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The Construction of Minorities
Cases for Comparison Across Time and Around the World
Andre Burguiere and Raymond Grew, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2001
How does a minority come to be? In an unusual project, a notable group of French and American scholars take the view that minorities are socially constructed. Their original studies of specific historical examples produce a series of stimulating and provocative essays useful and enjoyable for specialists and the general reader alike.
Spawned from a conference organized by the journals Annales and Comparative Studies in Society and History in concert with the Center for Historical Research at l'EHESS in Paris and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, this collection contrasts studies of Afro-Americans in the United States, French Protestants, notables in Renaissance Florence, religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire, Muslim and Chinese traders in Southeast Asia, the native peoples of Spanish America, lower-caste Indians, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, Australian aborigines, and American and French responses to AIDS to reveal valuable information about how minorities come to be constructed within societies. Some of the minorities considered are identified primarily in terms of their ethnicity, some by social class, and some by religion (Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim); a final essay asks whether the victims of AIDS constitute a minority at all.
With its cross-cultural emphasis, this book will be a valuable addition to courses on diversity, ethnicity, and cultural comparison. It is destined to be a useful reference for undergraduate and research libraries and a much-consulted work for specialists on each of the societies considered.
André Burguière is Research Director, l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (l'EHESS) in Paris. Raymond Grew is Professor of History Emeritus, University of Michigan.
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Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation
Peter Jackson
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes
Edward Swenson
University Press of Colorado, 2018

Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes explores archaeological approaches to temporalities, social memory, and constructions of history in the pre-Columbian Andes. The authors examine a range of indigenous temporal experiences and ideologies, including astronomical, cyclical, generational, eschatological, and mythical time.

This nuanced, interdisciplinary volume challenges outmoded anthropological theories while building on an emic perspective to gain greater understanding of pre-Columbian Andean cultures. Contributors to the volume rethink the dichotomy of past and present by understanding history as indigenous Andeans perceived it—recognizing the past as a palpable and living presence. We live in history, not apart from it. Within this framework time can be understood as a current rather than as distinct points, moments, periods, or horizons.

The Andes offer a rich context by which to evaluate recent philosophical explorations of space and time. Using the varied materializations and ritual emplacements of time in a diverse sampling of landscapes, Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes serves as a critique of archaeology’s continued and exclusive dependence on linear chronologies that obscure historically specific temporal practices and beliefs.

Contributors: Tamara L. Bray, Zachary J. Chase, María José Culquichicón-Venegas, Terence D’Altroy, Giles Spence Morrow, Matthew Sayre, Francisco Seoane, Darryl Wilkinson

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Consumer Culture
Lury, Celia
Rutgers University Press, 1996

This book is written as a survey for students who are interested in the nature and role of consumer culture in modern societies. Drawing on a wide range of studies and disciplines, Celia Lury examines the rise of consumer culture and the changing relations between the production and consumption of cultural goods. Rejecting the Marxist principle of production as the lone economic determinant in capitalist society, Lury presents consumerism as an equally active player in the free market. Rather than existing as opposites, production and consumerism are seen as complements, feeding off each other in an endless cycle. As the author writes, “the use or appropriation of an object is more often than not both a moment of consumption and production, of undoing and doing, of destruction and construction.”         

Lury weaves unique arguments over the expansive nature of consumption, including explanations as to how poorer segments of society do in fact contribute to consumer culture and how a commodity moves beyond its function and assumes a cultural and symbolic meaning. Not only does the author explore the way an individual’s position in social groups structured by class, gender, race and age affects the nature of his or her participation in consumer culture, but also how this culture itself is instrumental in the defining of social and political groups and the forming of an individual’s self-identity.         

Clearly written and well illustrated, Consumer Culture is a lively and engaging introduction to a topic which is of growing importance in media and cultural studies and in the sociology of culture. It will enable readers to understand and ultimately to have better control over the means of consumption.

 

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Consumer Culture
Selected Essays
Edited by Gjoko Muratovski
Intellect Books, 2016
We live in a society that defines us by what we consume and how. Every day we make purchasing decisions that express our sense of belonging, our commitments to the environment, and our systems of belief. We often choose to buy things, not necessarily because we need them, but because we believe that these things will help us express who we are—in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Whether we like it or not, consumerism is the prevalent ideology of our time. Led by Gjoko Muratovski who has long been influential at the intersection of design and business, Consumer Culture is the ideal starting point for an investigation into the social construction of the global economy.
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Consumer Identities
Agency, Media and Digital Culture
Edited by Candice Roberts and Myles Ethan Lascity
Intellect Books, 2019
This edited collection explores the notion of agency by tracing the role and activities of consumers from the pre-internet age into the possible future. Using an overview of the historical creation of consumer identity, Consumer Identities demonstrates that active consumption is not merely a product of the digital age; it has always been a means by which a person can develop identity. Grounded in the acknowledgment that identity is a constructed and contested space, the authors analyze emerging dynamics in contemporary consumerism, ongoing tensions of structure and agency in consumer identities, and the ways in which identity construction could be influenced in the future. By exploring consumer identity through examples in pop culture, the authors have created a scholarly work that will appeal to industry professionals as well as academics.
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The Consumer Society
Edited by Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman, and David Kiron
Island Press, 1997

The developed countries, particularly the United States, consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources, yet high and rising levels of consumption do not necessarily lead to greater satisfaction, security, or well-being, even for affluent consumers.

The Consumer Society provides brief summaries of the most important and influential writings on the environmental, moral, and social implications of a consumer society and consumer lifestyles. Each section consists of ten to twelve summaries of critical writings in a specific area, with an introductory essay that outlines the state of knowledge in that area and indicates where further research is needed. Sections cover:

  • Scope and Definition
  • Consumption in the Affluent Society
  • Family, Gender, and Socialization
  • The History of Consumerism
  • Foundations of Economic Theories of Consumption
  • Critiques and Alternatives in Economic Theory
  • Perpetuating Consumer Culture: Media, Advertising, and Wants Creation
  • Consumption and the Environment
  • Globalization and Consumer Culture
  • Visions of an Alternative
This book is the second volume in the Frontier Issues in Economic Thought series, which provides surveys of the most significant writings in emergent areas of economics -- an invaluable aid in fast-growing fields where genuine new ground is being broken. The series brings together economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers to develop analyses that challenge and enrich the dominant neoclassical paradigm.

The Consumer Society is an essential guide to and summary of the literature of consumption and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the deeper economic, social, and ethical implications of consumerism.

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Consumers And Citizens
Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts
Nestor Garcia Canclini
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.

Social Theory/Latin American Studies

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power. In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship. García Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Rather, the postmodern citizen-consumer inhabits a transterritorial and multilingual space, structured more along the lines of markets than states. Defining this space, García Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions. ISBN 0-8166-2986-2 Cloth £34.50 $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-2987-0 Paper £14.00 $19.95x256 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 AprilCultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 6Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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Consuming Catastrophe
Mass Culture in America's Decade of Disaster
Timothy Recuber
Temple University Press, 2016

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies—from omnipresent media broadcasts to relief fund efforts and promises to “Never Forget.”  

Recuber explains how a specific and “real” kind of emotional connection to the victims becomes a crucial element in the creation, use, and consumption of mass mediation of disasters. He links this to the concept of “empathetic hedonism,” or the desire to understand or feel the suffering of others. 

The ineffability of disasters makes them a spectacular and emotional force in contemporary American culture. Consuming Catastrophe provides a lively analysis of the themes and meanings of tragedy and the emotions it engenders in the representation, mediation and consumption of disasters.

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CONSUMING FANTASIES
LABOR, LEISURE, AND THE LONDON SHOPGIRL,
LISE SHAPIRO SANDERS
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

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Consuming Grief
Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
By Beth A. Conklin
University of Texas Press, 2001

Mourning the death of loved ones and recovering from their loss are universal human experiences, yet the grieving process is as different between cultures as it is among individuals. As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of grief for the family of the deceased, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives.

Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded. Beth Conklin explores Wari' conceptions of person, body, and spirit, as well as indigenous understandings of memory and emotion, to explain why the Wari' felt that corpses must be destroyed and why they preferred cannibalism over cremation. Her findings challenge many commonly held beliefs about cannibalism and show why, in Wari' terms, it was considered the most honorable and compassionate way of treating the dead.

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Consuming Modernity
Public Culture in a South Asian World
Carol A. Breckenridge
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Consuming Modernity illustrates that what is distinctive of any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class; the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions; and the state.

The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites they explore include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants, and tourism. Consuming Modernity also makes clear the differences among public, mass, and popular culture.Contributors include Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago; Frank F. Conlon, University of Washington; Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College; Paul Greenough, University of Iowa; David Lelyveld, Columbia University; Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati; Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster; and Phillip B. Zarrilli, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Consuming Motherhood
Taylor, Janelle S
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Consuming Motherhood addresses the provocative question of how motherhood and consumption—as ideologies and as patterns of social action—mutually shape and constitute each other in contemporary North American and European social life. Ideologically, motherhood and consumption are often constructed in opposition to each other, with motherhood standing in as a naturalized social relation that is thought to be uniquely free of the calculating instrumentality that dominates commercial relations. Yet, in social life, motherhood and consumption are inseparable. Whether shopping for children’s clothing or childbirth services, or making decisions about adopting children, becoming a mother (and maternal practice more generally) is deeply influenced by consumption. How can the relationship between motherhood and consumption be revealed, and critically analyzed? Consuming Motherhood brings together a group of sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars to address this question through carefully grounded ethnographic studies. This insightful book reveals how mothers negotiate the contradictory forces that position them as both immune from and the target of consumerist tendencies in contemporary global society.

 

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Consuming Religion
Kathryn Lofton
University of Chicago Press, 2017

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word “religion” allows us to describe and understand.

With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.

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Consuming Religion
Kathryn Lofton
University of Chicago Press, 2017
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word “religion” allows us to describe and understand.
With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.
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Consuming Russia
Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev
Adele Marie Barker, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia.
The contributors examine how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture—as well as the communist legacy—with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia’s political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens’ cultural production and consumption.
This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.

Contributors.
Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky
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Consuming Work
Youth Labor in America
Yasemin Besen-Cassino
Temple University Press, 2014
Youth labor is an important element in our modern economy, but as students’ consumption habits have changed, so too have their reasons for working. In Consuming Work, Yasemin Besen-Cassino reveals that many American high school and college students work for social reasons, not monetary gain. Most are affluent, suburban, white youth employed in part-time jobs at places like the Coffee Bean so they can be associated with a cool brand, hangout with their friends, and get discounts.
 
Consuming Work offers a fascinating picture of youth at work and how jobs are marketed to these students. Besen-Cassino also shows how the roots of gender and class inequality in the labor force have their beginnings in this critical labor sector.
 
Exploring the social meaning of youth at work, and providing critical insights into labor and the youth workforce, Consuming Work contributes a deeper understanding of the changing nature of American labor.
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Consumption Intensified
The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil
Maureen O'Dougherty
Duke University Press, 2002
Consumption Intensified examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in São Paulo redefined their class during Brazil’s economic crisis of 1981–1994. With inflation soaring to an astounding 2700 percent, their consumption practices intensified, not only in relation to the national crisis but also to the expanding global consumer culture. Drawing on her observations of everyday practices and on representations of the middle class in popular culture, anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty explores both the logic and incoherence of middle- to upper-middle-class Brazilian life.
With the supports of middle-class living threatened—job security, quality education, home ownership, savings, ease of consumption—the means and meaning of “middle class” were thrown into question. The sector thus redefined itself through both class- and race-based claims of moral and cultural superiority and through privileged consumption, a definition the media underscored by continually addressing middle-class Brazilians as consumers—or rather, as consumers denied. In these times, adults became more flexible in employment, and put stakes in their children’s expensive private education. They engaged in elaborate comparison shopping, stockpiling of goods, and financial strategizing. Ongoing desire for distinction and “first- world” modernity prompted these Brazilians to buy foreign goods through contraband, thereby defying state protectionist policy. Discontented with the constraints of the national economy, they welcomed neoliberalism.
By uncovering connections between culture and politics, O’Dougherty complicates understandings of the middle class as a social group and category. Illuminating the intricate relation between identity and local and global consumption, her work will be welcomed by students and scholars in anthropology and Latin American studies, and those interested in consumption, popular culture, politics, and globalization.
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Contacts Desired
Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s
Martin Meeker
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Whether one thinks homosexuals are born or made, they generally are not born into gay families, nor are they socialized to be gay by their peers or schools. How then do people become aware of homosexuality and, in some cases, integrate into gay communities? The making of homosexual identity is the result of a communicative process that entails searching, listening, looking, reading, and finding. Contacts Desired proposes that this communicative process has a history, and it sets out to tell that story.

Martin Meeker here argues that over the course of the twentieth century, a series of important innovations occurred in the networks that linked individuals to a larger social knowledge of homosexuality. He points to three key innovations in particular: the emergence of the homophile movement in the 1950s; the mass media treatments of homosexuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the popularization of do-it-yourself publishing from the late 1940s to the 1970s, which offered bar guides, handmade magazines, and other materials that gay men and lesbians could use to seek one another out. In the process, Meeker unearths a treasure trove of archival materials that reveals how homosexuals played a crucial role in transforming the very structure of communications and urban communities since the postwar era.
 
"Contacts Desired is a valuable and enduring work of scholarship, surely the best book in gay and lesbian history this year."--Gay and Lesbian Review
 
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Contagious
Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
Priscilla Wald
Duke University Press, 2008
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines—of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes—produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The “outbreak narrative” begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales, behaviors, and lifestyles.

Wald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology—to the identification of microbes and “Typhoid Mary,” the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States—to highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation (“social contagion”) and medical theories of bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were affected by—or reflected in—the advent of virology, Cold War ideas about “alien” infiltration, science-fiction stories of brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Contagious is a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines—or refuses to imagine—the next Great Plague.

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Containing the Poor
The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871
Silvia Marina Arrom
Duke University Press, 2001
In 1774 Mexico City leaders created the Mexico City Poor House—the centerpiece of a bold experiment intended to eliminate poverty and impose a new work ethic on former beggars by establishing a forcible internment policy for some and putting others to work. In Containing the Poor Silvia Marina Arrom tells the saga of this ill-fated plan, showing how the asylum functioned primarily to educate white orphans instead of suppressing mendicancy and exerting control over the multiracial community for whom it was designed.
For a nation that had traditionally regarded the needy as having the undisputed right to receive alms and whose affluent citizens felt duty-bound to dispense them, the experiment was doomed from the start, explains Arrom. She uses deep archival research to reveal that—much to policymakers’ dismay—the Poor House became an orphanage largely because the government had underestimated the embeddedness of this moral economy of begging. While tracing the course of an eventful century that also saw colonialism give way to republicanism in Mexico, Arrom links the Poor House’s transformation with other societal factors as well, such as Mexican women’s increasing impact on social welfare policies.
With poverty, begging, and homelessness still rampant in much of Latin America today, this study of changing approaches to social welfare will be particularly valuable to student and scholars of Mexican and Latin American society and history, as well as those engaged in the study of social and welfare policy.
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Containment and Condemnation
Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor
David Ray Papke
Michigan State University Press, 2019
The populations of American cities have always included poor people, but the predicament of the urban poor has worsened over time. Their social capital, that is, the connections and organizations that traditionally enabled them to form communities, has shredded. Economically comfortable Americans have come to increasingly care less about the plight of the urban poor and to think of them in terms of “us and them.” Considered lazy paupers in the early nineteenth century, the urban poor came to be seen as a violent criminal “underclass” by the end of the twentieth. Living primarily in the nation’s deindustrialized inner cities and making up nearly 15 percent of the population, today’s urban poor are oppressed people living in the midst of American affluence. This book examines how law works for, against, and with regard to the urban poor, with “law” being understood broadly to include not only laws but also legal proceedings and institutions. Law is too complicated and variable to be seen as simply a club used to beat down the urban poor, but it does work largely in negative ways for them. An essential text for both law students and those drawn to areas of social justice, Containment and Condemnation shows how law helps create, expand, and perpetuate contemporary urban poverty.
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The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam
Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi' and Tere Vaden
Pluto Press, 2010

The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam brings together the writings of highly influential figures in the field of Islamism in the contemporary Arab world, many of whose writings have never been available before in English.

Addressing the key issues such as human rights, civil society, secularism, globalisation and ummah, and the impact of the West on the modern Arab world, this is the perfect starting point for students and academics looking to understand 'Political Islam' in contemporary Arab and Muslim societies.

The contributors include such important Islamist thinkers and activists as Abdullah Azzam, central to the spread of Islamism in Afghanistan, Sayyid Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, a major Shiite figure in contemporary Lebanon and Ahmad Bin Yousuf, a political advisor to Akram Haniyya in Gaza.

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Contemporary Archaeologies of the Southwest
William Walker
University Press of Colorado, 2011
Organized by the theme of place and place-making in the Southwest, Contemporary Archaeologies of the Southwest emphasizes the method and theory for the study of radical changes in religion, settlement patterns, and material culture associated with population migration, colonialism, and climate change during the last 1,000 years.

Chapters address place-making in Chaco Canyon, recent trends in landscape archaeology, the formation of identities, landscape boundaries, and the movement associated with these aspects of place-making. They address how interaction of peoples with objects brings landscapes to life. Representing a diverse cross section of Southwestern archaeologists, the authors of this volume push the boundaries of archaeological method and theory, building a strong foundation for future Southwest studies.

This book will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as students working in the American Southwest.

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A Contemporary Archaeology of London's Mega Events
From the Great Exhibition to London 2012
Jonathan Gardner
University College London, 2022
The contemporary archaeology of urban mega-events.

This book explores the traces of London’s most significant modern “mega events”: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1951 Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition, and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe, and their organizers self-consciously seek to leave a “legacy” that will endure for decades or more. The book argues that these spectacles must thus be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply transient or short-term phenomena. It explores the long-term history of each event through contemporary archaeology, examining the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary afterlife at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new postwar British identity; and how London 2012 dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste, and heritage in creating a vision of the future.
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Contemporary Asian American Communities
Intersections And Divergences
edited by Linda Trinh Võ and Rick Bonus
Temple University Press, 2002
Once thought of in terms of geographically bounded spaces, Asian America has undergone profound changes as a result of post-1965 immigration as well as the growth and reshaping of established communities. This collection of original essays demonstrates that conventional notions of community, of ethnic enclaves determined by exclusion and ghettoization, now have limited use in explaining the dynamic processes of contemporary community formation.Writing from a variety of perspectives, these contributors expand the concept of community to include sites not necessarily bounded by space; formations around gender, class, sexuality, and generation reveal new processes as well as the demographic diversity of today's Asian American population. The case studies gathered here speak to the fluidity of these communities and to the need for new analytic approaches to account for the similarities and differences between them. Taken together, these essays forcefully argue that it is time to replace the outworn concept of a monolithic Asian America.
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Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance
Christina N. Baker
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Christina N. Baker’s Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a “womanist artistic standpoint” theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees—and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers—Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.
 
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Contemporary Carioca
Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene
Frederick Moehn
Duke University Press, 2012
Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture, given its history as a hub of Brazilian media and culture. In Contemporary Carioca, the ethnomusicologist Frederick Moehn introduces a generation of Rio-based musicians who collaboratively have reinvigorated Brazilian genres, such as samba and maracatu, through juxtaposition with international influences, including rock, techno, and funk. Moehn highlights the creativity of individual artists, including Marcos Suzano, Lenine, Pedro Luís, Fernanda Abreu, and Paulinho Moska. He describes how these artists manage their careers, having reclaimed some control from record labels. Examining the specific meanings that their fusions have in the Carioca scene, he explains that musical mixture is not only intertwined with nationalist discourses of miscegenation, but also with the experience of being middle-class in a country confronting neoliberal models of globalization. At the same time, he illuminates the inseparability of race, gender, class, place, national identity, technology, and expressive practice in Carioca music and its making. Moehn offers vivid depictions of Rio musicians as they creatively combine and reconcile local realities with global trends and exigencies.
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Contemporary Chinese America
Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation
Min Zhou, foreword by Alejandro Portes
Temple University Press, 2009

Contemporary Chinese America is the most comprehensive sociological investigation of the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States—and of their offspring—in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The author, Min Zhou, is a well-known sociologist of the Chinese American experience. In this volume, she collects her original research on a range of subjects, including the causes and consequences of emigration from China, demographic trends of Chinese Americans, patterns of residential mobility in the U.S., Chinese American "ethnoburbs," immigrant entrepreneurship, ethnic enclave economies, gender and work, Chinese language media, Chinese schools, and intergenerational relations. The concluding chapter, "Rethinking Assimilation," ponders the future for Chinese Americans. Also included are an extensive bibliography and a list of recommended documentary films.

While the book is particularly well-suited for college courses in Chinese American studies, ethnic studies, Asian studies, and immigration studies, it will interest anyone who wants to more fully understand the lived experience of contemporary Chinese Americans.

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Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949-1972
An Annotated Bibliography
Meishi Tsai
Harvard University Press, 1979

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Contemporary Culture
New Directions in Art and Humanities Research
Edited by Judith Thissen, Robert Zwijnenberg, and Kitty Zijlmans
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Are the humanities still relevant in the twenty-first century? In the context of pervasive economic liberalism and shrinking budgets, the importance of humanities research for society is increasingly put into question. This volume claims that the humanities do indeed matter by offering empirically grounded critical reflections on contemporary cultural practices, thereby opening up new ways of understanding social life and new directions in humanities scholarship. The contributors argue that the humanities can regain their relevance for society, pose new questions and provide fresh answers, while maintaining their core values: critical reflection, historical consciousness and analytical distance. 
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Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance
Edited by Yutian Wong
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
The definition of Asian American dance is as contested as the definition of “Asian American.” The term encompasses not only a range of national origins but also a dazzling variety of theoretical frameworks, disciplinary methods, and genres—from traditional to postmodern to hip hop.
            The contributors to this volume address such topics as the role of the 1960s Asian American Movement in creating Japanese American taiko groups, and the experience of internment during World War II influencing butoh dance in Canada. Essays about artists such as Jay Hirabayashi, Alvin Tolentino, Shen Wei, Kun-Yang Lin, Yasuko Yokoshi, Eiko & Koma, Sam Kim, Roko Kawai, and Denise Uyehara look closely at the politics of how Asian aesthetics are set into motion and marketed. The volume includes first-person narratives, interviews, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, and comparative ethnic studies.
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Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination
Edited by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual historians of modern Europe. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he was an early leader in the study of fascism and the history of sexuality and masculinity, authoring more than two dozen books. In ContemporaryEurope in the Historical Imagination, an international assembly of leading scholars explore Mosse’s enduring methodologies in German studies and modern European cultural history. Considering Mosse’s life and work historically and critically, the book begins with his intellectual biography and goes on to reread his writings in light of historical developments since his death, and to use, extend, and contend with Mosse’s legacy in new contexts he may not have addressed or even foreseen.

The volume wrestles with intertwined questions that continue to emerge from Mosse’s pioneering research, including: What role do sexual and racial stereotypes play in European political culture before and after 1945? How are gender and Nazi violence bound together? And what does commemoration reveal about national culture? Importantly, the contributors pose questions that are inspired by Mosse’s work but that he did not directly examine. For example, to what extent were Nazism and Italian Fascism colonial projects? How have popular radical right parties reinforced and reimagined ethnonationalism and nativism? And how did Nazi perpetrators construct a moral system that accommodated genocide? Much like Mosse’s own work, the chapters in this book inspire new interventions into the history of gender and sexuality, Jewish identity during the rise of the Third Reich, and the many reincarnations of fascist pageantry and mass politics.
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Contemporary Funeral Rituals of Sa'dan Toraja
From Aluk Todolo to "New" Religions
Michaela Budiman
Karolinum Press, 2013
The Sa’dan Toraja are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. This rigorous academic study by noted expert Michaela Budiman examines the deep cultural shifts among the Toraja during the last century through the lens of their most important ritual— funerals. This book specifically addresses the conversion of the Toraja from their indigenous religion, Aluk Todolo, to Christianity and how this shift is reflected in their contemporary funeral practices and understanding of both death and grief.  
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Contemporary German Editorial Theory
Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Over the past decade, Anglo-American notions of textual construction and editorial theory have begun major paradigm shifts. Many of the key emergent issues of Anglo-American debate--such as theories of versions--are already familiar in German theory. In other respects, including systematic reflection on the design and function of editorial apparatus, the German debate has already produced paradigms and procedures as yet unformulated in English.
Contemporary German Editorial Theory makes available for the first time in English ten major essays by seven German theorists, together with an original introductory meditation by Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the celebrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume thus participates in the paradigm shift in editorial theory that has led both to theoretical reconception of the field and to groundbreaking practical results. Topics discussed include the distinction between historical record and editor's interpretation, the display of multiple versions, concepts of authorization and intention, and the relations of textual theory to approaches like deconstruction and semiotics. The book also includes suggestions for further reading in both languages and a glossary of technical terms.
Contributors are Hans Zeller, Miroslav Cervenka, Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg, Henning Boetius, Siegfried Scheibe, and Gerhard Seidel.
Bringing together the heretofore separate Anglo- American and German approaches will strengthen each separately and prepare the way for a new hybrid combining the advantages of both orientations. This book will interest not only students of Anglo-American or German literature, but all who study cultural construction and transmission.
Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature, University of Munich. George Bornstein is Professor of English, University of Michigan. Gillian Borland Pierce is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan.
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Contemporary Gothic
Catherine Spooner
Reaktion Books, 2006

Modern Gothic culture alternately fascinates, horrifies, or bewilders many of us. We cringe at pictures of Marilyn Manson, cheer for Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and try not to stare at the pierced and tattooed teens we pass on the streets. But what is it about this dark and morbidly morose aesthetic that fascinates us today? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner probes the reasons behind the prevalence of the Gothic in popular culture and how it has inspired innovative new work in film, literature, music, and art. 

Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic subculture over the past few decades and examines the various aspects of contemporary society that revolve around the grotesque, abject, and artificial. The Gothic is continually resituated in different spheres of culture, she reveals, as she explores the transplantation of the “street” Goth style to haute couture runway looks by fashion designers. The Gothic also appears in a number of surprisingly diverse representations, and Spoonerconsiders them all, from the artistic excesses of Jake and Dinos Chapman to the fashions of Alexander McQueen, and from the mind-bending films of David Lynch to the abnormal postmodern subjects of Joel-Peter Witkin’s photography.

In an engaging way, Contemporary Gothic argues that this style ultimately balances a number of contradictions—the grotesque and incorporeal, authentic self-expression and campiness, mass popularity and cult appeal, comfort and outrage—and these contradictions make the Gothic a crucial expression of contemporary cultural currents. Whether seeking to understand the stories behind the TV show Supernatural or to extract deeper meanings from modern literature, Contemporary Gothic is a lively and virtually unparalleled study of the modern Gothic sensibility that pervades popular culture today.

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Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast
Problems, Solutions, and Interpretations
Philip J. Carr
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Representing work by a mixture of veterans and a new generation of lithic analysts, Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast explores fresh ideas while reworking and pushing the limits of traditional methods and hypotheses.
 
The variability in the southeastern lithic landscape over space and through time makes it a dynamic and challenging region for archaeologists.  Demonstrating a holistic approach and using a variety of methods, this volume aims to derive information regarding prehistoric lifeways from lithic assemblages.
 
The contributors use data from a wide temporal span and a variety of sites across the Southeast, ranging from Texas to South Carolina and from Florida to Kentucky. Not merely cautionary tales, these case studies demonstrate the necessity of looking beyond the bag of lithic material sitting in the laboratory to address the key questions in the organization of prehistoric lithic technologies.  How do field-collection strategies bias our interpretations? What is therelationship between technological strategies and tool design? How can inferences regarding social and economic strategies be made from lithic assemblages?
 
Contributors
William Andrefsky Jr. / Andrew P. Bradbury / Philip J. Carr / CarolynConklin /
D. Randall Cooper / Jason L.Edmonds / Jay D. Franklin / Albert C.Goodyear III /
Joel Hardison / Lucinda M. Langston / D. Shane Miller / George H.Odell /
Charlotte D. Pevny / Tara L. Potts /Sarah E. Price / Douglas Sain / Sarah C.Sherwood /
Ashley M. Smallwood /Paul Thacker
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Contemporary Marriage
Kingsley Davis
Russell Sage Foundation, 1985
This fascinating symposium is based on an assumption that no longer seems to need justification: that the institution of marriage is today experiencing profound changes. But the nature of those changes—their causes and consequences—is very much in need of explication. The experts contributing to this volume bring a wide range of perspectives—sociological, anthropological, economic, historical, psychological, and legal—to the problem of marriage in modern society. Together these essays help illuminate a form of relationship that is both vulnerable and resilient, biological and social, a reflection of and an influence on other social institutions. Contemporary Marriage begins with an important assessment of the revolution in marital behavior since World War II, tracing trends in marriage age, cohabitation, divorce, and fertility. The focus here is primarily on the United States and on idustrial societies in general. Later chapters provide intriguing case studies of particular countries. There is a recurrent interest in the impact on marriage of modernization itself, but a number of essays probe influences other than industrial development, such as strong cultural and historical patterns or legislation and state control. Beliefs and expectations about marriage are explored, and human sexuality and gender roles are also considered as factors in the nature of marriage. Contemporary Marriage offers a rich spectrum of approaches to a problem of central importance. The volume will reward an equally broad spectrum of readers interested in the meaning and future of marriage in our society.
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Contemporary Maya Spirituality
The Ancient Ways Are Not Lost
By Jean Molesky-Poz
University of Texas Press, 2006

Since the mid-1980s, when Guatemala returned to civilian rule and achieved relative peace and stability, the Maya have begun openly expressing their spiritual beliefs and practices. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq'ijab' (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices.

Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the recent pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq'ijab'. At the heart of this work, Ajq'ijab' interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. In subsequent chapters, Molesky-Poz explores aspects of Maya spirituality—sacred geography (the reciprocal relationship between the earth and humans, sacred places, and the significance of the cross or quatrefoil map), sacred time (how the 260-day sacred calendar is "the heart of the wisdom of the Maya," the matrix of Maya culture), and ritual practice (the distinct way and method of ancestral study, with special attention to fire ceremonialism). She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.

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Contemporary Northern Irish Society
An Introduction
Colin Coulter
Pluto Press, 1999

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Contemporary Opera in Flux
Edited by Yayoi U. Everett
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the twelve contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. 

Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.
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Contemporary Plays by African American Women
Ten Complete Works
Edited by Sandra Adell
University of Illinois Press, 2015
African American women have increasingly begun to see their plays performed from regional stages to Broadway. Yet many of these artists still struggle to gain attention. In this volume, Sandra Adell draws from the vital wellspring of works created by African American women in the twenty-first century to present ten plays by both prominent and up-and-coming writers. Taken together, the selections portray how these women engage with history as they delve into--and shake up--issues of gender and class to craft compelling stories of African American life. Gliding from gritty urbanism to rural landscapes, these works expand boundaries and boldly disrupt modes of theatrical representation.

Selections: Blue Door, by Tanya Barfield; Levee James, by S. M. Shephard-Massat; Hoodoo Love, by Katori Hall; Carnaval, by Nikkole Salter; Single Black Female, by Lisa B. Thompson; Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, by Lynn Nottage; BlackTop Sky, by Christina Anderson; Voyeurs de Venus, by Lydia Diamond; Fedra, by J. Nicole Brooks; and Uppa Creek: A Modern Anachronistic Parody in the Minstrel Tradition, by Keli Garrett.

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Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West
Care of the Self
Gregory Bracken
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This collection of essays examines urban communities and societies in Asia and the West to shed much-needed light on issues that have emerged as the world experiences its new urban turn. An urbanized world should be an improving place, one that is better to live in, one where humans can flourish. This book examines contemporary practices of care of the self in cities in Asia and the West, including challenges to citizenship and even the right to the city itself. Written by a range of academics from different backgrounds (from architecture and urbanism, anthropology, social science, psychology, gender studies, history, and philosophy) their trans- and multidisciplinary approaches shed valuable light on what are sometimes quite old problems, leading to fresh perspectives and news ways of dealing with them. One thing that unites all of these papers is their people-centred approach, because, after all, a city is its people.
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Contemporary Social Constructionism
Key Themes
Darin Weinberg
Temple University Press, 2015

In Contemporary Social Constructionism, Darin Weinberg provides a detailed, critical overview of the key themes of this school of thought, which explains how phenomena and ways of thinking develop in their social contexts. Weinberg traces the multiple roots of social constructionism, and shows how it has been used, critiqued, and refined within the social and human sciences. 

 

Contemporary Social Constructionism illuminates how constructionist social science developed in relation to positivism, critical and hermeneutic philosophy, and feminism and then goes on to distinguish the concept from postmodernism and deconstructionism. In addition, Weinberg shows how social constructionists have contributed to our understanding of biology, the body, self-knowledge, and social problems. 

 

The result is a contemporary statement of social constructionism that shores up its scientific veracity and demonstrates its analytic power, promise, and influence. The book concludes with a look toward the future of the concept and its use.   

 
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Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico
Death-Defying Acts
By Tamara L. Underiner
University of Texas Press, 2004

From the dramatization of local legends to the staging of plays by Shakespeare and other canonical playwrights to the exploration of contemporary sociopolitical problems and their effects on women and children, Mayan theatre is a flourishing cultural institution in southern Mexico. Part of a larger movement to define Mayan self-identity and reclaim a Mayan cultural heritage, theatre in Mayan languages has both reflected on and contributed to a growing awareness of Mayans as contemporary cultural and political players in Mexico and on the world's stage.

In this book, Tamara Underiner draws on fieldwork with theatre groups in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán to observe the Maya peoples in the process of defining themselves through theatrical performance. She looks at the activities of four theatre groups or networks, focusing on their operating strategies and on close analyses of selected dramatic texts. She shows that while each group works under the rubric of Mayan or indigenous theatre, their works are also in constant dialogue, confrontation, and collaboration with the wider, non-Mayan world. Her observations thus reveal not only how theatre is an agent of cultural self-definition and community-building but also how theatre negotiates complex relations among indigenous communities in Mayan Mexico, state governments, and non-Mayan artists and researchers.

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Contented among Strangers
Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest
Linda Schelbitzki Pickle
University of Illinois Press, 1995

German-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, yet their very success at assimilating has also made them one of the least visible. Contented among Strangers examines the central role German-speaking women in rural areas of the Midwest played in preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Even while living far from their original homelands, these women applied traditional European patterns of rural family life and values to their new homes in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. As a result they were more content with their modest lives than were their Anglo-American counterparts. Through personal recollections--including interesting diary material translated by the author, church and community documents, and migration and census data--Pickle reveals the diversity and richness of the women's experiences.

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Contentious City
The Politics of Recovery in New York City
John Mollenkopf
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
Few public projects have ever dealt with economic and emotional issues as large as those surrounding the rebuilding of lower Manhattan following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Picking up the pieces involved substantial challenges: deciding how to memorialize one of America's greatest tragedies, how to balance the legal claim of landowners against the moral claim of survivors who want a say in the future of Ground Zero, and how to rebuild the Trade Center site while preserving the sacredness and solemnity that Americans now attribute to the area. All the while, the governor, the mayor, the Port Authority, and the leaseholder competed with one another to advance their own interests and visions of the redevelopment, while at least leaving the impression that the decisions were the public's to make. In Contentious City, editor John Mollenkopf and a team of leading scholars analyze the wide-ranging political dimensions of the recovery process. Contentious City takes an in-depth look at the competing interests and demands of the numerous stakeholders who have sought to influence the direction of the recovery process. Lynne Sagalyn addresses the complicated institutional politics behind the rebuilding, which involve a newly formed development commission seeking legitimacy, a two-state transportation agency whose brief venture into land ownership puts it in control of the world's most famous 16 acres of land, and a private business group whose affiliation with the World Trade Center places it squarely in a fight for billions of dollars in insurance funds. Arielle Goldberg profiles five civic associations that sprouted up to voice public opinion about the redevelopment process. While the groups did not gain much leverage over policy outcomes, Goldberg argues that they were influential in steering the agenda of decision-makers and establishing what values would be prioritized in the development plans. James Young, a member of the jury that selected the design for the World Trade Center site memorial, discusses the challenge of trying to simultaneously memorialize a tragic event, while helping those who suffered find renewal and move on with their lives. Editor John Mollenkopf contributes a chapter on how the September 11 terrorist attacks altered the course of politics in New York, and how politicians at the city and state level adapted to the new political climate after 9/11 to win elected office. Moving forward after the destruction of the Twin Towers was a daunting task, made more difficult by the numerous competing claims on the site, and the varied opinions on how it should be used in the future. Contentious City brings together the voices surrounding this intense debate, and helps make sense of the rival interests vying for control over one of the most controversial urban development programs in history. A Russell Sage Foundation September 11 Initiative Volume
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Contentious Lives
Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition
Javier Auyero
Duke University Press, 2003
Contentious Lives examines the ways popular protests are experienced and remembered, individually and collectively, by those who participate in them. Javier Auyero focuses on the roles of two young women, Nana and Laura, in uprisings in Argentina (the two-day protest in the northwestern city of Santiago del Estero in 1993 and the six-day road blockade in the southern oil towns of Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul in 1996) and the roles of the protests in their lives. Laura was the spokesperson of the picketers in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul; Nana was an activist in the 1993 protests. In addition to exploring the effects of these episodes on their lives, Auyero considers how each woman's experiences shaped what she said and did during the uprisings, and later, the ways she recalled the events. While the protests were responses to the consequences of political corruption and structural adjustment policies, they were also, as Nana’s and Laura’s stories reveal, quests for recognition, respect, and dignity.

Auyero reconstructs Nana’s and Laura’s biographies through oral histories and diaries. Drawing on interviews with many other protesters, newspaper articles, judicial records, government reports, and video footage, he provides sociological and historical context for their stories. The women’s accounts reveal the frustrations of lives overwhelmed by gender domination, the deprivations brought about by hyper-unemployment and the withering of the welfare component of the state, and the achievements and costs of collective action. Balancing attention to large-scale political and economic processes with acknowledgment of the plurality of meanings emanating from personal experiences, Contentious Lives is an insightful, penetrating, and timely contribution to discussions of popular resistance and the combined effects of globalization, neoliberal economic policies, and political corruption in Argentina and elsewhere.

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A Contest without Winners
How Students Experience Competitive School Choice
Kate Phillippo
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Seeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyes

While policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice.

Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources.

With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.

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A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity
Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism
Sherina Feliciano-Santos
Rutgers University Press, 2021
A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity is an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding Taíno/Boricua activism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean diaspora in New York City. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, media analysis, and historical documents, the book explores the varied experiences and motivations of Taíno/Boricua activists as well as the alternative fonts of authority they draw on to claim what is commonly thought to be an extinct ethnic category. It explores the historical and interactional challenges involved in claiming membership in, what for many Puerto Ricans, is an impossible affiliation. In focusing on Taíno/Boricua activism, the books aims to identify a critical space from which to analyze and decolonize ethnoracial ideologies of Puerto Ricanness, issues of class and education, Puerto Rican nationalisms and colonialisms, as well as important questions regarding narrative, historical memory, and belonging.
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Contested Citizenship
Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe
Ruud Koopmans
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
From international press coverage of the French government’s attempt to prevent Muslims from wearing headscarves to terrorist attacks in Madrid and the United States, questions of cultural identity and pluralism are at the center of the world’s most urgent events and debates. Presenting an unprecedented wealth of empirical research garnered during ten years of a cross-cultural project, Contested Citizenship addresses these fundamental issues by comparing collective actions by migrants, xenophobes, and antiracists in Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. 

Revealing striking cross-national differences in how immigration and diversity are contended by different national governments, these authors find that how citizenship is constructed is the key variable defining the experience of Europe’s immigrant populations. Contested Citizenship provides nuanced policy recommendations and challenges the truism that multiculturalism is always good for immigrants. Even in an age of European integration and globalization, the state remains a critical actor in determining what points of view are sensible and realistic—and legitimate—in society. 

Ruud Koopmans is professor of sociology at Free University, Amsterdam. Paul Statham is reader in political communications at the University of Leeds. Marco Giugni is a researcher and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva. Florence Passy is assistant professor of political science at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
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Contested City
Art and Public History as Mediation at New York's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
University of Iowa Press, 2018

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. 

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Contested City
Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917-1937
Anthony McElligott
University of Michigan Press, 1998
In the wake of the First World War, many Germans saw the future of their nation as contingent on a vision of municipal progress. In this well-researched study, Anthony McElligott uses local politics as an analytical tool to decipher the bigger picture of the fate of the Weimar Republic. Focusing on the industrial city of Altona, McElligott locates his discussion of the contradictions of the Weimar "local state" along two axes—first, persistent financial, policy, and political conflict between the central and the local state; and, second, the conflicts within the Weimar local state between the displaced and resentful middle classes and the newly enfranchised working class. The Social Democrats used their considerable political influence at the local level to pursue progressive social policies. However, these local experiments in "practical socialism" alienated middle- and lower-middle-class voters without guaranteeing the support of all workers, since dwindling financial resources made it impossible to extend the benefits of the new social programs to many of the unskilled and poorer sections of the working class. Ultimately, the translation of the democratic republican vision into active policy provoked the conservative push for reassertion of central authority in the state. McElligott probes beneath the level of formal party conflicts to reconstruct the "politics of everyday life" at the street level. This study will be of wide interest to historians and political scientists.
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Contested Communities
Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951
Thomas Miller Klubock
Duke University Press, 1998
In Contested Communities Thomas Miller Klubock analyzes the experiences of the El Teniente copper miners during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Describing the everyday life and culture of the mining community, its impact on Chilean politics and national events, and the sense of self and identity working-class men and women developed in the foreign-owned enclave, Klubock provides important insights into the cultural and social history of Chile.
Klubock shows how a militant working-class community was established through the interplay between capitalist development, state formation, and the ideologies of gender. In describing how the North American copper company attempted to reconfigure and reform the work and social-cultural lives of men and women who migrated to the mine, Klubock demonstrates how struggles between labor and capital took place on a gendered field of power and reconstituted social constructions of masculinity and femininity. As a result, Contested Communities describes more accurately than any previous study the nature of grassroots labor militancy, working-class culture, and everyday politics of gender relations during crucial years of the Chilean Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s.
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The Contested Crown
Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation.
 
In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel.
 
Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.
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Contested Ground
The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America
Mike Conway
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, produced by NBC's Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions. While the television industry ultimately awarded the program three Emmys, the U.S. Department of State pressured NBC to cancel the program, and print journalists criticized the network for what they considered to be a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics.

It was not just The Tunnel's subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country's top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
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Contested Memories
Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath
Zimmerman, Joshua D.
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Few issues have divided Poles and Jews more deeply than the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War and the subsequent slaughter of almost ninety percent of Polish Jewry. Many Jewish historians have argued that, during the occupation, Poles at best displayed indifference to the fate of the Jews and at worst were willing accomplices of the Nazis. Many Polish scholars, however, deny any connection between the prewar culture of antisemitism and the wartime situation. They emphasized that Poles were also victims of the Nazis and, for the most part, tried their best to protect the Jews.

This collection of essays, representing three generations of Polish and Jewish scholars, is the first attempt since the fall of Communism to reassess the existing historiography of Polish-Jewish relations just before, during, and after the Second World War. In the spirit of detached scholarly inquiry, these essays fearlessly challenge commonly held views on both sides of the debates. The authors are committed to analyzing issues fairly and to reaching a mutual understanding. Contributors cover six topics:
1. The prewar legacy
2. The deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations during the first years of the war
3. Institutional Polish responses to the Nazi Final Solution
4. Poles and the Polish nation through Jewish eyes
5. The destruction of European Jewry and Polish popular opinion
6. Polish-Jewish relations since 1945
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Contested Reproduction
Genetic Technologies, Religion, and Public Debate
John H. Evans
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Scientific breakthroughs have led us to a point where soon we will be able to make specific choices about the genetic makeup of our offspring. In fact, this reality has arrived—and it is only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread.

Much like past arguments about stem-cell research, the coming debate over these reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) will be both political and, for many people, religious. In order to understand how the debate will play out in the United States, John H. Evans conducted the first in-depth study of the claims made about RGTs by religious people from across the political spectrum, and Contested Reproduction is the stimulating result.

Some of the opinions Evans documents are familiar, but others—such as the idea that certain genetic conditions produce a “meaningful suffering” that is, ultimately, desirable—provide a fascinating glimpse of religious reactions to cutting-edge science. Not surprisingly, Evans discovers that for many people opinion on the issue closely relates to their feelings about abortion, but he also finds a shared moral language that offers a way around the unproductive polarization of the abortion debate and other culture-war concerns. Admirably evenhanded, Contested Reproduction is a prescient, profound look into the future of a hot-button issue.

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Contested Terrain
Reflections with Afghan Women Leaders
Sally L Kitch
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sally L. Kitch explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women’s lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. Kitch's compelling narrative follows the stories of Judge Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani from 2005 through 2013, providing an oft-ignored perspective on the personal and professional lives of Afghanistan's women. Contending with the complex dynamics of a society both undergoing and resisting change, Basel and Afghani speak candidly--and critically--of matters like international intervention and patriarchal Afghan culture, capturing the ways in which immense possibility alternates and vies with utter hopelessness. Strongly rooted in feminist theory and interdisciplinary historical and geopolitical analysis, Contested Terrain sheds new light on the struggle against the powerful forces that affect Afghan women's education, health, political participation, livelihoods, and quality of life. The book also suggests how a new dialogue might be started--in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.
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Contested Territories
Native Americans and Non-Natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700-1850
Charles Beatty-Medina
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A remarkable multifaceted history, Contested Territories examines a region that played an essential role in America's post-revolutionary expansion—the Lower Great Lakes region, once known as the Northwest Territory. As French, English, and finally American settlers moved westward and intersected with Native American communities, the ethnogeography of the region changed drastically, necessitating interactions that were not always peaceful. Using ethnohistorical methodologies, the seven essays presented here explore rapidly changing cultural dynamics in the region and reconstruct in engaging detail the political organization, economy, diplomacy, subsistence methods, religion, and kinship practices in play. With a focus on resistance, changing worldviews, and early forms of self-determination among Native Americans, Contested Territories demonstrates the continuous interplay between actor and agency during an important era in American history.

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Contesting Archives
Finding Women in the Sources
Edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry
University of Illinois Press, 2010

The contributors of Contesting Archives challenge the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, and a historical repository of information. Instead, these historians view it as a place where decisions are made about whose documents--and therefore whose history--is important. Finding that women's voices and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether, they have developed many new methodologies for creating unique archives and uncovering more evidence by reading documents "against the grain," weaving together many layers of information to reveal complexities and working collectively to reconstruct the lives of women in the past.

Global in scope, this volume demonstrates innovative research on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in Spain, Mexico, Tunisia, India, Iran, Poland, Mozambique, and the United States. Addressing gender, race, class, nationalism, transnationalism, and migration, these essays' subjects include indigenous women of colonial Mexico, Muslim slave women, African American women of the early twentieth century, Bengali women activists of pre-independence India, wives and daughters of Qajar rulers in Iran, women industrial workers in communist Poland and socialist Mozambique, and women club owners in modern Las Vegas. A foreword by Antoinette Burton adroitly synthesizes the disparate themes woven throughout the book.

Contributors are Janet Afary, Maryam Ameli-Rezai, Antoinette Burton, Nupur Chaudhuri, Julia Clancy-Smith, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, Malgorzata Fidelis, Joanne L. Goodwin, Kali Nicole Gross, Daniel S. Haworth, Sherry J. Katz, Elham Malekzadeh, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Kathleen Sheldon, Lisa Sousa, and Ula Y. Taylor.

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Contesting Austerity
Social Movements and the Left in Portugal and Spain (2008-2015)
Tiago Carvalho
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Despite the historical and political similarities between Portugal and Spain, the contentious responses to austerity diverged in terms of number, rhythm and players. This book compares the contentious responses to austerity in Portugal and Spain during the Eurozone crisis and the Great Recession between 2008 and 2015. While in Spain a sustained wave of mobilisation lasted for three years, involving various players and leading to a transformation of the party system, in Portugal social movements were only able to mobilise in specific instances, trade unions dominated protest and, by the end of the cycle, institutional change was limited. Contesting Austerity shows that the different trajectories and outcomes in these two countries are connected to the nature and configurations of the players in the mobilisation process. While in Spain actors’ relative autonomy from one another led to deeper political transformation, in Portugal the dominance of the institutional actors limited the extent of that change.
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Contesting Childhood
Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory
Douglas, Kate
Rutgers University Press, 2010
The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a surge in the publication and popularity of autobiographical writings about childhood. Linking literary and cultural studies, Contesting Childhood draws on a varied selection of works from a diverse range of authorsùfrom first-time to experienced writers. Kate Douglas explores Australian accounts of the Stolen Generation, contemporary American and British narratives of abuse, the bestselling memoirs of Andrea Ashworth, Augusten Burroughs, Robert Drewe, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, and Lorna Sage, among many others.

Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. This study enables readers to discover how stories configure childhood within cultural memory and the public sphere.

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Contesting Chineseness
Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants
Sylvia Ang
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.
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Contesting Community
The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing
DeFilippis, James
Rutgers University Press, 2010
What do community organizations and organizers do, and what should they do? For the past thirty years politicians, academics, advocates, and activists have heralded community as a site and strategy for social change. In contrast, Contesting Community paints a more critical picture of community work which, according to the authors--in both theory and practice--has amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes and analyzes the limits and potential of this work.

Covering dozens of groups, including ACORN, Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue Committee, and the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and discussing alternative models, this book is at once historical and contemporary, global and local. Contesting Community addresses one of the vital issues of our day--the role and meaning of community in people's lives and in the larger political economy.
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Contesting Leviathan
Activists, Hunters, and State Power in the Makah Whaling Conflict
Les Beldo
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In 1999, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, the first gray whale in seven decades was killed by Makah whalers. The hunt marked the return of a centuries-old tradition and, predictably, set off a fierce political and environmental debate. Whalers from the Makah Indian Tribe and antiwhaling activists have clashed for over twenty years, with no end to this conflict in sight.
 
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.
 
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Contesting Malayness
Malay Identity Across Boundaries
Edited by Timothy P. Barnard
National University of Singapore Press, 2014
People who call themselves Malay - Melayu - are found in many countries, united by a notional shared identity but divided by political boundaries, divergent histories, variant dialects and peculiarities of local experience. While the term 'Malay' is widely used and readily understood in Southeast Asia, it remains elusive and open to varying interpretations. "Malay" as an identity, or nationality, is one of the most challenging and perplexing concepts in the multi-ethnic world of Southeast Asia. This book assembles research on the theme of how Malays have identified themselves in time and place, developed by a wide range of scholars. The authors include Malaysian anthropologist Shamsul A.B., Indonesian poet Tenas Effendy, and linguists and historians based in Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore and the U.S.A. While the authors describe some of the historical and cultural patterns that make up the Malay world, taken as a whole their work demonstrates the impossibility of offering a definition or even a description of 'Melayu' that is not rife with omissions and contradictions.
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Contesting Publics
Feminism, Activism, Ethnography
Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole
Pluto Press, 2014

Through ethnographic cases and activists’ narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. The book re-examines the relationship between public and private and speaks to a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?

Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.

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Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities
Social Categories, Social Identities, and Educational Participation
Andrew J. Fuligni
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Since the end of legal segregation in schools, most research on educational inequality has focused on economic and other structural obstacles to the academic achievement of disadvantaged groups. But in Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities, a distinguished group of psychologists and social scientists argue that stereotypes about the academic potential of some minority groups remain a significant barrier to their achievement. This groundbreaking volume examines how low institutional and cultural expectations of minorities hinder their academic success, how these stereotypes are perpetuated, and the ways that minority students attempt to empower themselves by redefining their identities. The contributors to Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities explore issues of ethnic identity and educational inequality from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, drawing on historical analyses, social-psychological experiments, interviews, and observation. Meagan Patterson and Rebecca Bigler show that when teachers label or segregate students according to social categories (even in subtle ways), students are more likely to rank and stereotype one another, so educators must pay attention to the implicit or unintentional ways that they emphasize group differences. Many of the contributors contest John Ogbu's theory that African Americans have developed an "oppositional culture" that devalues academic effort as a form of "acting white." Daphna Oyserman and Daniel Brickman, in their study of black and Latino youth, find evidence that strong identification with their ethnic group is actually associated with higher academic motivation among minority youth. Yet, as Julie Garcia and Jennifer Crocker find in a study of African-American female college students, the desire to disprove negative stereotypes about race and gender can lead to anxiety, low self-esteem, and excessive, self-defeating levels of effort, which impede learning and academic success. The authors call for educational institutions to diffuse these threats to minority students' identities by emphasizing that intelligence is a malleable rather than a fixed trait. Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities reveals the many hidden ways that educational opportunities are denied to some social groups. At the same time, this probing and wide-ranging anthology provides a fresh perspective on the creative ways that these groups challenge stereotypes and attempt to participate fully in the educational system.
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Contesting Tears
The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
Stanley Cavell
University of Chicago Press, 1996
What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness. With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies.

Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility.

"Film is an interest of mine," Stanley Cavell has written, "or say a love, not separate from my interest in, or love of, philosophy." In Contesting Tears Cavell once again brilliantly unites his two loves, using detailed and perceptive musings on melodrama to reflect on philosophical problems of skepticism, psychoanalysis, and perfectionism. As he shows, the fascination and intelligence of such great stars as
Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck illuminate, as they are illuminated by, the topics and events of these beloved and enduring films.
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Contesting the Foreshore
Tourism, Society and Politics on the Coast
Edited by Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
This collection of essays examines social, political, and economic relations in primarily European coastal locations through the lens of tourism. The contributors explore the intersecting interests of fishing, tourism, and development and the conflict among local communities and market forces, all of which are infused with the symbolism of the sea as a place of mystery and danger. From the tensions between Cornish villagers and city visitors to the explosion of resort development in Gran Canaria, the authors consider the relationship between local residents, businesses, and tourist newcomers as they vie for status, influence, and, ultimately, for space.
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The Context of Ancient Drama
Eric Csapo and William J. Slater
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Ancient theater has always caught contemporary interest, despite the eclectic nature of the surviving evidence. Tourists wander the remains of buildings at Epidauros and Athens, and generations of people have pondered Medea and Oedipus, yet it can be surprisingly difficult to find reliable, accessible information on these plays and their theaters. The Context of Ancient Drama remedies this situation. It provides, in modern English translation, documents that illustrate all aspects of the drama of antiquity, other than the text of the dramas themselves. For convenience the material is grouped in thematic sections, such as "music," or "judging." The illustrations give well-known examples of the kind of evidence that has survived to us. Plans of theaters are provided, to exemplify the outlines of the buildings' development, and an extensive glossary of terms offers information to the interested amateur and the theater specialist alike. The Context of Ancient Drama will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students and teachers. Theater historians, students of dramatic performance and the visual arts, and students and teachers in literature-in-translation courses will all find much that speaks to them.
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Context Providers
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna
Intellect Books, 2011

Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning. The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared, creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging the scientific community through collaboration, active dialogue, and creative work that challenges the scientific.

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Continental Shifts
Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America
By John D. "Rio" Riofrio
University of Texas Press, 2015

Applying a broad geographical approach to comparative Latino literary and cultural studies, Continental Shifts illuminates how the discursive treatment of Latinos changed dramatically following the enactment of NAFTA—a shift exacerbated by 9/11. While previous studies of immigrant representation have focused on single regions (the US/Mexico border in particular), specific genres (literature vs. political rhetoric), or individual groups, Continental Shifts unites these disparate discussions in a provocative, in-depth examination.

Bringing together a wide range of groups and genres, this intercultural study explores novels by Latin American and Latino writers, a border film by Tommy Lee Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, “viral” videos of political speeches, popular television programming (particularly shows that feature incarceration and public shaming), and user-generated YouTube videos. These cultural products reveal the complexity of Latino representations in contemporary discourse. While tropes of Latino migrants as threatening, diseased foreign bodies date back to the nineteenth century, Continental Shifts marks the more pernicious, recent images of Latino laborers (legal and not) in a variety of contemporary media. Using vivid examples, John Riofrio demonstrates the connections between rhetorical and ideological violence and the physical and psychological violence that has more intensely plagued Latino communities in recent decades. Culminating with a consideration of the “American” identity, this eye-opening work ultimately probes the nation’s ongoing struggle to uphold democratic ideals amid dehumanizing multiethnic tension.

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Contingent Figure
Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment
Michael D. Snediker
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain

At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. 

Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention.

Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.

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Contingent Lives
Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa
Caroline H. Bledsoe
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason—to have as many children as possible.

Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, Contingent Lives explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, Caroline Bledsoe produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives. Her insights will be welcomed by scholars of anthropology and demography as well as by those working in public health, development studies, gerontology, and the history of medicine.
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Contingent Loyalties
State Agents in the Yunnan Borderlands (1856-1911)
Diana Zhidan Duan
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan’s decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state agents, both Han and non-Han, acted on the state's behalf in the borderlands’ affairs while seeking the balance between the interests of the state and their own communities. The state agents competed with each other while utilising and wresting with the state authorities. The dynamic relationship between the state and local actors created another contested facet of modern Yunnan’s transformation. Competing narratives emerged when local actors negotiated and reconstructed their status within the contemporary Chinese nation-state. Bandits became heroes; separatists became patriots; a vibrant regional center became an isolated, exotic, and marginal province of the People’s Republic of China.
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Contingent Maps
Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West
Edited by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Contingent Maps is an appeal to all who read, write, and care about the history of women in the North American West. Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett, former co-editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, argue that the discipline of Western women’s history, despite its many years of accomplishment, remains “the stepsister to both U.S. women’s history and the New Western history.” The problem, they assert, is one of place. Western women’s history remains unhappily chained to one place, Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythical frontier, where white civilization vanquished Indigenous savagery. Drawing on the work of feminist geographers, Gray and Gullett contend that the West is better understood as a place of many places.

Contingent Maps demonstrates how employing place as an analytical tool transforms Western women’s history. Gray and Gullett depict place as not only a physical location but as a way of understanding, as the spatial configuration of power relations that are always in flux. As a place and many places, the West is therefore always being constructed. All maps are contingent, as Gray and Gullett’s reading of the articles in this collection attest. Contingent Maps offers histories of Wests ranging from the nineteenth century to the near present. This synthesis of feminist history and geography has the potential to revitalize the field of Western women’s history.
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The Continuing Storm
Learning from Katrina
Kai Erikson and Lori Peek
University of Texas Press, 2022

More than fifteen years later, Hurricane Katrina maintains a strong grip on the American imagination. The reason is not simply that Katrina was an event of enormous scale, although it certainly was by any measure one of the most damaging storms in American history. But, quite apart from its lethality and destructiveness, Katrina retains a place in living memory because it is one of the most telling disasters in our recent national experience, revealing important truths about our society and ourselves.

The final volume in the award-winning Katrina Bookshelf series The Continuing Storm reflects upon what we have learned about Katrina and about America. Kai Erikson and Lori Peek expand our view of the disaster by assessing its ongoing impact on individual lives and across the wide-ranging geographies where displaced New Orleanians landed after the storm. Such an expanded view, the authors argue, is critical for understanding the human costs of catastrophe across time and space. Concluding with a broader examination of disasters in the years since Katrina—including COVID-19—The Continuing Storm is a sobering meditation on the duration of a catastrophe that continues to exact steep costs in human suffering.

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Continuities in Popular Culture
The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present and Future
Edited by Ray B. Brown and Ronald J. Ambrosetti
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
The humanities are the strongest dynamic that runs from the past into the future. Throughout history, except for the past one hundred fifty years, the strongest element in the humanities has been the culture of the folk. Now it is the everyday culture of a democratic society—popular culture, a key to people’s understanding themselves and their society. These sixteen essays by leading popular culture scholars demonstrate how elements in our everyday life flourished in the past, came to flower today, and will continue to shape us in the future.
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Continuous Improvement
Quality Control Circles in Japanese Industry
Paul Lillrank; Noriaki Kano
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Quality Control Circles (QCCs) are small groups of workers from the same workshop, which meet, often on their own time, to discuss ways to improve the quality of their work. They are supported by management; the circles and the support structure together are called Quality Control Circle (QCC) activity. The phenomenon is widespread in Japan: as of December 1987, 264,899 circles had been registered with more than two million members. QCC activities have spread to more than fifty countries worldwide and can be considered the most famous Japanese organizational innovation to date. The Japanese QCC, in its contribution to business application and theory, may rival the discovery of the informal organization of Hawthorne Studies frame.
The Japanese QCC movement has achieved quite impressive results, which are well described in the Japanese-language literature. Of concern, however, is what sustains and causes the phenomenon. The existing literature is quite thin on these mechanisms and forces.
Our aim in this research is to develop a systematic model of the organizational nature and management of Japanese QCC activities. Quality engineering and group dynamics are not part of this study; the focus is on the supporting arrangements, not on what happens within a circle. [1]
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Continuous Pasts
Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa
Sakiru Adebayo
University of Michigan Press, 2023
In Continuous Pasts, author Sakiru Adebayo claims that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa depicts the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, and continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration. Adebayo argues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa invites critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity—that is to say, the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book also argues that post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa shows the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. It contends that, in most cases in Africa, the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors—and that it is precisely this despairing disposition toward the future that the some writers of post-conflict fiction attempt to confront in their works. On the whole, Continuous Pasts shows how post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa recalibrate discourses of futurity, solidarity, responsibility, justice, survival, and reconciliation. It also contends that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory. Each text analyzed in the book provides, in very interesting ways, an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can ‘remember together’ using what the author describes as an African transnational memory framework.
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The Continuous Path
Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming
Edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Southwestern archaeology has long been fascinated with the scale and frequency of movement in Pueblo history, from great migrations to short-term mobility. By collaborating with Pueblo communities, archaeologists are learning that movement was—and is—much more than the result of economic opportunity or a response to social conflict. Movement is one of the fundamental concepts of Pueblo thought and is essential in shaping the identities of contemporary Pueblos.

The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo notions of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. In this volume, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native community members weave multiple perspectives together to write histories of particular Pueblo peoples. Within these histories are stories of the movements of people, materials, and ideas, as well as the interconnectedness of all as the Pueblo people find, leave, and return to their middle places. What results is an emphasis on historical continuities and the understanding that the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue to do so into the present and the future.

Movement is a never-ending and directed journey toward an ideal existence and a continuous path of becoming. This path began as the Pueblo people emerged from the underworld and sought their middle places, and it continues today at multiple levels, integrating the people, the village, and the individual.
 
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Contours of Change
Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905-1965
Bala Saho
Michigan State University Press, 2018
Based on a previously unexamined body of qadi court records as well as two hundred oral interviews in Wolof and Mandinka, Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905–1965, offers a new perspective on the impact of British rule in West Africa. It focuses on the formation of present-day Banjul and the role of law, religion, and gender relations. Specifically, this volume explores how colonization affected the evolution of women’s understanding of the importance of law in securing their rights, and how urban women used the new qadi court system to fight for greater rights in the domestic sphere. The fascinating cases discussed in the text show that male Muslim judges often were sympathetic to women’s claims, and that, as a result, the qadi court created opportunities for women to acquire property rights and negotiate patriarchal relationships. Contours of Change sheds light on African subjectivities and the broader social, economic, and political changes taking place in colonial Gambian society during the first half of the twentieth century. This text breaks new ground in Senegambian history and makes a significant contribution to British colonial studies, African legal studies, Islam in Africa studies, and women’s history studies.
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Contours of Israeli Politics
Jewish Ethnicity, Religious Nationalism, and Democracy
Hannah M. Ridge
Temple University Press, 2025

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Contours of White Ethnicity
Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America
Yiorgos Anagnostou
Ohio University Press, 2009

In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences.

Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts.

Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.

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Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance
John M. Riddle
Harvard University Press, 1992

John Riddle uncovers the obscure history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the seventeenth century with forays into Victorian England—a topic that until now has evaded the pens of able historians.

Riddle’s thesis is, quite simply, that the ancient world did indeed possess effective (and safe) contraceptives and abortifacients. The author maintains that this rich body of knowledge about fertility control—widely held in the ancient world—was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages, becoming nearly extinct by the early modern period. The reasons for this he suggests, stemmed from changes in the organization of medicine. As university medical training became increasingly important, physicians’ ties with folk traditions were broken. The study of birth control methods was just not part of the curriculum.

In an especially telling passage, Riddle reveals how Renaissance humanists were ill equipped to provide accurate translations of ancient texts concerning abortifacients due to their limited experience with women’s ailments. Much of the knowledge about contraception belonged to an oral culture—a distinctively female-centered culture. From ancient times until the seventeenth century, women held a monopoly on birthing and the treatment of related matters; information passed from midwife to mother, from mother to daughter. Riddle reflects on the difficulty of finding traces of oral culture and the fact that the little existing evidence is drawn from male writers who knew that culture only from a distance. Nevertheless, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, the author pieces together the clues and evaluates the scientific merit of these ancient remedies in language that is easily understood by the general reader. His findings will be useful to anyone interested in learning whether it was possible for premodern people to regulate their reproduction without resorting to the extremities of dangerous surgical abortions, the killing of infants, or the denial of biological urges.

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Contraception and Persecution
Charles E. Rice
St. Augustine's Press, 2014
“Contraceptive sex,” wrote social science researcher Mary Eberstadt in 2012, “is the fundamental social fact of our time.” In this important and pointed book, Charles E. Rice, of the Notre Dame Law School, makes the novel claim that the acceptance of contraception is a prelude to persecution. He makes the striking point that contraception is not essentially about sex. It is a First Commandment issue: Who is God? It was at the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 when for the first time a Christian denomination said that contraception could ever be a moral choice. The advent of the Pill in the 1960s made the practice of contraception practically universal. This involved a massive displacement of the Divine Law as a normative measure of conduct, not only on sex but across the board. Nature abhors a vacuum. The State moved in to occupy the place formerly held by God as the ultimate moral Lawgiver. The State put itself on a collision course with religious groups and especially with the Catholic Church, which continues to insist on that traditional teacher. A case in point is the Obama Regime’s Health Care Mandate, coercing employees to provide, contrary to conscience, abortifacients and contraceptives to their employees. The first chapter describes that Mandate, which the Catholic bishops have vowed not to obey. Rice goes on to show that the duty to disobey an unjust law that would compel you to violate the Divine Law does not confer a general right to pick and choose what laws you will obey. The third chapter describes the “main event,” which is the bout to determine whether the United States will conform its law and culture to the homosexual (LGBTQ) lifestyle in all its respects. “The main event is well underway and LGBTQ is well ahead on points.” Professor Rice follows with a clear analysis of the 2013 Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Part II presents some “underlying causes” of the accelerating persecution of the Catholic Church. The four chapter headings in this part outline the picture: The Dictatorship of Relativism; Conscience Redefined; The Constitution: Moral Neutrality; and The Constitution: Still Taken Seriously? The answer to the last question, as you might expect, is: No. Part III, the controversial heart of the book, prese nts contraception as “an unacknowledged cause” of persecution. The first chapter argues that contraception is not just a “Catholic issue.” The next chapter describes the “consequences” of contraception and the treatment of women as objects. The third chapter spells out in detail the reality that contraception is a First Commandment issue and that its displacement of God as the ultimate moral authority opened the door for the State to assume that role, bringing on a persecution of the Church. The last chapter, “A Teaching Untaught,” details the admitted failure of the American Catholic bishops to teach Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. But Rice offers hope that the bishops are now getting their act together Part IV offers as a “response” to the persecution of the Church three remedies: Speak the Truth with clarity and charity; Trust God; and, most important, Pray. As the last sentence in the book puts it: “John Paul II wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops in 1993: ‘America needs much prayer – lest it lose its soul.’” This readable and provocative book is abundantly documented with a detailed index of names and subjects.
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Contracting Colonialism
Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule
Vicente L. Rafael
Duke University Press, 1993
In an innovative mix of history, anthropology, and post-colonial theory, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of language in the religious conversion of the Tagalogs to Catholicism and their subsequent colonization during the early period (1580–1705) of Spanish rule in the Philippines. By tracing this history of communication between Spaniards and Tagalogs, Rafael maps the conditions that made possible both the emergence of a colonial regime and resistance to it. Originally published in 1988, this new paperback edition contains an updated preface that places the book in theoretical relation to other recent works in cultural studies and comparative colonialism.
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The Contradictions of Neoliberal Agri-Food
Corporations, Resistance, and Disasters in Japan
Kae Sekine
West Virginia University Press, 2016
Employing original fieldwork, historical analysis, and sociological theory, Sekine and Bonanno probe how Japan’s food and agriculture sectors have been shaped by the global push toward privatization and corporate power, known in the social science literature as neoliberalism. They also examine related changes that have occurred after the triple disaster of March 2011 (the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor), noting that reconstruction policy has favored deregulation and the reduction of social welfare.
 
Sekine and Bonanno stress the incompatibility of the requirements of neoliberalism with the structural and cultural conditions of Japanese agri-food. Local farmers’ and fishermen’s emphasis on community collective management of natural resources, they argue, clashes with neoliberalism’s focus on individualism and competitiveness. The authors conclude by pointing out the resulting fundamental contradiction: The lack of recognition of this incompatibility allows the continuous implementation of market solutions to problems that originate in these very market mechanisms.
 
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Contradictory Indianness
Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary
Atreyee Phukan
Rutgers University Press, 2022
As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.
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Contributions from the Museum of Geology, University of Michigan
Volume II
Edited by Eugene S. McCartney
University of Michigan Press, 1928
This volume features a collection of papers originally published between July 10, 1924, and August 3, 1927, and edited by Eugene S. McCartney. Most, but not all, of the contributors were members of the faculties or graduates of the University of Michigan who published on their findings while examining fossils and rock formations. Many of the articles discuss findings from the state of Michigan, including “Occurrence of the Collingwood Formation in Michigan.”
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Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan
Volume III
Edited by Eugene S. McCartney
University of Michigan Press, 1932
This continuation of Contributions from the Museum of Geology features a collection of papers originally published between November 10, 1928, and April 9, 1932, and edited by Eugene S. McCartney. Most, but not all, of the contributors were members of the faculties or graduates of the University of Michigan who published on their findings while examining fossils and fossilized remains. Many of the articles discuss findings from the state of Michigan.
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Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan
Volume V
Edited by Eugene S. McCartney
University of Michigan Press, 1939
This continuation of Contributions from the Museum of Geology features a collection of papers originally published between July 31, 1936, and July 1, 1939, and edited by Eugene S. McCartney. Most, but not all, of the contributors were members of the faculties or graduates of the University of Michigan who published on their findings while examining fossils and fossilized remains. Many of the articles discuss findings from the state of Michigan.
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Contributions to Michigan Archaeology
James E. Fitting, John R. Halsey and H. Martin Wobst
University of Michigan Press, 1968
Three Michigan archaeological sites are covered in this report: the Spring Creek site, in Muskegon County; the Springwells Mound Group, in Wayne County; and the Butterfield site, near Lake Huron in Bay County, Michigan.
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Control and Subversion
Gender Relations in Tajikistan
Colette Harris
Pluto Press, 2004
Control and Subversion makes an important contribution to the study of Muslim societies in general, while also being a unique study of a neglected area – post-Soviet Tajikistan – a country gaining increasing importance in the international arena of Central Asia. The book presents an intimate view of this society, told through ethnographically collected life histories, unusually including men’s as well as women’s. Despite developing significant gender theories (notably reframing work of Judith Butler), and maintaining high academic standards, it remains as readable as a popular novel.
Control and Subversion investigates the relationship of gender to the inner workings of social control, such as exposing ways in which Tajik society threatens men’s masculinity, thereby bringing them to force family members into conformity, irrespective of the suffering this may cause. It examines how masculine and feminine gender characteristics influence personal relationships and explores gender relations at their most intimate – from the secret musings of adolescent girls, through the painful experiences of young men, to the trauma of sexual initiation. Although largely concentrating on contemporary life, the book also discusses historical materials and Soviet influence on Tajik society. Control and Subversion is essential reading for anyone interested in Central Asia, Muslim societies, the lives of Muslim women, or gender in a Muslim context.
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Controlling Anger
The Anthropology of Gisu Violence
Suzette Heald
Ohio University Press, 1997

Controlling Anger examines the dilemmas facing rural people who live within the broader context of political instability. Following Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962, the Bagisu men of Southeastern Uganda developed a reputation for extreme violence.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources including local court records, statistical survey analysis, and intensive fieldwork, Suzette Heald portrays and analyzes the civil violence that grew out of intense land shortage, the marginalization of the Gisu under British rule, and the construction of male gender identity among the Gisu. Now available in a paperback edition with a new preface by the author, Controlling Anger is an important contribution to rural sociology in Africa.

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Controlling Crime
Strategies and Tradeoffs
Edited by Philip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig, and Justin McCrary
University of Chicago Press, 2011

 Criminal justice expenditures have more than doubled since the 1980s, dramatically increasing costs to the public. With state and local revenue shortfalls resulting from the recent recession, the question of whether crime control can be accomplished either with fewer resources or by investing those resources in areas other than the criminal justice system is all the more relevant.

Controlling Crime considers alternative ways to reduce crime that do not sacrifice public safety. Among the topics considered here are criminal justice system reform, social policy, and government policies affecting alcohol abuse, drugs, and private crime prevention. Particular attention is paid to the respective roles of both the private sector and government agencies. Through a broad conceptual framework and a careful review of the relevant literature, this volume provides insight into the important trends and patterns of some of the interventions that may be effective in reducing crime.
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Controlling Our Destiny
A Board Member’s View of Deaf President Now
Philip W. Bravin
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
In March 1988, students at Gallaudet University led a successful protest to demand the selection of the university’s first deaf president. The Deaf President Now (DPN) movement was a watershed event in American deaf history;­ it achieved self-governance for the deaf community and placed Gallaudet in the center of a national media spotlight. Controlling Our Destiny is Philip Bravin’s personal perspective of these momentous events. A lifelong member of the deaf community and proud Gallaudet alumnus, Bravin was a member of the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees and the chair of the presidential search committee during DPN. Although the deaf community had been strongly advocating for a deaf president to lead the university, the board (which had a hearing majority) selected the lone hearing candidate.

       Bravin recounts the discussions and decision-making that happened behind the scenes leading up to and following the ill-fated announcement. He reflects on the integrity of the process and the internal conflict he experienced as a deaf person who supported a deaf president yet felt compelled to abide by his duties as a board member. After the protests, his leadership was recognized when he was selected as the first deaf chair of the board. Photographs and documents add depth to Bravin’s account, many of which will be seen by the public for the first time. I. King Jordan, the first deaf president of Gallaudet, provides a foreword in which he shares his own unique insight into these events.

       Controlling Our Destiny captures the energy and the urgency of DPN. Readers will understand the complexities of the presidential search process and the cultural and historical contexts that triggered the protest. Bravin’s memoir contemplates power, access, community, and the enduring legacy of a movement that inspired deaf people around the world.
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Controlling the Past, Owning the Future
The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East
Edited by Ran Boytner, Lynn Swartz Dodd, and Bradley J. Parker
University of Arizona Press, 2010
What are the political uses—and misuses—of archaeology in the Middle East? In answering this question, the contributors to this volume lend their regional expertise to a variety of case studies, including the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the commercialization of archaeology in Israel, the training of Egyptian archaeology inspectors, and the debate over Turkish identity sparked by the film Troy, among other provocative subjects. Other chapters question the ethical justifications of archaeology in places that have “alternative engagements with the material past.” In the process, they form various views of the role of the archaeologist, from steward of the historical record to agent of social change.

The diverse contributions to this volume share a common framework in which the political use of the past is viewed as a process of social discourse. According to this model, political appropriations are seen as acts of social communication designed to accrue benefits to particular groups. Thus the contributors pay special attention to competing social visions and the filters these impose on archaeological data. But they are also attentive to the potential consequences of their own work. Indeed, as the editors remind us, “people’s lives may be affected, sometimes dramatically, because of the material remains that surround them.”

Rounding out this important volume are critiques by two top scholars who summarize and synthesize the preceding chapters.
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