By empowering clients to be well-informed medical consumers and by delivering care providers from the straitjacket of inadequate diagnostic standards and stereotypes, this book sets out to transform the nature of transgender care.

In an accessible style, the authors discuss the key mental health issues, with much attention to the vexed relationship between professionals and clients. They propose a new professional role; that of "Gender Specialist."

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide definitive information (in the context of consulting health professionals) on hormone administration, aesthetic surgery, and genital reassignment surgery. Chapter 6 takes up the little-examined issue of HIV and AIDS among transgender people. There is also a chapter devoted to issues of transgender people of color, as well as a chapter on transgender adolescents.

The book contains a wealth of practical information and accounts of people's experiences about coming out to one's employer or to one's friends or spouse. Several essays spell out the legal rights of transgender people with regard to insurance, work, marriage, and the use of rest rooms.

The second part of the book consists of thirteen essays on a range of controversial topics. They include three personal stories of transgender life, one essay on the new academic field of Transgender Studies, two essays on legal rights, three essays on medical issues, and two essays on the origins and possible resolution of the conflicts between therapist and client. The authors have also provided useful listings of organizations, centers, and Web sites.

The book has been reviewed by a national committee of professionals and consumers, some of whose members have contributed the essays in the second part of the book.

The helmet-shaped mapiko masks of Mozam­bique have garnered admiration from African art scholars and collectors alike, due to their striking aesthetics and their grotesque allure. This book restores to mapiko its historic and artistic context, charting in detail the transformations of this masquerading tradition throughout the twentieth century.

Based on field research spanning seven years, this study shows how mapiko has undergone continuous reinvention by visionary individuals, has diversified into genres with broad generational appeal, and has enacted historical events and political engagements. This dense history of creativity and change has been sustained by a culture of competition deeply ingrained within the logic of ritual itself. The desire to outshine rivals on the dance ground drives performers to search for the new, the astonishing, and the topical. It is this spirit of rivalry and one-upmanship that keeps mapiko attuned to the times that it traverses.

In Step with the Times is illustrated with vibrant photographs of mapiko masks and performances. It marks the most radical attempt to date to historicize an African performative tradition.

The descendents of twentieth-century southern and central European immigrants successfully assimilated into mainstream American culture and generally achieved economic parity with other Americans within several generations. So far, that is not the case with recent immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. A compelling case study of first- and second-generation Dominicans in Providence, Rhode Island, Encountering American Faultlines suggests that even as immigrants and their children increasingly participate in American life and culture, racialization and social polarization remain key obstacles to further progress. Encountering American Faultlines uses occupational and socioeconomic data and in-depth interviews to address key questions about the challenges Dominicans encounter in American society. What is their position in the American socioeconomic structure? What occupations do first- and second-generation Dominicans hold as they enter the workforce? How do Dominican families fare economically? How do Dominicans identify themselves in the American racial and ethnic landscape? The first generation works largely in what is left of Providence's declining manufacturing industry. Second-generation Dominicans do better than their parents economically, but even as some are able to enter middle-class occupations, the majority remains in the service-sector working class. José Itzigsohn suggests that the third generation will likely continue this pattern of stratification, and he worries that the chances for further economic advancement in the next generation may be seriously in doubt. While transnational involvement is important to first-generation Dominicans, the second generation concentrates more on life in the United States and empowering their local communities. Itzigsohn ties this to the second generation's tendency to embrace panethnic identities. Panethnic identity provides Dominicans with choices that defy strict American racial categories and enables them to build political coalitions across multiple ethnicities. This intimate study of the Dominican immigrant experience proposes an innovative theoretical approach to look at the contemporary forms and meanings of becoming American. José Itzigsohn acknowledges the social exclusion and racialization encountered by the Dominican population, but he observes that, by developing their own group identities and engaging in collective action and institution building at the local level, Dominicans can distinguish themselves and make inroads into American society. But Encountering American Faultlines also finds that hard work and hope have less to do with their social mobility than the existing economic and racial structures of U.S. society.

Cultured States is a vivid account of the intersections of postcolonial state power, the cultural politics of youth and gender, and global visions of modern style in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the 1960s and early 1970s. Andrew Ivaska describes a cosmopolitan East African capital rocked by debates over youth culture, national cultural policy, the rumored sexual escapades of the postcolonial elite, the content of university education, leftist activism, and the reform of colonial-era marriage laws. If young Tanzanians saw themselves as full-fledged participants in modern global culture, their understandings of the modern conflicted with that of a state launching “decency campaigns” banning cultural forms such as soul music, miniskirts, wigs, and bell-bottoms. Promoted by the political elite as a radical break from the colonial order, these campaigns nonetheless contained strong echoes of colonial assumptions about culture, tradition, and African engagements with the modern city. Exploring the ambivalence over the modern at the heart of these contests, Ivaska uses them as lenses through which to analyze struggles around gender relations and sexual politics, youth and masculinity, and the competition for material resources in a Dar es Salaam in rapid flux. Cultured States is a major contribution to understandings of urban cultural politics; national political culture; social struggles around gender, generation, and wealth; and the transnational dimensions of postcolonial histories too often conceived within national frames.

This unflinching examination of the obstacles to economic mobility for low-income families exposes the ugly reality that lies beneath the shining surface of the American Dream. The fact is that nearly 25% of employed adults have difficulty supporting their families today. In eye-opening interviews, twenty-five workers and nearly a thousand people who are linked to them—children, teachers, job trainers, and employers—tell wrenching stories about "trying to get ahead." Spanning five cities over five years, this study convincingly demonstrates that prevailing ideas about opportunity, merit, and "bootstraps" are outdated. As the authors show, some workers who believe the myths end up destroying their health and families in the process of trying to "move up." Jobs Aren't Enough demonstrates that the social institutions of family, education, labor market, and policy all intersect to influence—and inhibit—employment mobility. It proposes a new mobility paradigm grounded in cooperation and collaboration across social institutions, along with revitalization of the "public will."

George Magoon (1851-1929), a notorious
  moose and deer poacher in Maine, was the hero of scores of funny stories of
  how he outwitted game wardens. Preserving these oral histories, Edward Ives
  documents Magoon's life and explores his significance as a folk hero within
  the context of the conservation movement, the cult of the sportsman, and Maine's
  increasingly restrictive game laws.
"A rich and subtle book, an
  important work by a major scholar. . . . It is a major contribution to folklore
  studies, and to history and American studies as well."
  -- Journal of American Folklore
 

Since 1980, The Tape-Recorded Interview has been an essential resource for folklorists and oral historians—indeed, for anyone who uses a tape recorder in field research. Now, Sandy Ives has updated this manual to reflect the current preferences in tape-recording technology and equipment.

When this book was first published, the reel-to-reel recorder was the favored format for fieldwork. Because the cassette recorder has almost completely replaced it, Ives has revised the first chapter, “How a Tape Recorder Works,” accordingly and has included a useful discussion of the differences between analog and digital recording. He has also added a brief section on video, updated the bibliography, and reworked his original comments on tape cataloging and transcription.

As in the first edition, Ives’s emphasis is on documenting the lives of common men and women. He offers a careful, step-by-step tour through the collection process—finding informants, making advance preparations, conducting the actual interview, obtaining a release—and then describes the procedures for processing the taped interview and archiving such materials for future use. He also gives special treatment to such topics as recording music, handling group interviews, and using photographs or other visual material during interviews.

South African rooibos tea is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express “authentic” belonging to the land: Afrikaners, who espouse a “white” African indigeneity, and “coloureds,” who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of “extinct” Bushmen or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere. In Steeped in Heritage Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the postapartheid era.

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance.

Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan.

In this study of the Biase, a small ethnic group living in Nigeria's Cross River State, David Uru Iyam attempts to resolve a long-standing controversy among development theorists: must Third World peoples adopt Western attitudes, practices, and technologies to improve their standard of living or are indigenous beliefs, technologies, and strategies better suited to local conditions?

The Biase today face social and economic pressures that seriously strain their ability to cope with the realities of modern Nigeria. Iyam, an anthropologist and a Biase, examines the relationship between culture and development as played out in projects in local communities.

Western technologies and beliefs alone cannot ensure economic growth and modernization, Iyam shows, and should not necessarily be imposed on poor rural groups who may not be prepared to incorporate them; neither, however, is it possible to recover indigenous coping strategies given the complexities of the postcolonial world. A successful development strategy, Iyam argues, needs to strengthen local managerial capacity, and he offers suggestions as to how this can be done in a range of cultural and social settings.

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.

Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. 

Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.

In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.