A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1949 have author last names that start with B have author last names that start with B
Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.
In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.
Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.
Contributors:
Richard B. Allen
David Arnold
A. L. Beier
Andrew Burton
Vincent DiGirolamo
Andrew A. Gentes
Robert Gordon
Frank Tobias Higbie
Thomas H. Holloway
Abby Margolis
Paul Ocobock
Aminda M. Smith
Linda Woodbridge
How are images made, and how should we understand their limits, capacities, and forces in digital media?
While functioning as representations or mediations of the political, images also act through the technologies and social processes that they claim only to represent. In both capacities, images can be innovative, but they can also reproduce harmful phenomena such as racism, misogyny, and conspiracy. Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.
This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity?
The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological.
Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.
Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary, and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk history and grass-roots social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century, an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a “history from below” that gives serious attention to the perspectives of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered, and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the French offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and modern Irish history.
Winner, Wayland Hand Competition for outstanding publication in folklore and history, American Folklore Society
Finalist, award for the best book published about or growing out of public history, National Council on Public History
Winner, Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize for the best study of folklore or folk life in Great Britain and Ireland
“An important and beautifully produced work. Guy Beiner here shows himself to be a historian of unusual talent.”—Marianne Elliott, Times Literary Supplement
“Thoroughly researched and scholarly. . . . Beiner’s work is full of empathy and sympathy for the human remains, memorials, and commemorations of past lives and the multiple ways in which they actually continue to live.”—Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Journal of British Studies
“A major contribution to Irish historiography.”—Maureen Murphy, Irish Literary Supplement
"A remarkable piece of scholarship . . . . Accessible, full of intriguing detail, and eminently teachable.”?—Ray Casman, New Hibernia Review
“The most important monograph on Irish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be published in recent years.”—Matthew Kelly, English Historical Review
“A strikingly ambitious work . . . . Elegantly constructed, lucidly written and inspired, and displaying an inexhaustible capacity for research”—Ciarán Brady, History IRELAND
“A closely argued, meticulously detailed and rich analysis . . . . providing such innovative treatment of a wide array of sources, his work will resonate with the concerns of many cultural and historical geographers working on social memory in quite different geographical settings and historical contexts.”—Yvonne Whelan, Journal of Historical Geography
Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings. This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are eminently subject to archaeological investigation.
A few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.
Using San Francisco as an illuminating case study, Beitel analyzes the innovative ways urban social movements have organized around issues regarding land use, housing, urban ecology, and health care on the local level to understand the changing nature of protest formation around the world.
Reconciling the passing of New Left Ideals and the emergence of mobilization on a global scale, he assesses the limits of contemporary urban movements as conduits for advancing a radical political program. Beitel argues these limits reflect recurrent problems of internal fragmentation, and the manner in which liberal democratic institutions structure processes of political participation and interest representation.
How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history
The concept of the “harlequin” refers to the practice of reassembling dinner scraps cleared from the plates of the wealthy to sell, replated, to the poor in nineteenth-century Paris. In The Harlequin Eaters, Janet Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier, similarly patchworked Commedia dell’arte Harlequin character and can be used to rethink the entangled place of class, race, and food in the longer history of modernism.
By superimposing figurations of the edible harlequin taken from a broad array of popular and canonical novels, newspaper articles, postcard photographs, and lithographs, Beizer shows that what is at stake in nineteenth-century discourses surrounding this mixed meal are representations not only of food but also of the marginalized people—the “harlequin eaters”—who consume it at this time when a global society is emerging. She reveals the imbrication of kitchen narratives and intellectual–aesthetic practices of thought and art, presenting a way to integrate socioeconomic history with the history of literature and the visual arts. The Harlequin Eaters also offers fascinating background to today’s problems of food inequity as it unpacks stories of the for-profit recycling of excess food across class and race divisions.
During the past decade, racial/ethnic minority women have made significant strides in U.S. politics, comprising large portions of their respective minority delegations both in Congress and in state legislatures. This trend has been particularly evident in the growing political presence of Latinas, yet scholars have offered no clear explanations for this electoral phenomenon—until now.
In The Latina Advantage, Christina E. Bejarano draws on national public opinion datasets and a close examination of state legislative candidates in Texas and California to demonstrate the new power of the political intersection between race and gender. Underscoring the fact that racial/ethnic minority women form a greater share of minority representatives than do white women among white elected officials, Bejarano provides empirical evidence to substantiate previous theoretical predictions of the strategic advantage in the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in Latinas. Her evidence indicates that two factors provide the basis for the advantage: increasingly qualified candidates and the softening of perceived racial threat, leading minority female candidates to encounter fewer disadvantages than their male counterparts.
Overturning the findings of classic literature that reinforce stereotypes and describe minority female political candidates as being at a compounded electoral disadvantage, Bejarano brings a crucial new perspective to dialogues about the rapidly shifting face of America’s electorate.
For Latina/o adolescents who already find life challenging, the borderland is a place that presents continual affirmations of and contradictions about identity—questions of who is more Mexican than American or vice versa. This book analyzes the construction of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o identities through a four-year ethnographic study in a representative American high school. It reveals how identity politics impacts young people’s forms of communication and the cultural spaces they occupy in the school setting. By showing how identities are created and directly influenced by the complexities of geopolitics and sociocultural influences, it stresses the largely unexplored divisions among youths whose identities are located along a wide continuum of “Mexicanness.”
Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with both Mexicana/o and Chicana/o students, Cynthia Bejarano explores such topics as the creation of distinct styles that reinforce differences between the two groups; the use of language to further distinguish themselves from one another; and social stratification perpetuated by internal colonialism and the “Othering” process. These and other issues are shown to complicate how Latinas/os ethnically identify as Mexicanas/os or Chicanas/os and help explain how they get to this point.
In contrast to research that views identity as a reflection of immigration or educational experiences, this study embraces border theory to frame the complex and conflicted relations of adolescents as a result of their identity-making processes. This intimate glimpse into their lives provides valuable information about the diversity among youths and their constant efforts to create, define, and shape their identities according to cultural and social structures.
Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice. Also central to this collection are questions on how migration and detention restructure forms of mothering. Overall, this collection encapsulates how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.
Contributors
Elva M. Arredondo
Cynthia Bejarano
Bertha A. Bermúdez Tapia
Margaret Brown Vega
Macrina Cárdenas Montaño
Claudia Yolanda Casillas
Luz Estela (Lucha) Castro
Marisa Elena Duarte
Taide Elena
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla
Paula Flores Bonilla
Judith Flores Carmona
Sandra Gutiérrez
Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez
Irene Lara
Leticia López Manzano
Mariana Martinez
Maria Cristina Morales
Paola Isabel Nava Gonzales
Olga Odgers-Ortiz
Priscilla Pérez
Silvia Quintanilla Moreno
Cirila Quintero Ramírez
Felicia Rangel-Samponaro
Coda Rayo-Garza
Shamma Rayo-Gutierrez
Marisol Rodríguez Sosa
Brenda Rubio
Ariana Saludares
Victoria M. Telles
Michelle Téllez
Marisa S. Torres
Edith Treviño Espinosa
Mariela Vásquez Tobon
Hilda Villegas
Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a gradual evolution—from the 1960s, when writers mindful of its communal significance carefully “wrote around” the physical operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak out against the practice and their societies’ gender politics, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights.
China’s long history is one of the richest and most complex in the known world, and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China offers visitors a wonderful, comprehensive survey of it through some 350 artifacts on display, spanning from the Paleolithic period to present day. Now, with China: Visions through the Ages, anyone can experience the marvels of this exhibition through the book’s beautifully designed and detailed pages. Readers will gain deeper insight into The Field Museum’s important East Asian collections, the exhibition development process, and research on key aspects of China’s fascinating history. This companion book, edited by the exhibition’s own curatorial team, takes readers even deeper into the wonders of the Cyrus Tang Hall of China and enables them to study more closely the objects and themes featured in the show. Mirroring the exhibition’s layout of five galleries, the volume is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; the second, the Bronze Age, the first dynasties, and early writing; the third, the imperial system and power; the fourth, religion and performance; and the fifth, interregional trade and the Silk Routes. Each section also includes highlights containing brief stories on objects or themes in the hall, such as the famous Lanting Xu rubbing.
With chapters from a diverse set of international authors providing greater context and historical background, China: Visions through the Ages is a richly illustrated volume that allows visitors, curious readers, and China scholars alike a chance to have an enduring exchange with the objects featured in the exhibition and with their multifaceted histories.
In Contesting Leviathan, anthropologist Les Beldo describes the complex judicial and political climate for whale conservation in the United States, and the limits of the current framework in which whales are treated as “large fish” managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Emphasizing the moral dimension of the conflict between the Makah, the US government, and antiwhaling activists, Beldo brings to light the lived ethics of human-animal interaction, as well as how different groups claim to speak for the whale—the only silent party in this conflict. A timely and sensitive study of a complicated issue, this book calls into question anthropological expectations regarding who benefits from the exercise of state power in environmental conflicts, especially where indigenous groups are involved. Vividly told and rigorously argued, Contesting Leviathan will appeal to anthropologists, scholars of indigenous culture, animal activists, and any reader interested in the place of animals in contemporary life.
A Guardian Best Book of the Year
“A gripping study of white power…Explosive.”
—New York Times
“Helps explain how we got to today’s alt-right.”
—Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution.
Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
“A much-needed and troubling revelation… The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know.”
—The Nation
“Fascinating… Shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.”
—Slate
“Superbly comprehensive…supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism.”
—Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
The Culture of Feedback digs deep into a dazzling variety of left-of-center experiences and attitudes from this misunderstood period, bringing us a new look at the wild side of the 1970s. Belgrad shows us how ideas from systems theory were taken up by the counterculture and the environmental movement, eventually influencing a wide range of beliefs and behaviors, particularly related to the question of what is and is not intelligence. He tells the story of a generation of Americans who were struck by a newfound interest in—and respect for—plants, animals, indigenous populations, and the very sounds around them, threading his tapestry with cogent insights on environmentalism, feminism, systems theory, and psychedelics. The Culture of Feedback repaints the familiar image of the ’70s as a time of Me Generation malaise to reveal an era of revolutionary and hopeful social currents, driven by desires to radically improve—and feed back into—the systems that had come before.
The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is unprecedented. It showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose.This wide-ranging anthology brings together writers who offer perspectives that span generations and perspectives on life and Diné history. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities.
The Diné Reader developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by poet Sherwin Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, creative nonfiction, mixed genres, and oral traditions reshaped into the written word.
This volume combines an array of literature with illuminating interviews, biographies, and photographs of the featured Diné writers and artists. A valuable resource to educators, literature enthusiasts, and beyond, this anthology is a much-needed showcase of Diné writers and their compelling work. The volume also includes a chronology of important dates in Diné history by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, as well as resources for teachers, students, and general readers by Michael Thompson. The Diné Reader is an exciting convergence of Navajo writers and artists with scholars and educators.
The mosaics in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum span the second through the sixth centuries AD and reveal the diversity of compositions found throughout the Roman Empire during this period. Elaborate floors of stone and glass tesserae transformed private dwellings and public buildings alike into spectacular settings of vibrant color, figural imagery, and geometric design. Scenes from mythology, nature, daily life, and spectacles in the arena enlivened interior spaces and reflected the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This online catalogue documents all of the mosaics in the Getty Museum’s collection, presenting their artistry in new color photography as well as the contexts of their discovery and excavation across Rome's expanding empire—from its center in Italy to provinces in southern Gaul, North Africa, and ancient Syria.
Reflecting the Getty's commitment to open content, Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum is available online at www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics and may be downloaded free of charge in multiple formats. For readers who wish to have a bound reference copy, a paperback edition has been made available for sale.
The publication of this online catalogue is issued on the occasion of the exhibition, Roman Mosaics across the Empire, on view at the Getty Villa from March 30 through September 12, 2016.
The Politics of Health Care Reform explains how successful reforms occur in the United States and shows what is unique about health care issues. Theoretically informed, politically astute, historically nuanced, this volume takes an inventory of our health policy infrastructure. Here is an account of the institutions, ideas, and interests that shape health policy in the 1990s: Congress, the federal courts, interest groups, state governments, the public bureaucracy, business (large and small), the insurance industry, the medical profession. The volume offers a fresh look at such critical matters as public opinion, the politics of race and gender, and the lessons we can draw from other nations.
The Politics of Health Care Reform is the definitive collection of political science essays about health care. Expanded from two special issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the most prominent scholarly journal in the field it helped create, this collection will enliven the present debate over health reform and instruct everyone who is concerned about the future of American health care.
Contributors. Lawrence Brown, Robert Evans, William Glaser, Colleen Grogan, Robert Hackey, Lawrence Jacobs, Nancy Jecker, Taeku Lee, Joan Lehman, David McBride, Ted Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, James A. Morone, Mark Peterson, David Rochefort, Rand Rosenblatt, David Rothman, Joan Ruttenberg, Mark Schlesinger, Theda Skocpol, Michael Sparer, Deborah Stone, Kenneth Thorpe
Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin’s The Masquerader to Garbo’s androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch,and A Fantastic Woman.
As it traces the evolution of trans people onscreen, Transgender Cinema also considers the ongoing controversies sparked by these movies and series both within LGBTQ communities and beyond. Ultimately it reveals how film and television have shaped not only how the general public sees trans people, but also how trans people see themselves.
Selected Filmography:
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, All about My Mother, Anak, Austin Unbound, Becoming Chaz, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Boy I Am, Boy Meets Girl, Boys Don’t Cry, The Brandon Teena Story, A Busy Day, Call Me Malcolm, Carlotta, Change over Time, The Crying Game, Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Gir, The Devil Is a Woman, Drunktown’s Finest, Facing Mirrors, A Fantastic Woman, 52 Tuesdays, Flesh, Girl Inside, A Girl like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I Was a Male War Bride,Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kumu Hina, La Cage aux Folles, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) The Masquerader, Myra Breckinridge, Orlando, Paris Is Burning, Playing with Gender, Psycho, Queen Christina, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Saga of Anatahan, She’s a Boy I Knew, Silence of the Lambs, Some Like It Hot, Southern Comfort, Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen, Stonewall, The Tenant, Three Generations. Tomboy, Tootsie, Transamerica, Transparent, Trash, Whatever Suits You, A Woman.
“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High
Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.
The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.
What can a cemetery tell us about the social and cultural dynamics of a place and time? Anthropologist Alison Bell suggests that cemeteries participate in the grassroots cultural work of crafting social connections, even as they test the transcendental durability of the deceased person and provide a measure of a culture’s values. In The Vital Dead, Bell applies this framework to the communities of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the cemeteries that have both claimed them and, paradoxically, sustained them.
Bell surveys objects left on graves, images and epitaphs on grave markers, and other artifacts of material culture to suggest a landscape of symbols maintaining relationships across the threshold of death. She explores cemetery practice and its transformation over time and largely presents her interpretations as a struggle against alienation. Rich in evocative examples both contemporary and historical, Bell’s analysis stems from fieldwork interviews, archival sources, and recent anthropological theory. The book’s chapters range across cemetery types, focusing on African American burials, the grave sites of institutionalized individuals, and modern community memorials. Ultimately, The Vital Dead is an account of how lives, both famous and forgotten, become transformed and energized through the communities and things they leave behind to produce profound and unexpected narratives of mortality. Bell’s deft storytelling coupled with skill for scholarly analysis make for a fascinating and emotionally moving read.
Groundbreaking in its approach, The Vital Dead makes important contributions to cemetery and material culture studies, as well as the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history, geography, and folklore.
In the 1980s, conflicts between the Miskito people of Nicaragua's eastern coast and the Sandinistas drew international attention. Indeed, the Miskitos' struggle to defend their cultural autonomy and land rights points out a curious historical anomaly. This native group has long had closer ties to British and American culture than to Hispanic Nicaraguan culture. C. Napier Bell, son of a British trader, grew up on the Miskito Coast in the nineteenth century and spoke the Miskito language fluently.
Tangweera, first published in 1899, is Bell's autobiographical account of his boyhood experiences. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book records an idyllic life of hunting, fishing, and trading. Bell describes the social customs and beliefs of the various Indian peoples he knew, as well as the relations among the coastal Miskito, the black creole population, and the tribes of the interior—the latter a subject of continuing importance. Although Bell shared common nineteenth-century ideas about the inferiority of “savage” races, his affection for the Miskito people and his love of their land fill Tangweera. Anthropologists, historians, naturalists, and travelers in the region will find this fascinating reading.
The introduction by Philip A. Dennis, Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech University, provides a modern observer's view of Miskito culture and discusses important changes and continuities since Bell's time.
Now East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on a tour of his beloved neighborhood. He takes you on three separate walking tours, each visiting a different part of East Harlem and each full of stories about its theatres, museums, art spaces, schools, community centers, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You’ll also learn about the famous people who lived in El Barrio, such as actress Cecily Tyson, opera singer Marian Anderson, portrait artist Alice Neel, the incomparable poet Julia De Burgos, and the King of Latin Music Tito Puente.
Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photos, Walking East Harlem points out not only the many architectural and cultural landmarks in the neighborhood, but also the historical buildings that have since been demolished. Whether you are a tourist or a resident, this guide will give you a new appreciation for El Barrio’s exciting history, cultural diversity, and continued artistic vibrancy.
Disability Studies diverge from the medical model of disability (which argues that disabled subjects can and should be “fixed”) to view disability as socially constructed, much in the same way other identities are. The work of reading black and disabled bodies is not only recovery work, but work that requires a willingness to deconstruct the systems that would keep those bodies in separate spheres. This pivotal volume uncovers the misrepresentations of black disabled bodies and demonstrates how those bodies transform systems and culture. Drawing on key themes in Disability Studies and African American Studies, these collected essays complement one another in interesting and dynamic ways, to forge connections across genres and chronotopes, an invitation to keep blackness and disability in conversation. With an analysis of disability as a result of war, studies of cognitive impairment and slavery in fiction, representations of slavery and violence in photography, deconstructions of illness (cancer and AIDS) narratives, comparative analyses of black and Latina/o and black and African subjects, analysis of treatments of disability in hip-hop, and commentary on disability, blackness, and war, this volume shows that the historical lines of demarcation in this field are permeable and should be challenged.
Named by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books since the end of World War II, The End of Ideology has been a landmark in American social thought, regarded as a classic since its first publication in 1962.
Daniel Bell postulated that the older humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exhausted, and that new parochial ideologies would arise. In a new introduction to the year 2000 edition, he argues that with the end of communism, we are seeing a resumption of history, a lifting of the heavy ideological blanket and the return of traditional ethnic and religious conflicts in the many regions of the former socialist states and elsewhere.
After the advent of sound, women in the British film industry formed an essential corps of below-the-line workers, laboring in positions from animation artist to negative cutter to costume designer. Melanie Bell maps the work of these women decade-by-decade, examining their far-ranging economic and creative contributions against the backdrop of the discrimination that constrained their careers. Her use of oral histories and trade union records presents a vivid counter-narrative to film history, one that focuses not only on women in a male-dominated business, but on the innumerable types of physical and emotional labor required to make a motion picture. Bell's feminist analysis looks at women's jobs in film at important historical junctures while situating the work in the context of changing expectations around women and gender roles.
Illuminating and astute, Movie Workers is a first-of-its-kind examination of the unsung women whose invisible work brought British filmmaking to the screen.
Why do these villagers find country living so compelling? Why, despite our urban lives, do so many of us strive for a home in the country, closer to nature? Michael Bell suggests that we are looking for a natural conscience: an unshakeable source of identity and moral value that is free from social interests—comfort and solace and a grounding of self in a world of conflict and change.
During his interviews with over a hundred of Childerley's 475 residents—both working-class and professional—Bell heard time and again of their desire to be "country people" and of their anxiety over their class identities. Even though they often knowingly participate in class discrimination themselves—and see their neighbors doing the same—most Childerleyans feel a deep moral ambivalence over class. Bell argues they find in class and its conflicts the restraints and workings of social interests and feel that by living "close to nature" they have an alternative: the identity of a "country person," a "villager that the natural consicence gives."
Yet there are clear parallels between the ways in which the villagers conceive of nature and of social life, and Bell traces these parallels across Childerleyans' perspectives on class, gender, and politics. Where conventional theories would suggest that what the villagers see as nature is a reflection of how they see society, and that the natural conscience must be a product of social interests, Bell argues that ideological processes are more complex. Childerleyans' understandings of society and of the natural conscience shape each other, says Bell, through a largely intuitive process he calls resonance.
For anyone who has ever lived in the countryside or considered doing so, this book is not to be missed. It will also be of particular interest to scholars of British studies and the sociology of knowledge and culture, and to those who work on problems of environment, community, class, and rural life.
"[An] exemplary piece of fieldwork. . . . These gentle conclusions . . . reminds us (when we most need reminding) of the skillful ethnographer's enduring capacity to make the everyday seem truly extraordinary."—Laurie Taylor, New Statesman & Society
"Bell's achievement, and his perceptions, are impressive."—J.W.M. Thompson, London Times
"Races along with all the gossipy compulsion of a blockbuster."—Frances Hardy, Daily Mill
"I believe this view of how people relate to the different domains of their experience is absolutely right. . . . The reader, this ready anyway, finishes Childerley with the feeling that she has just returned from visiting a remote Hampshire village and has learned something, not just about that place, but about human social life lived in other places and lived through place itself."—Wendy Griswold, American Journal of Sociology
The Strange Music of Social Life presents a dialogue on dialogic sociology, explored through the medium of music. Sociologist and composer Michael Mayerfeld Bell presents an argument that both sociology and classical music remain largely in the grip of a nineteenth-century totalizing ambition of prediction and control. He provides the refreshing approach of "strangency" to explain a sociology that tries to understand not only the regularities of social life but also the social conditions in which people do what we do not expect.
Nine important sociologists and musicians respond-often vigorously-to the conversation Bell initiates by raising pivotal questions. The Strange Music of Social Life concludes with Bell's reply to those responses and offers new insight into sociology and music sociology.
Confronting Theory presents a critique of what has come to be known as theory in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than dismissing theory writing as pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that although many of these analyses sound like revolutionary psychological theory, few, if any, have empirical implications that students can evaluate. By considering the educational implications of cultural theory, Confronting Theory will empower students with arguments, not just opinions, about the increasingly idealist and irrelevant anti-realist curricula they confront in their humanities education in today’s universities.
Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the world view from which all social life flows. The concept of fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.
Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a postmodern world.
"Everyone interested in anorexia nervosa . . . should skim this book or study it. It will make you realize how dependent upon culture the definition of disease is. I will never look at an anorexic patient in the same way again."—Howard Spiro, M.D., Gastroenterology
"[This] book is a first-class social history and is well-documented both in its historical and scientific portions."—Vern L. Bullough, American Historical Review
"A significant contribution to revisionist history, which re-examines events in light of feminist thought. . . . Bell is particularly skillful in describing behavior within its time and culture, which would be bizarre by today's norms, without reducing it to the pathological."—Mary Lassance Parthun, Toronto Globe and Mail
"Bell is both enlightened and convincing. His book is impressively researched, easy to read, and utterly fascinating."—Sheila MacLeod, New Statesman
Modern American culture has raised generations of women who believed that their true and most important role in society was to get married and have children. Anything short of this role was considered abnormal, unfulfilling, and suspect. This female stereotype has been exploited and perpetuated by some key films in the late 40's and early 50's. But more recently we have seen a shift in the cultural view of the spinster. The erosion of the traditional nuclear family, as well as a larger range of acceptable life choices, has caused our perceptions of unmarried women to change. The film industry has reflected this shift with updated stereotypes that depict this cultural trend. The shift in the way we perceive spinsters is the subject of current academic research which shows that a person's perception of particular societal roles influences the amount of stress or depression they experience when in that specific role. Further, although the way our culture perceives spinsters and the way the film industry portrays them may be evolving, we still are still left with a negative stereotype.
Themes of choice and power have informed the lives of single women in all times and places. When considered at all in a scholarly context, single women have often been portrayed as victims, unhappily subjected to forces beyond their control. This collection of essays about "women on their own" attempts to correct that bias, by presenting a more complex view of single women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and Europe.
Topics covered in this book include the complex and ambiguous roles that society assigns to widows, and the greater social and financial independence that widows have often enjoyed; widow culture after major wars; the plight of homeless, middle-class single women during the Great Depression; and comparative sociological studies of contemporary single women in the United States, Britain, Ireland, and Cuba.
Composed of papers presented to the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis project on single women, this collection incorporates the work of specialists in anthropology, art history, history, and sociology. It is deeply connected with the emerging field of singleness studies (to which the RCHA has contributed an Internet-based bibliography of more than 800 items). All of the essays are new and have not been previously published.
Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research program designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups in order to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. The authors examine in detail four projects in London in detail that exemplify collaboration with engineers, designers, and scientists to enact urban change. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings that face challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.
Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being.
Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--many of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, losses, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the relationship between Appalachian women's activism and the gendered responsibilities they feel within their families and communities. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader "protector identity" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, the women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them.
30% of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to organizations fighting for environmental justice in Central Appalachia.
Paying tribute to Richard Daniel De Puma, a scholar who has made significant and influential contributions to Etruscan and Roman studies, the contributors to this collection echo the ambition and creativity of his work while offering an up-to-date survey of contemporary Etruscan scholarship. In surveying new developments in both fields, the work collected here represent the diverse, interdisciplinary interests of De Puma as well as areas of recent groundbreaking research.
This textual ethnography embeds early college students’ writing in deep historical and theoretical contexts and looks for new ways that their writing contributes to and reshapes contemporary understandings of how US and global citizens are thinking about race. The book is a teaching narrative, tracing a teaching journey that considers student writing not only in the moments it is assigned but also in continual revisions of the course, making it a useful tool in helping college-age students see, explore, and articulate the role of race in determining their life experiences and opportunities.
Sophie Bell’s work narrates the experiences of a white teacher making mistakes in teaching about race and moving forward through those mistakes, considering that process valuable and, in fact, necessary. Providing a model for future scholars on how to carve out a pedagogically responsive identity as a teacher, Mapping Racial Literacies contributes to the scholarship on race and writing pedagogy and encourages teachers of early college classes to bring these issues front and center on the page, in the classroom, and on campus.
In DES Daughters, Susan Bell recounts the experiences of this generation of “victims.” In moving, heartfelt narratives, she presents the voices of those women who developed cancer, those who were cancer-free but have concerns about becoming pregnant, and those who suffered other medical and/or reproductive difficulties.
Bell examines the hierarchy of knowledge and power of scientists, doctors, and daughters, tracing the emergence of a feminist health movement. The “embodied knowledge” of these DES daughters prompted them to become advocates and form a social movement that challenged reproductive medical knowledge specifically, but also the politics of women’s health in general. Bell’s important book chronicles the history and future of these grassroots activists born out of illness, suffering, and uncertainty.
This edition includes his 1978 article "Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic," and a new Preface.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year
Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association
Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.
“Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly…Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’”
—Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review
“Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.”
—Richard L. Wood, Commonweal
The first classics in human history—the early works of literature, philosophy, and theology to which we have returned throughout the ages—appeared in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical texts of the Hebrew scriptures, the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing, the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha—all of these works came down to us from the compressed period of history that Karl Jaspers memorably named the Axial Age.
In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Robert Bellah and Hans Joas make the bold claim that intellectual sophistication itself was born worldwide during this critical time. Across Eurasia, a new self-reflective attitude toward human existence emerged, and with it an awakening to the concept of transcendence. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter through human thought and action.
Bellah and Joas have assembled diverse scholars to guide us through this astonishing efflorescence of religious and philosophical creativity. As they explore the varieties of theorizing that arose during the period, they consider how these in turn led to utopian visions that brought with them the possibility of both societal reform and repression. The roots of our continuing discourse on religion, secularization, inequality, education, and the environment all lie in Axial Age developments. Understanding this transitional era, the authors contend, is not just an academic project but a humanistic endeavor.
The Reader is organized around four central concerns. It seeks to place modernity in theoretical and historical perspective, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary, from Aristotle and Rousseau through Durkheim and Weber to Habermas and Mary Douglas. It takes the United States to be in some respects the type-case of modernity and in others the most atypical of modern societies, analyzing its common faith in individual freedom and democratic self-government, and its persistent paradoxes of inequality, exclusion, and empire. The Reader is also concerned to test the axiomatic modern assumption that rational cognition and moral evaluation, fact and value, are absolutely divided, arguing instead that they overlap and interact much more than conventional wisdom in the university today usually admits. Finally, it criticizes modernity’s affirmation that faith and knowledge stand even more utterly at odds, arguing instead that their overlap and interaction, obvious in every premodern society, animate the modern world as well.
Through such critical and constructive inquiry this Reader probes many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements, at mortal risk. Through the practical self-understanding such inquiry spurs, Bellah shows how we may share responsibility for the world we have made and seek to heal it.
The canon of popular cinema has long been rife with fantastic tales, yet critical studies have too often expediently mixed the fantasy genre with its kindred science fiction and horror films or dismissed it altogether as escapist fare. Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation reconsiders the cultural significance of this storytelling mode by investigating how films seemingly divorced from reality and presented in a context of timelessness are, in fact, encoded with the social practices and beliefs of their era of production.
Situating representative fantasy films within their cultural moments, Joshua David Bellin illustrates how fantastic visions of monstrous others seek to propagate negative stereotypes of despised groups and support invidious hierarchies of social control. In constructing such an argument, Framing Monsters not only contests dismissive attitudes toward fantasy but also challenges the psychoanalytic criticism that has thus far dominated its limited critical study.
Beginning with celebrated classics, Bellin locates King Kong (1933) within the era of lynching to evince how the film protects whiteness against supposed aggressions of a black predator and reviews The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a product of the Depression’s economic anxieties. From there, the study moves to the cult classic animated Sinbad Trilogy (1958–1977) of Ray Harryhausen, films rampant with xenophobic fears of the Middle East as relevant today as when the series was originally produced.
Advancing to more recent subjects, Bellin focuses on the image of the monstrous woman and the threat of reproductive freedom found in Aliens (1986), Jurassic Park (1993), and Species (1995) and on depictions of the mentally ill as dangerous deviants in 12 Monkeys (1996) and The Cell (2000). An investigation into physical freakishness guides his approach to Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). He concludes with a discussion of X-Men (2000) and Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), commercial giants that extend a recent trend toward critical self-reflection within the genre while still participating in the continuity of social alienation.
Written to enhance rather than undermine our understanding of fantastic cinema, Framing Monsters invites filmmakers, critics, and fans alike to reassess this tremendously popular and influential film type and the monsters that populate it.
In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala’s civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country’s history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy.
Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised...
New Threats to Freedom
In the twentieth century, free people faced a number of mortal threats,ranging from despotism, fascism,
and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. While the struggle against some of these overt dangers continues, some insidious new threats seem to have slipped past our intellectual defenses. These often unchallenged threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms and, in some cases, are widely accepted as beneficial.
In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled an all-star lineup of innovative thinkers to challenge these insidious new threats. Some leap into already raging debates on issues such as Sharia law in the West, the rise of transnationalism, and the regulatory state. Others turn their attention to less obvious threats, such as the dogma of fairness, the failed promises of the blogosphere, and the triumph of behavioral psychology.
These threats are very real and very urgent, yet this collection avoids projecting an air of doom and gloom. Rather, it provides a blueprint for intellectual resistance so that modern defenders of liberty may better understand their enemies, more effectively fight to preserve the meaning of freedom, and more surely carry its light to a new generation.
What are the new threats to freedom?
when has authority not claimed, when imposing trammels and curbs on liberty, that it does so for a wider good and a greater happiness?” —Christopher Hitchens
“The regulatory state amounts to a regressive tax that penalizes small independent producers and protects
the status quo.” —Max Borders
“Europe tends to favor stability over democracy, America democracy over stability.” —Daniel Hannan
“The value of free expression is perceived to be at odds with goals that were considered ‘more important,’ like inclusiveness, diversity, nondiscrimination, and tolerance.” —Greg Lukianoff
“The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.” —Robert D. Kaplan
“That old bugbear of postwar sociology—the mob-self—is now a reality. In a participatory/popularity culture, the freedom to think and act for ourselves becomes harder and harder to achieve.” —Lee Siegel
“As traditional marriage declines, the ranks of single women are growing, and increasingly these women are substituting the security of a husband with the security of the state.” —Jessica Gavora
“Ending the freedom to fail is a mean-spirited attack on the freedom to succeed.” —Michael Goodwin
“The only solution to the new threats to American press freedom lies in organized resistance.” —Katherine Mangu-Ward
“The new behaviorism isn’t interested in protecting people’s freedom to choose; on the contrary, its core principle is the idea that only by allowing an expert elite to limit choice can individuals learn to break their bad habits.” —Christine Rosen
“There’s a world of Travis Bickles out there, and they’re not driving cabs. They’re reading blogs.” —Ron Rosenbaum
“The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.” —David Mamet
Join the conversation about these issues at www.newthreatstofreedom.com
To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and George Schuyler’s Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and Guido d’Agostino’s Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative’s exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself.
When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and “white ethnic” (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity.
The desire “to be suddenly white” serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. Byexamining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world’s preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.
Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these and similar questions, four leading psychologists have spent their careers studying thousands of people, observing them as they’ve grown up and grown older. The result is unprecedented insight into what makes each of us who we are.
In The Origins of You, Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Richie Poulton share what they have learned about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child’s early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.
Painstaking and revelatory, the discoveries in The Origins of You promise to help schools, parents, and all people foster well-being and ameliorate or prevent developmental problems.
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
“Brings the groundbreaking research of the top developmental psychologists of the past quarter-century to a wider audience…A masterpiece!”—Dante Cicchetti, Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota
“Deliver[s] a flood of insights around the book’s central question: To what degree do our childhood personalities and behaviors predict our adult selves?”—Wall Street Journal
“One of the best and most important works of the last few years…Fascinating.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
Does childhood temperament predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is one’s health shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these questions, four leading psychologists dedicated their careers to studying thousands of people, observing them as they grew and emerging with unprecedented insight into what makes us who we are.
They found that human development is not subject to ironclad laws so much as a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction of one’s life. The early years do predict who we become, but they do so imperfectly. At once actionable and revelatory, The Origins of You is an invaluable guide for parents, teachers, and anyone working with or caring for children.
Why are immigrants from Mexico and Latin America such an affectively charged population for political conservatives?
More than a decade before the election of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the national conversation. Situating the contemporary debate on immigration within America’s history of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cristina Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a participatory practice of racial violence, domination, and exclusion that gave white citizens the right to both wield and exceed the law. Still, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial justice.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Beginning over 10,000 years ago and continuing until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, hunter and gatherer societies occupied the Edwards Plateau of central Texas. Archaeological studies over the past eighty years have reconstructed their subsistence, technology, and settlement patterns, but until now little information has been available on their burial practices, due to the scarcity of known burial sites. This detailed archaeological report describes the human skeletal remains, burial furnishings, and fauna recovered from Bering Sinkhole in Kerr County, the first carefully excavated hunter-gatherer burial site in central Texas.
The remains in Bering Sinkhole were deposited from 7,500 to 2,000 years ago. Leland Bement's analysis reveals a growing elaboration in burial rituals during the period and also uncovers important data on the diet and health of the hunter-gatherers. He discusses climate change based on faunal remains and compares burial goods such as bone, antler, freshwater shell, marine shell, turtle, and stone artifacts with those found at other Texas mortuary sites and with deposits at hunter-gatherer habitation sites in Central Texas.
The essays in Folklore Genres represent development in folklore genre studies, diverging into literary, ethnographic, and taxonomic questions. The study as a whole is concerned with the concept of genre and with the history of genre theory. A selective bibliography provides a guide to analytical and theoretical works on the topic.
The literary-oriented articles conceive of folklore forms, not as the antecedents of literary genres, but as complex, symbolically rich expressions. The ethnographically oriented articles, as well as those dealing with classification problems, reveal dimensions of folklore that are often obscured from the student reading the folklore text alone. It has long been known that the written page is but a pale reproduction of the spoken word, that a tale hardly reflects the telling. The essays in this collection lead to an understanding of the forms of oral literature as multidimensional symbols of communication and to an understanding of folklore genres as systematically related conceptual categories in culture. What kinship terms are to social structure, genre terms are to folklore. Since genres constitute recognized modes of folklore speaking, their terminology and taxonomy can play a major role in the study of culture and society.
The essays were originally published in Genre (1969–1971); introduction, bibliography, and index have been added to this edition.
This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.
Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.
Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
A History of the Jewish People presents a total vision of Jewish experiences and achievements—religious, political, social, and economic—in both the land of Israel and the diaspora throughout the ages. It has been acclaimed as the most comprehensive and penetrating work yet to have appeared in its field.
Six distinguished scholars at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, have set forth here for the first time the authentic story of the Jewish past that is relevant to the Jewish present. Special attention is paid to the significant historical sources that have come to light in the past decades, to the findings of archaeological research, and to source materials in Jewish studies such as Talmudic literature—sources that have too often been ignored by historians. Yet, while bringing immense scholarship to the task of writing this book, the authors do not lose sight of the essential drama of Jewish history. Their style is forceful and lucid, their narrative both lively and complete.
The book centers on the town of Mazara del Vallo, located on the southwestern tip of Sicily some ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Ben-Yehoyada intertwines the town’s recent turbulent history—which has been fraught with conflicts over fishing rights, development projects, and how the Mediterranean should figure in Italian politics at large—with deep accounts of life aboard the Naumacho, linking ethnography with historical anthropology and political-economic analysis. Through this sophisticated approach, he crafts a new viewpoint on the historical processes of transnational region formation, one offered by these moving ships as they weave together new social and political constellations.
Ben-Yehuda describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and unsubstantiated narrative of Josephus Flavius was edited and augmented in the twentieth century to form a simple and powerful myth of heroism. He looks at the ways this new mythical narrative of Masada was created, promoted, and maintained by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army, archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the tourist industry, and the arts. He discusses the various organizations and movements that created “the Masada experience” (usually a ritual trek through the Judean desert followed by a climb to the fortress and a dramatic reading of the Masada story), and how it changed over decades from a Zionist pilgrimage to a tourist destination.
Placing the story in a larger historical, sociological, and psychological context, Ben-Yehuda draws upon theories of collective memory and mythmaking to analyze Masada’s crucial role in the nation-building process of modern Israel and the formation of a new Jewish identity. An expert on deviance and social control, Ben-Yehuda looks in particular at how and why a military failure and an enigmatic, troubling case of mass suicide (in conflict with Judaism’s teachings) were reconstructed and fabricated as a heroic tale.
The collection provides a thorough and engaging survey of the playwrights, directors, actors, and productions that comprise this dynamic theater, a theater whose evolution and ideology diverges from Anglo-American models. The book's early essays trace the development of Hebrew drama from its inception in Moscow in 1918 to the establishment of a national theater and the emergence of a national repertoire.
Succeeding essays explore the personalities and themes that have dominated the Israeli stage, featuring interviews with leading Israeli playwrights, actors, directors, and dramaturgs. The book also provides highlights from the first Palestinian and Israeli Arab Theater Symposium, focusing on the history, themes, and future of Arab theater.
The contributors include Karen Alkalay-Gut, Shosh Avigal, Linda Ben-Zvi, Erella Brown, Joseph Chaikin, Scott Cummings, Ben-Ami Feingold, Gad Kaynar, Shimon Lev- Ari, Shimon Levy, Gabriella Moscati-Steindler, Freddie Rokem, Eli Rozik, Gershon Shaked, Chaim Shoham, Michael Taub, Dan Urian, Shoshana Weitz, and Nurit Yaari.
"Impressive historical, critical, and theoretical depth . . . a sophisticated introduction to theater in Israel." --Anne Golomb Hoffman, Fordham University
Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of English and Theater, Colorado State University, and Professor of Theater, Tel Aviv University.
In this first in-depth historical study of homosexuality in Fascist Italy, Lorenzo Benadusi brings to light immensely important archival documents regarding the sexual politics of the Italian Fascist regime; he adds new insights to the study of the complex relationships of masculinity, sexuality, and Fascism; he explores the connections between new Fascist values and preexisting Italian traditional and Roman Catholic views on morality; he documents both the Fascist regime’s denial of the existence of homosexuality in Italy and its clandestine strategies and motivations for repressing and imprisoning homosexuals; he uncovers the ways that accusations of homosexuality (whether true or false) were used against political and personal enemies; and above all, he shows how homosexuality was deemed the enemy of the Fascist “New Man,” an ideal of a virile warrior and dominating husband vigorously devoted to the “political” function of producing children for the Fascist state.
Benadusi investigates the regulation and regimentation of gender in Fascist Italy, and the extent to which, in uneasy concert with the Catholic Church, the regime engaged in the cultural and legal engineering of masculinity and femininity. He cites a wealth of unpublished documents, official speeches, letters, coerced confessions, private letters and diaries, legal documents, and government memos to reveal and analyze how the orders issued by the regime attempted to protect the “integrity of the Italian race.” For the first time, documents from the Vatican archives illuminate how the Catholic Church dealt with issues related to homosexuality during the Fascist period in Italy.
Bitter Water presents the narratives of four Diné women who have resisted removal but who have watched as their communities and lifeways have changed dramatically. The book, based on 25 hours of filmed personal testimony, features the women’s candid discussions of their efforts to carry on a traditional way of life in a contemporary world that includes relocation and partitioned lands; encroaching Western values and culture; and devastating mineral extraction and development in the Black Mesa region of Arizona. Though their accounts are framed by insightful writings by both Benally and Diné historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Benally lets the stories of the four women elders speak for themselves.
Scholars, media, and other outsiders have all told their versions of this story, but this is the first book that centers on the stories of women who have lived it—in their own words in Navajo as well as the English translation. The result is a living history of a contested cultural landscape and the unique worldview of women determined to maintain their traditions and lifeways, which are so intimately connected to the land. This book is more than a collection of stories, poetry, and prose. It is a chronicle of resistance as spoken from the hearts of those who have lived it.
A new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world
How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community.
From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.
In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.
Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.
In Sex and Isolation, readers will encounter eccentric street people, Latin American literary geniuses, a French cabaret owner, a transvestite performer, and many other unusual characters; they’ll visit subcultures rarely described in writing and be treated to Benderson’s iconoclastic opinions about culture in former and contemporary urban society. Whether proposing new theories about the relationship between art, entertainment, and sex, analyzing the rise of the Internet and the disappearance of public space, or considering how religion and sexual identity interact, each essay demonstrates sharp wit, surprising insight and some startling intellectual positions.
This is the first American volume of Benderson’s collected essays, featuring both new work and some of his best-known writings, including his famous essay “Toward the New Degeneracy.”
2020 Brendan Gill Prize finalist
For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in 1967, displacing thousands of low-income people of color with the promise that they would soon return to new housing—housing that never came.
Over decades, efforts to keep out affordable housing sparked deep-rooted enmity and stalled development, making SPURA a dramatic study of failed urban renewal, as well as a microcosm epitomizing the greatest challenges faced by American cities since World War II.
Artist and urban scholar Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani was invited to enter this tense community to support a new approach to planning, which she accepted using collaboration, community organizing, public history, and public art. Having engaged her students at The New School in a multi-year collaboration with community activists, the exhibitions and guided tours of her Layered SPURA project provided crucial new opportunities for dialogue about the past, present, and future of the neighborhood.
Simultaneously revealing the incredible stories of community and activism at SPURA, and shedding light on the importance of collaborative creative public projects, Contested City bridges art, design, community activism, and urban history. This is a book for artists, planners, scholars, teachers, cultural institutions, and all those who seek to collaborate in new ways with communities.
Searches for authenticity, Bendix contends, have been a constant companion to the feelings of loss inherent in modernization, forever upholding a belief in a pristine yet endangered cultural essence and fueling cultural nationalism worldwide. Beginning with precursors of Herder and Emerson and the “discovery” of the authentic in expressive culture and literature, she traces the different, albeit intertwined, histories of German Volkskunde and American folklore studies. A Swiss native educated in American folklore programs, Bendix moves effortlessly between the two traditions, demonstrating how the notion of authenticity was used not only to foster national causes, but also to lay the foundations for categories of documentation and analysis within the nascent field of folklore studies.
Bendix shows that, in an increasingly transcultural world, where Zulu singers back up Paul Simon and where indigenous artists seek copyright for their traditional crafts, the politics of authenticity mingles with the forces of the market. Arguing against the dichotomies implied in the very idea of authenticity, she underscores the emptiness of efforts to distinguish between folklore and fakelore, between echt and ersatz.
Saturated in patriotic colors, Superman and Wonder Woman are about as American as baseball and apple pie. Superman, created in 1938, materialized as the brawny answer to the Great Depression, and when Wonder Woman arrived three years later, she supported her adopted country by fighting alongside Allied troops in World War II. As the proverbial mother and father of the superhero genre, these icons appeared to a society in crisis as unwavering beacons of national morality, a quality that lent them success on the battlefield—and on the newsstand.
As new crises arise our comic-book champions continue to be called into action. They adapt and evolve but remain the same potent, if flawed, symbols of the American way. The artists in Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, wrestle with Wonder Woman’s standing as a feminist icon, position Superman as a Soviet-era weapon, and question the immigration status of both characters. Featuring more than seventy artworks that range from loving endorsements to brutal critiques of American culture, this exhibition catalog reveals the enduring presence of these characters and the diverse ways artists employ them.
Through aesthetically informed and sensitive modes of analysis, these contributors examine a wealth of representations—including violence in weddings and spousal devotion after death. The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World demonstrates the varying conceptions of an institution that was central to ancient social and political life—and remains prominent in the modern world. This volume will contribute to scholars' understanding of the era and fascinate anyone interested in historic depictions of marriage and the role and status of women in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods.
By the 1740s, colonists living in North America began to encounter scores of itinerant performers from England and Europe. These show people—acrobats, wire dancers, tumblers, trick riders, painters, dancing-masters, waxworks proprietors, healers, and singing and language teachers—brought novelty and culture to remote areas. Advertising in newspapers, they attracted audiences with the hook of appearing "for a short time only."
In this richly illustrated and deeply researched book, Peter Benes examines the rise of early American popular culture through the lives and work of itinerants who circulated in British North America and the United States from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Although they were frequently reviled as quacks and absconders by many provincials, these transients enjoyed a unique camaraderie and found audiences among high- and lowbrow alike. Drawing on contemporary diaries, letters, reminiscences, and hitherto inaccessible newspaper ads, broadsides, and images, Benes suggests why some elements of Europe's carnival and folklore traditions failed to gain acceptance in American society while others flourished brilliantly.
A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry
The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.
As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.
Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today.
Cover alt text:
Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.
Despite the World Bank’s profound impact on economic, political, and social conditions during the post–World War II era, cultural critics who rigorously theorize other institutions of colonialism and globalization have largely ignored the institution. Working to correct this blind spot, Bret Benjamin’s Invested Interests presents the first extended cultural analysis of the World Bank.
In Invested Interests, Benjamin contends that the World Bank has, from its inception, trafficked in culture. From the political context in which the Bank was chartered to its evolution into an interventionist development agency with vast, unchecked powers, Benjamin explores the Bank’s central role in the global dissemination of Fordist-Keynesianism, its conflicted support for nationalism and the nation-state, and its emerging awareness of the relationships between economics and culture. Benjamin argues that the Bank shapes, and is in turn shaped by, historical pressures of the age—most significantly the rise of third world national liberation movements. Reading a broad array of midcentury archival materials, Benjamin examines not only the Bank’s own growing attentiveness to cultural work but also its prominent place in the thinking of such anti-imperialist intellectuals as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright.
Benjamin maps the Bank’s contemporary rhetorical maneuvering in the wake of ever-intensifying protests, offering close readings of the World Bank’s corporate literature, the activities of the antiglobalization World Social Forum, and the writings of prominent Bank critic Arundhati Roy, including her novel The God of Small Things.
Deftly investigating the World Bank’s ideological struggles over six decades, Invested Interests develops a conceptually and politically nuanced critique of the Bank as a cultural institution deeply enmeshed in the last century’s historical transformations of imperial power and anti-imperial struggle.
Bret Benjamin is associate professor of English and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Albany, SUNY.
Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.
Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.
Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
For many aging followers of rock, punk, and other contemporary popular genres, music is ingrained in their identities. Its meaning is highly personal and intertwined with the individual's biographical development. Bennett studies these fans and how they have changed over time--through fashions, hairstyles, body modification, career paths, political orientations, and perceptions of and by the next generation.
The significance of popular music for these fans is no longer tied exclusively to their youth. Bennett illustrates how the music? that "mattered" to most people in their youth continues to play an important role in their adult lives--a role that goes well beyond nostalgia.
Illuminating largely untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States, this work places these stories within a larger history, connecting historical violence in the United States to present-day hate crimes. Bennett contends that hate crimes committed against Native Americans have persisted as an extension of an “Indian hating” ideology that has existed since colonization, exposing how the justice system has failed Native American victims and families.
While this book looks deeply at multiple generations of unnecessary and ongoing pain and violence, it also recognizes that this is a time of uncertainty and hope. The movement to abolish racial injustice and racially motivated violence has gained fierce momentum. Our Fight Has Just Begun shows that racism, hate speech, and hate crimes are ever present and offers recommendations for racial justice.
In the rational modern world, belief in the supernatural seemingly has been consigned to the worlds of entertainment and fantasy. Yet belief in other worldly phenomena, from poltergeists to telepathy, remains strong, as Gillian Bennett's research shows. Especially common is belief in continuing contact with, or the continuing presence of, dead family members. Bennett interviewed women in Manchester, England, asking them questions about ghosts and other aspects of the supernatural. (Her discussion of how her research methods and interview techniques evolved is in itself valuable.) She first published the results of the study in the well-received Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural, which has been widely used in folklore and women's studies courses. "Alas, Poor Ghost!" extensively revises and expands that work. In addition to a fuller presentation and analysis of the original field research and other added material, the author, assisted by Kate Bennett, a gerontological psychologist, presents and discusses new research with a group of women in Leicester, England.
Bennett is interested in more than measuring the extent of belief in other worldly manifestations. Her work explores the relationship between narrative and belief. She anticipated that her questions would elicit from her interviewees not just yes or no replies but stories about their experiences that confirmed or denied notions of the supernatural. The more controversial the subject matter, the more likely individuals were to tell stories, especially if their answers to questions of belief were positive. These were most commonly individualized narratives of personal experience, but they contained many of the traditional motifs and other content, including belief in the supernatural, of legends. Bennett calls them memorates and discusses the cultural processes, including ideas of what is a "proper" experience of the supernatural and a "proper" telling of the story, that make them communal as well as individual. These memorates provide direct and vivid examples of what the storytellers actually believe and disbelieve. In a final section, Bennett places her work in historical context through a discussion of case studies in the history of supernatural belief.
This guidebook of historic iron-production sites is designed to give the reader a factual and illuminating look at the people and events that shaped Birmingham into one of America’s leading steel centers. Iron & Steel is heavily illustrated with both color and historical black-and-white photographs. It can be used while visiting parks or read as a coherent volume before or after a visit.
The book contains chapters devoted to the larger preserved sites open to the public, such as Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark and Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. It also highlights lesser-known, yet still accessible, sites such as Blocton Coke Ovens Park. The work provides easy-to-follow maps for every site as well as driving directions to the more remote locations, giving visitors easy access to all the notable iron and steel sites in Jefferson, Shelby, Tuscaloosa, and Bibb counties. Each chapter also includes a variety of historical information, with accompanying photographs, in order to present the reader with a detailed and comprehensive account of the Birmingham Iron and Steel District.
Featured sites include: Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park; Shelby Ironworks Park; Billy Gould Coke Ovens Park; Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Park; Oxmoor Furnace Site; Irondale Furnace Park; Helena Rolling Mill Site; Red Mountain Park, Iron Ore Mines; Lewisburg Coke Ovens Park; Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark; Ruffner Mountain Nature Center; Blocton Coke Ovens Park; and Vulcan Park and Museum.
Informed by recent developments in literary criticism and social theory, In the Nature of Things addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language. The theoretical approaches of the contributors represent both modernist and postmodernist positions, including feminist theory, critical theory, Marxism, science fiction, theology, and botany. They demonstrate how the concept of nature is invoked and constituted in a wide range of cultural projects—from the Bible to science fiction movies, from hunting to green consumerism. Ultimately, it weeks to link the work of theorists concerned with nature and the environment to nontheorists who share similar concerns.
Contributors include R. McGreggor Cawley, Romand Coles, William E. Connolly, Jan E. Dizard, Valerie Hartouni, Cheri Lucas Jennings, Bruce H. Jennings, Timothy W. Luke, Shane Phelan, John Rodman, Michael J. Shapiro, and Wade Sikorski.
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