Why is culture a problem that can never be solved? Charles W. Nuckolls poses this question to his readers, and offers a genuinely synthetic approach to culture that is both cognitive and psychoanalytic. He develops a theory of cultural dialectics based on the concept of paradox, in which he shows how ambivalence and conflicts, and the desire to resolve them, are at the heart of all cultural knowledge systems.
    Nuckolls combines and synthesizes the ideas of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud—major influences in the cognitive and psychoanalytic paradigms—and develops the concept basic to both: the dialectic. He recovers the legacy of Gregory Bateson, who provided the foundation for a theory of paradox in culture. With his integrated theory, Nuckolls explains the conflicts of knowledge and desire in a South Asian knowledge system, in particular the religious mythology and divinatory system of the Jalaris, a Telugu-speaking fishing caste on the southeastern coast of India.
    This provocative book allows us to rethink the relationship between the currently competing discourses in psychological and cultural anthropology, and at the same time offers a general synthetic theory of cultural dynamics.

Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.

Placing Eliot’s diverse and wide-ranging treatment of Otherness in its contemporary context, Alicia Carroll argues that Eliot both engages and resists traditional racial and ethnic representations of Otherness. Carroll finds that Eliot, like other women writers of her time, often appropriates narratives of Otherness to explore issues silenced in mainstream Victorian culture, particularly the problem of the desirous woman. But if Otherness in Eliot’s century was usually gendered as woman and constructed as the object of white male desire, Eliot often seeks to subvert that vision. Professor Carroll demonstrates Eliot’s tendency to “exoticize” images of girlhood, vocation, and maternity in order to critique and explore gendered subjectivities. Indeed, the disruptive presence of a racial or ethnic outsider often fractures Eliot’s narratives of community, creating a powerful critique of home culture.

The consistent reliance of Eliot’s work upon racial and ethnic Otherness as a mode of cultural critique is explored here for the first time in its entirety.

• The diagnosis of "sex addiction"in the 1970s and its social and political implications.

• New developments within the field of sexology, including the "Viagra Revolution" that began in the 1990s.

• The pharmaceutical industry's role in the development of sexual enhancements and the search for the female equivalent of Viagra.

Is a native-born tour guide who has sex with tourists—in exchange for dinner or gifts or cash—merely a prostitute or gigolo? What if the tourist continues to send gifts or money to the tour guide after returning home? As this original and provocative book demonstrates, when it comes to sex—and the effects of capitalism and globalization—nothing is as simple as it might seem.

Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, Amalia Cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly “affective economies”), “sex workers,” and “sexual tourism,” and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are attracted to them.
     Our desire makes us sick. The throes of rivalry are at the heart of our attraction to one another. This is the central thesis of Jean-Michel Oughourlian's The Genesis of Desire, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. The discovery of mirror neurons corroborates his ideas, clarifying the phenomena of empathy and the mechanisms of violent reciprocity.
     How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. There are strategies that can help, which Dr. Oughourlian has prescribed successfully to his patients. This work, alternating between case studies and more theoretical statements, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent.

Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.

Landscape of Desire examines the plight of the western landscape. It discusses a wide range of issues, including mining, grazing, dams, recreation, wilderness, and land management. Since recreation has replaced extraction industries as the primary use of wilderness, especially in southern Utah, Gordon addresses its impactful qualities. He overviews the history of the conflict between preservation and development and places these issues in a cultural context. The text is presented in a narrative format, following the individuals of one field course Gordon lead that explored Muddy Creek and the Dirty Devil River from Interstate 70 to Lake Powell. Though each chapter focuses on the geologic formation the group is traveling through, the plants, animals, ecology, and human impacts are all tightly woven into the narrative. Not only does the land affect the members of the field course, but their attitudes and insights affect the land.

In Landscape of Desire Gordon achieves a vision of wholeness of this popular and contested region of Utah that centers around the implications of being human and also stewards of the wild.

Is the call to spirituality embedded in human biology? Authors Nancy K. Morrison and Sally K. Severino draw on cutting-edge research, including the recent discovery of brain "mirror neurons" and the elucidation of the physiology of social affiliation and attachment, to make a bold case that we are, in fact, biologically wired to seek oneness with the divine. They have termed this innate urge "sacred Desire."

In their new book on the subject, ,em>Sacred Desire: Growing in Compassionate Living, Morrison and Severino, both highly esteemed academic psychiatrists, draw on neurophysiology, relationship studies, research on spiritual development, and psychotherapy to show how spirituality is intimately connected with our physical being. The authors offer several clinical examples of how recognizing sacred Desire can advance a person's healing and they provide an action plan for using Desire to move from fear to love of self, others, and all creation.

In addition to psychiatrists and neurophysiologists, who will undoubtedly welcome this significant contribution to their fields of study, Sacred Desire is sure to appeal as well to the much wider audience of spiritual seekers looking for intellectually and scientifically credible ways to understand spirituality in today's world.

From steamships to steam rooms and sweat lodges to sweatshops, processes of pleasures and desire have shaped the regulation and classification of bodies in a wide variety of colonial settings. On beaches and online, and in boardrooms, temples, and taverns, sexual practices have always influenced imperial power relations. In the many places and relationships where colonialism still affects economics, sex and sexuality remain a driving—if sometimes hidden—force. The contributors to this provocative issue contemplate empire as a global process involving sexualized subjects and objects, with essays that consider the history of sex and (or in) empire across several disciplines. Their topics include a "bewitched" nun in colonial Peru, contemporary call-center workers in the Philippines, and General Douglas MacArthur’s mixed-race Filipina mistress, among many others.

Ben Cowan is assistant professor of world history at George Mason University. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, also published by Duke University Press. Jason Ruiz is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire.

Contributors: Laura Briggs, Keith Camacho, Ben Cowan, Emmanuel David, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Elizabeth Mesok, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Katrina Phillips, Jason Ruiz

Wade Davis has been called "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity." In Shadows in the Sun, he brings all of those gifts to bear on a fascinating examination of indigenous cultures and the interactions between human societies and the natural world.

Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, Shadows in the Sun is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land and seize the human heart. Its essays and stories, though distilled from travels in widely separated parts of the world, are fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.

As Davis explains, "To know that other, vastly different cultures exist is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the jaguar Shaman of Venezuela, teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth." Shadows in the Sun considers those possibilities, and explores their implications for our world.