studies by establishing medicine as a legitimate focus for cultural analysis. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic is a comprehensive collection of Treichler’s related writings, including revised and updated essays from the 1980s and 1990s that present a sustained argument about the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely knowledgeable and interdisciplinary standpoint.
“AIDS is more than an epidemic disease,” Treichler writes, “it is an epidemic of meanings.” Exploring how such meanings originate, proliferate, and take hold, her essays investigate how certain interpretations of the epidemic dominate while others are obscured. They also suggest ways to understand and choose between overlapping or competing discourses. In her coverage of roughly fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic, Treichler addresses a range of key issues, from biomedical discourse and theories of pathogenesis to the mainstream media’s depictions of the crisis in both developed and developing countries. She also examines representations of women and AIDS, treatment issues, and the role of activism in shaping the politics of the epidemic. Linking the AIDS tragedy to a uniquely broad spectrum of contemporary theory and culture, this collection concludes with an essay on the continued importance of theoretical thought for untangling the sociocultural phenomena of AIDS—and for tackling the disease itself.
With an exhaustive bibliography of critical and theoretical writings on HIV and AIDS, this long-awaited volume will be essential to all those invested in studying the course of AIDS, its devastating medical effects, and its massive impact on contemporary culture. It should become a standard text in university courses dealing with AIDS in biomedicine, sociology, anthropology, gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and cultural and media studies.

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How Welfare States Care

Culture, Gender and Parenting in Europe

Monique Kremer

Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Though women’s employment patterns in Europe have been changing drastically over several decades, the repercussions of this social revolution are just beginning to garner serious attention. Many scholars have presumed that diversity and change in women’s employment is based on the structures of welfare states and women’s responses to economic incentives and disincentives to join the workforce; How Welfare States Care provides in-depth analysis of women’s employment and childcare patterns, taxation, social security, and maternity leave provisions in order to show this logic does not hold. Combining economic, sociological, and psychological insights, Kremer demonstrates that care is embedded in welfare states and that European women are motivated by culturally and morally-shaped ideals of care that are embedded in welfare states—and less by economic reality.

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The Human Career

Human Biological and Cultural Origins, Third Edition

Richard G. Klein

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Since its publication in 1989, The Human Career has proved to be an indispensable tool in teaching human origins. This substantially revised third edition retains Richard G. Klein’s innovative approach while showing how cumulative discoveries and analyses over the past ten years have significantly refined our knowledge of human evolution.

Klein chronicles the evolution of people from the earliest primates through the emergence of fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge, including, for example, ever more abundant evidence that fully modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there, replacing the Neanderthals in Europe and equally archaic people in Asia. With its coverage of both the fossil record and the archaeological record over the 2.5 million years for which both are available, The Human Career demonstrates that human morphology and behavior evolved together. Throughout the book, Klein presents evidence for alternative points of view, but does not hesitate to make his own position clear.

In addition to outlining the broad pattern of human evolution, The Human Career details the kinds of data that support it. For the third edition, Klein has added numerous tables and a fresh citation system designed to enhance readability, especially for students. He has also included more than fifty new illustrations to help lay readers grasp the fossils, artifacts, and other discoveries on which specialists rely. With abundant references and hundreds of images, charts, and diagrams, this new edition is unparalleled in its usefulness for teaching human evolution.

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Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration

Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture

Edited by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams

Island Press, 2011

When it comes to implementing successful ecological restoration projects, the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions are often as important as-and sometimes more important than-technical or biophysical knowledge.

Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration takes an interdisciplinary look at the myriad human aspects of ecological restoration. In twenty-six chapters written by experts from around the world, it provides practical and theoretical information, analysis, models, and guidelines for optimizing human involvement in restoration projects. Six categories of social activities are examined:

collaboration between land manager and stakeholders
ecological economics
volunteerism and community-based restoration
environmental education
ecocultural and artistic practices
policy and politics

For each category, the book offers an introductory theoretical chapter followed by multiple case studies, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the category and provides a perspective from within a unique social/political/cultural setting.

Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration delves into the often-neglected aspects of ecological restoration that ultimately make the difference between projects that are successfully executed and maintained with the support of informed, engaged citizens, and those that are unable to advance past the conceptual stage due to misunderstandings or apathy. The lessons contained will be valuable to restoration veterans and greenhorns alike, scholars and students in a range of fields, and individuals who care about restoring their local lands and waters.

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Human Rights, Culture and Context

Anthropological Perspectives

Richard A. Wilson

Pluto Press, 1998

Human-Built World

How to Think about Technology and Culture

Thomas P. Hughes

University of Chicago Press, 2004

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential.

Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life.

Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

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Humanism of the Other

Emmanuel Levinas

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Hybrid Constitutions

Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America

Vicki Hsueh

Duke University Press, 2010

In Hybrid Constitutions, Vicki Hsueh contests the idea that early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse constitutional thought and practice were at the time, and how colonial ambitions were advanced through cruelty toward indigenous peoples as well as accommodation of them. Proprietary colonies were governed by individuals (or small groups of individuals) granted colonial charters by the Crown. These proprietors had quasi-sovereign status over their colonies; they were able to draw on and transform English legal and political instruments as they developed constitutions. Hsueh demonstrates that the proprietors cobbled together constitutions based on the terms of their charters and the needs of their settlements. The “hybrid constitutions” they created were often altered based on interactions among the English settlers, other European settlers, and indigenous peoples.

Hsueh traces the historical development and theoretical implications of proprietary constitutionalism by examining the founding of the colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. She provides close readings of colonial proclamations, executive orders, and assembly statutes, as well as the charter granting Cecilius Calvert the colony of Maryland in 1632; the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, adopted in 1669; and the treaties brokered by William Penn and various Lenni Lenape and Susquehannock tribes during the 1680s and 1690s. These founding documents were shaped by ambition, contingency, and limited resources; they reflected an ambiguous and unwieldy colonialism rather than a purposeful, uniform march to modernity. Hsueh concludes by reflecting on hybridity as a rubric for analyzing the historical origins of colonialism and reconsidering contemporary indigenous claims in former settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

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Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China

The Uncanny New Village

Lili Lai

Amsterdam University Press, 2017

This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.

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