BiblioVault - Books about Occupations

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Disability, Medicine, and Identity

Wei Yu Wayne Tan

University of Michigan Press, 2022

While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment.

The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

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The Company We Keep

Occupational Community in the High-Tech Network Society

Daniel Marschall

Temple University Press, 2014

At the birth of the Internet Age, computer technologists in small, aggressive software development companies became part of a unique networked occupational community. They were creative, team-oriented, and enthusiastic workers who built "boundaryless careers," hopping from one employer to another.

In his absorbing ethnography The Company We Keep, sociologist Daniel Marschall immerses himself in IntenSivity, one such technological workplace. Chronicling the employees' experiences, Marschall examines how these workers characterize their occupational culture, share values and work practices, and help one another within their community. He sheds light on the nature of this industry marked by highly skilled jobs and rapid technological change.

The experiences at IntenSivity are now mirrored by employees at Facebook and thousands of other cutting-edge, high-tech start-up firms. The Company We Keep helps us understand the emergence of virtual work communities and the character of the contemporary labor market at the level of a small enterprise.

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The Cultural Impact of RuPaul's Drag Race

Why Are We All Gagging?

Edited by Cameron Crookston

Intellect Books, 2022

This edited volume is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and commercial implications of the trailblazing reality television series RuPaul’s Drag Race. Going beyond mere analysis of the show itself, the contributors interrogate the ways RuPaul’s Drag Race has affected queer representation in media, examining its audience, economics, branding, queer politics, and every point in between.

Since its groundbreaking and subversive entry into the reality television complex in 2009, the show has had profound effects on drag and the cultures that surround it. Bringing together scholarship across disciplines—including cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology, marketing, and theater and performance studies—the collection offers rich academic analysis of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and its lasting influence on fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.

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Folklore

In All of Us, In All We Do

Kenneth L. Untiedt

University of North Texas Press, 2006

Medieval Callings

Edited by Jacques Le Goff

University of Chicago Press, 1990

These essays by eleven internationally renowned historians present nuanced profiles of the major social and professional groups—the callings-of the Middle Ages.

The contributors focus on attitudes of medieval men and women toward their own society. Through a variety of techniques, from a reading of the Song of Roland to a reading of administrative records, they identify characteristic viewpoints of members of the fighting class, the clergy, and the peasantry. Along with vivid descriptions of what life was like for warrior knights, monks, high churchmen, criminals, lepers, shepherds, and prostitutes, this innovative approach offers a valuable new perspective on the complex social dynamics of feudal Europe.

"Very useful discussions of texts, both learned and literary."—Christopher Dyer, Times Literary Supplement

Contributors: Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, Franco Cardini, Enrico Castelnuovo, Giovanni Cherubini, Bronislaw Geremek, Aron Ja. Gurevich, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Jacques Le Goff, Giovanni Miccoli, Jacques Rossiaud, and André Vauchez.

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The Occupations of Migrants in Ghana

Polly Hill

University of Michigan Press, 1970

In this study, which is statistically based on the 1960 Ghana population census, author Polly Hill attempts to show that economically motivated migration takes a much greater variety of occupational forms than is conventionally supposed. Hill reports on the occupations, geographical distribution, and urbanization of Ghana’s migrant population, and supplies notes on 34 migratory ethic groups.

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On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination

Everett C. Hughes

University of Chicago Press, 1994

The writings in this volume highlight Hughes's contributions to the sociology of work and professions; race and ethnicity; and the central themes and methods of the discipline. Hughes was the first sociologist to pay sustained attention to occupations as a field for study and wrote frequently and searchingly about them. Several of the essays in this collection helped orient the first generation of Black sociologists, including Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, and Horace Cayton.

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Professionalism, the Third Logic

On the Practice of Knowledge

Eliot Freidson

University of Chicago Press, 2001

This new work explores the meaning and implications of professionalism as a form of social organization. Eliot Freidson formalizes professionalism by treating it as an ideal type grounded in the political economy; he presents the concept as a third logic, or a more viable alternative to consumerism and bureaucracy. He asks us to imagine a world where workers with specialized knowledge and the ability to provide society with especially important services can organize and control their own work, without directives from management or the influence of free markets.

Freidson then appraises the present status of professionalism, exploring how traditional and national variations in state policy and organization are influencing the power and practice of such professions as medicine and law. Widespread attacks by neoclassical economists and populists, he contends, are obscuring the social value of credentialism and monopolies. The institutions that sustain professionalism in our world are simply too useful to both capital and state to dismiss.

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The Romans

Edited by Andrea Giardina

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this book, third in a series which includes Jacques Le Goff's Medieval Characters and Eugenio Garin's Renaissance Portraits, leading scholars search for the character of the ancient Romans through portraits of Rome's most typical personages. Essays on the politician, the soldier, the priest, the farmer, the slave, the merchant, and others together create a fresco of Roman society as it spanned 1300 years.

Synthesizing a wealth of current research, The Romans surveys the most complex society ever to exist prior to the Industrial Age. Searching out the identity of the ancient Roman, the contributors describe an urbane figure at odds with his rustic peers, known for his warlike nature and his love of virtue, his magnanimity to foreigners and his predilection for cutting off his enemies' heads. Most important, perhaps, of the themes explored throughout this volume are those of freedom and slavery, of citizenship and humanitas.

What results from the depictions Roman society through time and across its many constituent cultures is the variety of Roman identity in all its richness and depth. These masterful essays will engage the general reader as well as the specialist in history and culture.

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Trade and Taboo

Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Sarah E. Bond

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Trade and Taboo addresses the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. Tracking the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity, it follows particular groups of professionals—funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers—asking how they coped with stigmatization.

In this book, Sarah E. Bond reveals the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, she shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets.

Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. She expands on anthropological theories of pollution, closely studying individuals who regularly came into contact with corpses and other polluting materials, and considering communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers, or praecones. Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners. The book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman Empire. Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45 BCE and 565 CE.

Trade and Taboo will interest those studying Roman society, issues of historiographical method, and the topic of taboo in preindustrial cultures.

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