A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY2097 have author last names that start with S have author last names that start with S
Harold Schechter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art--the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor--and finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.
In the process, Schechter shows how deeply imbricated the analyst-patient relationship is in this effort. Since the mid-twentieth century, the "real" relationship between analyst and patient is no longer the unremarked background of analysis but its very site. Psychoanalysts seek to validate the centrality of this relationship with theory and, through codified "standards," to claim it as a privileged technique. It has become the means by which psychoanalysts, in seeking to protect their disciplinary autonomy, have unwittingly bound themselves to a neoliberal discourse of regulation.
Thomas J. Scheff brings together the study of communication and the social
psychology of emotions to explore the microworld of thoughts, feelings,
and moods. Drawing on strikingly diverse and rich sources—the findings of
artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and examples from literary
dialogues and psychiatric interviews—Scheff provides an inventive account
of the nature of social life and a theory of motivation that brilliantly
accounts for the immense complexity involved in understanding even the most
routine conversation.
"A major contribution to some central debates in social theory at the
present time. . . . What Thomas Scheff seeks to develop is essentially a
quite novel account of the nature of social life, its relation to language
and human reflexivity, in which he insists upon the importance of a theory
of emotion. . . . A work of true originality and jolting impact. . . .
Microsociology is of exceptional interest, which bears witness to the
very creativity which it puts at the center of human social contact."
—Anthony Giddens, from the Foreword
"Scheff provides a rich theory that can easily generate further exploration. And he drives home the message that sociological work on interaction, social bonds, and society cannot ignore human emotionality."—Candace Clark, American Journal of Sociology
"This outstanding and ground-breaking little volume contains a wealth of original ideas that bring together many insights concerning the relationship of emotion to motivation in a wide variety of social settings. It is strongly recommended to all serious students of emotion, of society, and of human nature."—Melvin R. Lansky, American Journal of Psychiatry
Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.
The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors:
o Paul Burnett
o Oskar Burger
o Minette C. Church
o Philip Duke
o Kevin Gilmore
o Eileen Johnson
o Mark D. Mitchell
o Michael R. Peterson
o Lawrence Todd
The contributors address a series of interlocking themes. Several consider the role of indigenous agency in the processes of colonial interaction, paying particular attention to gender and status. Others examine the ways long-standing native political economies affected, and were in turn affected by, colonial interaction. A third group explores colonial-period ethnogenesis, emphasizing the emergence of new native social identities and relations after 1500. The book also highlights tensions between the detailed study of local cases and the search for global processes, a recurrent theme in postcolonial research.
If archaeologists are to bridge the artificial divide separating history from prehistory, they must overturn a whole range of colonial ideas about American Indians and their history. This book shows that empirical archaeological research can help replace long-standing models of indigenous culture change rooted in colonialist narratives with more nuanced, multilinear models of change—and play a major role in decolonizing knowledge about native peoples.
At Home Among Strangers presents an engrossing portrait of the Deaf community as a complex, nationwide social network that offers unique kinship to deaf people across the country. Schein depicts in striking detail the history and culture of the Deaf community, its structural underpinnings, the intricacies of family life, issues of education and rehabilitation, economic factors, and interaction with the medical and legal professions. This book is a fascinating, provocative exploration of the Deaf community in the United States for scholars and lay people alike.
Posing questions about gender, cultural politics, and identity, Schein examines how non-Miao people help to create Miao ethnicity by depicting them as both feminized keepers of Chinese tradition and as exotic others against which dominant groups can assert their own modernity. In representing and consuming aspects of their own culture, Miao distance themselves from the idea that they are less than modern. Thus, Schein explains, everyday practices, village rituals, journalistic encounters, and tourism events are not just moments of cultural production but also performances of modernity through which others are made primitive. Schein finds that these moments frequently highlight internal differences among the Miao and demonstrates how not only minorities but more generally peasants and women offer a valuable key to understanding China as it renegotiates its place in the global order.
"Scheingold presents a clear, thoughtful discussion of the ways in which rights can both empower and constrain those seeking change in American society. While much of the writing on rights is abstract and obscure, The Politics of Rights stands out as an accessible and engaging discussion."
-Gerald N. Rosenberg, University of Chicago
"This book has already exerted an enormous influence on two generations of scholars. It has had an enormous influence on political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as historians and legal scholars. With this new edition, this influence is likely to continue for still more generations. The Politics of Rights has, I believe, become an American classic."
-Malcolm Feeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, from the foreword
Stuart A. Scheingold is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Washington.
Rhetorica in Motion is the first collected work to investigate feminist rhetorical research methods in both contemporary and historical contexts. The contributors analyze the decision-making processes and methodologies employed in deciphering the origins, meanings, theories, workings, and manifestations of feminist rhetoric.
The volume examines familiar themes, such as archival, literary, and online research, but also looks to other areas of rhetoric, such as disability studies; gerontology/aging studies; Latina/o, queer, and transgender studies; performance studies; and transnational feminisms in both the United States and larger geopolitical spaces. Rhetorica in Motion incorporates previous views of feminist research, outlines a set of principles that guides current methods, and develops models for undertaking future inquiry, including working as individuals or balancing the dynamics of group research. The text explores how feminist research embodies what has come before and reflects what researchers, institutions, and instructors bring to it and what it brings to them. Underlying the discovery of this volume is the understanding that feminist rhetoric is in constant motion in a dynamic that resists definition.
To explain why this industry had such a widespread and enduring impact on American literature, Jennifer Schell juxtaposes and analyzes a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling narratives. Drawing on various studies of masculinity, labor history, and transnationalism, Schell shows how this particular type of maritime work, and the traits and values associated with it, helped to shape the American literary, cultural, and historical imagination. In the process, she reveals the diverse, flexible, and often contradictory meanings of gender, class, and nation in nineteenth-century America.
All of the essays in this new collection by Thomas Schelling convey his unique perspective on individuals and society. This perspective has several characteristics: it is strategic in that it assumes that an important part of people's behavior is motivated by the thought of influencing other people's expectations; it views the mind as being separable into two or more parts (rational/irrational; present-minded/future-minded); it is motivated by policy concerns--smoking and other addictions, global warming, segregation, nuclear war; and while it accepts many of the basic assumptions of economics--that people are forward-looking, rational decision makers, that resources are scarce, and that incentives are important--it is open to modifying them when appropriate, and open to the findings and insights of other social science disciplines.
Schelling--a 2005 Nobel Prize winner-- has been one of the four or five most important social scientists of the past fifty years, and this collection shows why.
Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.
From the tombs of the elite to the graves of commoners, mortuary remains offer rich insights into Classic Maya society. In Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul, the anthropological archaeologist and bioarchaeologist Andrew K. Scherer explores the broad range of burial practices among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250–900), integrating information gleaned from his own fieldwork with insights from the fields of iconography, epigraphy, and ethnography to illuminate this society’s rich funerary traditions.
Scherer’s study of burials along the Usumacinta River at the Mexican-Guatemalan border and in the Central Petén region of Guatemala—areas that include Piedras Negras, El Kinel, Tecolote, El Zotz, and Yaxha—reveals commonalities and differences among royal, elite, and commoner mortuary practices. By analyzing skeletons containing dental and cranial modifications, as well as the adornments of interred bodies, Scherer probes Classic Maya conceptions of body, wellness, and the afterlife.
Scherer also moves beyond the body to look at the spatial orientation of the burials and their integration into the architecture of Maya communities. Taking a unique interdisciplinary approach, the author examines how Classic Maya deathways can expand our understanding of this society’s beliefs and traditions, making Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya an important step forward in Mesoamerican archeology.
Through detailed studies of two different orphan support organizations in Uganda, Scherz shows how many Ugandans view material forms of Catholic charity as deeply intertwined with their own ethics of care and exchange. With a detailed examination of this overlooked relationship in hand, she reassesses the generally assumed paradox of material aid as both promising independence and preventing it. The result is a sophisticated demonstration of the powerful role that anthropological concepts of exchange, value, personhood, and religion play in the politics of international aid and development.
After a critical examination of recent historical renderings of neighborhood life, Scherzer focuses on the ecological, symbolic, and social aspects of nineteenth-century community life in New York City. Employing a wide array of sources, from census reports and church records to police blotters and brothel guides, he documents the complex composition of neighborhoods that defy simple categorization by class or ethnicity. From his account, the New York City neighborhood emerges as a community in flux, born out of the chaos of May Day, the traditional moving day. The fluid geography and heterogeneity of these neighborhoods kept most city residents from developing strong local attachments. Scherzer shows how such weak spatial consciousness, along with the fast pace of residential change, diminished the community function of the neighborhood. New Yorkers, he suggests, relied instead upon the "unbounded community," a collection of friends and social relations that extended throughout the city.
With pointed argument and weighty evidence, The Unbounded Community replaces the neighborhood of nostalgia with a broader, multifaceted conception of community life. Depicting the neighborhood in its full scope and diversity, the book will enhance future forays into urban history.
Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story.
In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, an unconventional work that searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical center that Scheub calls "the poem in the story." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in southern Africa and decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Scheub develops an original approach—a blend of field notes, diary entries, photographs, and texts of stories and poems—that guides readers into a new way of viewing, even experiencing, meaning in a story. Though this work is largely focused on African storytelling, its universal applications emerge when Scheub brings the work of storytellers as different as Shakespeare and Faulkner into the discussion.
What is the essence of story? How does the storyteller convey meaning? Leading scholar Harold Scheub tackles these questions and more, demonstrating that the power of story lies in emotion.
While others have focused on the importance of structure in the art of story, Scheub emphasizes emotion. He shows how an expert storyteller uses structural elements—image, rhythm, and narrative—to shape a story's fundamental emotional content. The storyteller uses traditional images, repetition, and linear narrative to move the audience past the story’s surface of morals and ideas, and make connections to their past, present, and future. To guide the audience on this emotional journey is the storyteller’s art.
The traditional stories from South African, Xhosa, and San cultures included in the book lend persuasive support to Scheub’s. These stories speak for themselves, demonstrating that a skilled performer can stir emotions despite the obstacles of space, time, and culture.
With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.
Scheub delves into the importance of trickster mythologies and the shifting relationships between tricksters and heroes. He examines protagonists that figure centrally in a wide range of oral narrative traditions, showing that the true hero is always to some extent a trickster as well. The trickster and hero, Scheub contends, are at the core of storytelling, and all the possibilities of life are there: we are taken apart and rebuilt, dismembered and reborn, defeated and renewed.
“Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review
“In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards
Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association
Spartacus (109?–71 BCE), the slave who rebelled against Rome, has been a source of endless fascination: the subject of myth-making in his own time, and of movie-making in ours. Hard facts about the man have always yielded to romanticized tales and mystifications. In this riveting, compact account, Aldo Schiavone rescues Spartacus from the murky regions of legend and brings him squarely into the arena of serious history.
Schiavone transports us to Italy in the first century BCE, where the pervasive institution of slavery dominates all aspects of Roman life. In this historic landscape, carefully reconstructed by the author, we encounter Spartacus, who is enslaved after deserting from the Roman army to avoid fighting against his native Thrace. Imprisoned in Capua and trained as a gladiator, he leads an uprising that will shake the empire to its foundations.
While the grandeur of the Spartacus story has always been apparent, its political significance has been less clear. What were his ambitions? Often depicted as the leader of a class rebellion that was fierce in intent but ragtag in makeup and organization, Spartacus emerges here in a very different light: the commander of an army whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system. Surprising, persuasive, and highly original, Spartacus challenges the lore and illuminates the reality of a figure whose achievements, and whose ultimate defeat, are more extraordinary and moving than the fictions we make from them.
Do women do science differently? And how about feminists--male or female? The answer to this fraught question, carefully set out in this provocative book, will startle and enlighten every faction in the "science wars."
Has Feminism Changed Science? is at once a history of women in science and a frank assessment of the role of gender in shaping scientific knowledge. Science is both a profession and a body of knowledge, and Londa Schiebinger looks at how women have fared and performed in both instances. She first considers the lives of women scientists, past and present: How many are there? What sciences do they choose--or have chosen for them? Is the professional culture of science gendered? And is there something uniquely feminine about the science women do? Schiebinger debunks the myth that women scientists--because they are women--are somehow more holistic and integrative and create more cooperative scientific communities. At the same time, she details the considerable practical difficulties that beset women in science, where domestic partnerships, children, and other demanding concerns can put women's (and increasingly men's) careers at risk.
But what about the content of science, the heart of Schiebinger's subject? Have feminist perspectives brought any positive changes to scientific knowledge? Schiebinger provides a subtle and nuanced gender analysis of the physical sciences, medicine, archaeology, evolutionary biology, primatology, and developmental biology. She also shows that feminist scientists have developed new theories, asked new questions, and opened new fields in many of these areas.
Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature—one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.
Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature’s Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right.
The contributions to this volume attempt to apply different aspects of Ilya Prigogine's Nobel-prize-winning work on dissipative structures to nonchemical systems as a way of linking the natural and social sciences. They address both the mathematical methods for description of pattern and form as they evolve in biological systems and the mechanisms of the evolution of social systems, containing many variables responding to subjective, qualitative stimuli.
The mathematical modeling of human systems, especially those far from thermodynamic equilibrium, must involve both chance and determinism, aspects both quantitative and qualitative. Such systems (and the physical states of matter which they resemble) are referred to as self-organized or dissipative structures in order to emphasize their dependence on the flows of matter and energy to and from their surroundings. Some such systems evolve along lines of inevitable change, but there occur instances of choice, or bifurcation, when chance is an important factor in the qualitative modification of structure. Such systems suggest that evolution is not a system moving toward equilibrium but instead is one which most aptly evokes the patterns of the living world.
The volume is truly interdisciplinary and should appeal to researchers in both the physical and social sciences. Based on a workshop on dissipative structures held in 1978 at the University of Texas, contributors include Prigogine, A. G. Wilson, Andre de Palma, D. Kahn, J. L. Deneubourgh, J. W. Stucki, Richard N. Adams, and Erick Jantsch.
The papers presented include Allen, "Self-Organization in the Urban System"; Robert Herman, "Remarks on Traffic Flow Theories and the Characterization of Traffic in Cities"; W. H. Zurek and Schieve, "Nucleation Paradigm: Survival Threshold in Population Dynamics"; De Palma et al., "Boolean Equations with Temporal Delays"; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegin, "Energy Analysis and Technology Assessment"; Magoroh Maruyama, "Four Different Causal Meta-types in Biological and Social Sciences"; and Jantsch, "From Self-Reference to Self-Transcendence: The Evolution of Self-Organization Dynamics."
What is the social value of archaeological research to present-day society? Michael Schiffer answers this question with forty-two case studies from a global perspective to demonstrate archaeology’s diverse scientific and humanistic contributions. Drawing on nearly five decades of research, he delivers fascinating yet nontechnical discussions that provide a deeper understanding of what archaeologists do and why they do it.
From reconstructing human evolution and behavior in prehistoric times to providing evidence that complements recorded history or debunks common legends, archaeologists help us understand our human past. They have also played crucial roles in developing techniques essential for the investigation of climate change along with tools for environmental reconstruction. Working for cities, tribes, and federal agencies, archaeologists manage cultural resources and testify in court. In forensic contexts, archaeological expertise enables the gathering of critical evidence. With engaging and lively prose, Archaeology’s Footprints brings to life a full panorama of contributions that have had an impact on modern society.
Behavioral archaeology is an emerging branch of anthropology emphasizing the study of relationships between human behavior and artifacts (material culture) in all times and places. As such, it aspires to make contributions beyond the confines of archaeology to other behavioral sciences and to society in general.
Behavioral Archaeology is a selection of writings by Michael Schiffer, one of the field’s primary proponents. The chapters include important works published between 1972 and 1987, the formative period of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer has crafted a lengthy introduction to the coume, a personal history that contextualizes the development of these works. Also new is the last chapter, which lists—and keys to the preceding chapters—the field’s most important principles, tenets, and premises.
Readers will discover that although behavioral archaeologist have put archaeological inference on a scientific footing and have fostered the growth of experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology as research strategies, behavioral archaeology is not confined to methodology.
Indeed, cultivation of the fields established here is leading to the development of new behavioral science focused on studies of people-artifact interactions. By closely juxtaposing method and theory, principles and applications, science and history, this book illustrates the coherence and scope of behavioral archaeology’s conceptual framework.
This handbook synthesizes the most important principles of cultural and environmental formation processes for both students and practicing archaeologists.
Formation Process of the Archaeological Record embodies a vision that the cultural past is knowable, but only when the nature of the evidence is thoroughly understood. It shows how the past is accessible in practice by identifying variability introduced by the diverse effects of people and nature that in some sum, form the archaeological record.
For students, it is intended as both an introduction and guide in method and theory, field work, and analysis. Practicing archaeologists will find it a valuable checklist of sources of variability when observations on the archaeological record are used to justify inferences.
Since the debut of the New Archaeology in the 1960s, approaches to the science of interpreting the material past have proliferated.
Seeking to find common ground in an increasingly fractious and polarized discipline, a group of archaeological theorists representing various schools of thought gathered in a roundtable, during the fall of 1997. As organizer, Michael Schiffer sought to build bridges that might begin to span the conceptual chasms that have formed in archaeology during the past few decades. Many participants in the roundtable accepted the challenge of building bridges, but some rejected the premise that bridge building is desirable or feasible. Even so, every chapter in the resulting volume contributes something provocative or significant to the enterprise of constructing social theory in archaeology and setting the agenda for future social-theoretic research.
With contributions from every major school of thought, whether informed by evolutionary theory, feminism, chaos theory, behavioralism, or post-processualism, this volume serves as both handbook to an array of theoretical approaches and as a useful look at each school’s response to criticism.
Studying Technological Change synthesizes nearly four decades of research by Michael Brian Schiffer, a cofounder of the field of behavioral archaeology. This new book asks historical and scientific questions about the interaction of people with artifacts during all times and in all places. The book is not about the history or prehistory of technology, nor is it a catalog of methods and techniques for inferring how specific technologies were made or used. Rather, it supplies conceptual tools that can be used to help craft an explanation of any technological change in any society.
The chapters employ a wide range of data classes, demonstrating the versatility and productivity of the approach for fashioning rigorous inferences in history, historical archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and prehistory. By illustrating the strong case approach with convincing case studies from behavioral archaeology, the editors aim to alert the archaeological community about how the process of archaeological inference can be improved.
The fact that men and women continue to receive unequal treatment at work is a point of contention among politicians, the media, and scholars. Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. Just One of the Guys? sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men—people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male—on the job.
Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,” that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, Just One of the Guys? lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.
The numbers are no less shocking in southern Arizona: one in six residents, and one in four children, are food insecure. How can this be in the richest country in the world? This book explores that paradox and the innovative solutions that one organization has developed to create a healthier, more secure tomorrow for the less fortunate among us.
The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFB) is one of the oldest and most respected food banks in America. It is a widely recognized leader not simply in providing hunger relief but in attacking the root causes of hunger and poverty through community development, education, and advocacy. In 2018, Feeding America—the national organization of food banks—named it “Food Bank of the Year.” The CFB serves as a model for all nonprofits to follow, no matter their mission.
This profusely illustrated book chronicles the CFB’s amazing success and evolution from a tiny grassroots hunger-relief organization to one with more than six thousand workers and an annual budget exceeding $100 million. The book gives voice to the thousands of CFB participants past and present, weaving their profiles and quotes throughout the book. These profiles personalize the history of the CFB and give readers an insider’s perspective on the people and events that shaped the food bank’s success. It shows how individuals working together can help prevent hunger and break the cycle of poverty that is its cause.
The aim of Sowing the Seeds of Change is not to laud the CFB’s achievements. It is to demonstrate to readers that the war against hunger, despite the obstacles, can be won. And not tomorrow. Now!
Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives?
In Rockin’ Out of the Box, Mimi Schippers, employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. The author focuses on this sizable section of rock music both because it is widely inclusive of men and women and because it explicitly adopted feminism as its point of departure from mainstream music. Schippers uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain her observations that gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process, she demonstrates, operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles.
Schippers, who spent more than two years frequenting alternative hard rock clubs and concerts in Chicago, conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, this book also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people.
As the African American population grew in size and assertiveness, whites increasingly identified blacks with those factors that most deprived a given space of its middle-class character. Consequently, African Americans came to represent the antithesis of middle-class values, and the white middle class established its identity by excluding blacks from the urban spaces it occupied.
By 1930, racial discrimination rested firmly on gender and family values as well as class. Inequitable law enforcement in the ghetto increased criminal activity, both real and perceived, within the African American community. White Kansas Citians maintained this system of racial exclusion and denigration in part by “misdirection,” either by denying that exclusion existed or by claiming that segregation was necessary to prevent racial violence. Consequently, African American organizations sought to counter misdirection tactics. The most effective of these efforts followed World War II, when local black activists devised demonstration strategies that targeted misdirection specifically.
At the same time, a new perception emerged among white liberals about the role of race in shaping society. Whites in the local civil rights movement acted upon the belief that integration would produce a better society by transforming human character. Successful in laying the foundation for desegregating public accommodations in Kansas City, black and white activists nonetheless failed to dismantle the systems of spatial exclusion and inequitable law enforcement or to eradicate the racial ideologies that underlay those systems.
These racial perceptions continue to shape race relations in Kansas City and elsewhere. This study demystifies these perceptions by exploring their historical context. While there have been many studies of the emergence of ghettos in northern and border cities, and others of race, gender, segregation, and the origins of white ideologies, A City Divided is the first to address these topics in the context of a dynamic, urban society in the Midwest.
Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.
In this significant recovery project, Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. She argues that African American authors and artists--such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others--viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. Schlabach explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street "Stroll" district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She also covers in detail the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group, two institutions of art and literature that engendered a unique aesthetic consciousness and political ideology for which the Black Chicago Renaissance would garner much fame.
Life in Bronzeville also involved economic hardship and social injustice, themes that resonated throughout the flourishing arts scene. Schlabach explores Bronzeville's harsh living conditions, exemplified in the cramped one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that housed many of the migrants drawn to the city's promises of opportunity and freedom. Many struggled with the precariousness of urban life, and Schlabach shows how the once vibrant neighborhood eventually succumbed to the pressures of segregation and economic disparity. Providing a virtual tour South Side African American urban life at street level, Along the Streets of Bronzeville charts the complex interplay and intersection of race, geography, and cultural criticism during the Black Chicago Renaissance's rise and fall.
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach examines the complexities of Black women’s work in policy gambling. Policy provided Black women with a livelihood for themselves and their families. At the same time, navigating gender expectations, aggressive policing, and other hazards of the infromal economy led them to refashion ideas about Black womanhood and respectability. Policy earnings also funded above-board enterprises ranging from neighborhood businesses to philanthropic institutions, and Schlabach delves into the various ways Black women straddled the illegal policy business and reputable community involvement.
Vivid and revealing, Dream Books and Gamblers tells the stories of Black women in the underground economy and how they used their work to balance the demands of living and laboring in Black Chicago.
During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from "fringe elements" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.
Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites—while offering a "solution" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society. Aryan Cowboys exposes the exclusionist message of this "American" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.
Schleier analyzes cinematic works in which skyscrapers are an integral component, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices in these often fictional modern buildings, especially on concepts of gender. Organized chronologically and thematically, she offers close readings of films including Safety Last, Skyscraper Souls, Wife vs. Secretary, Baby Face, The Fountainhead, and Desk Set. Opening with the humorous antics of Harold Lloyd, the premier skyscraper actor of the silent era, the book moves through the disillusionment of the Depression era, in which skyscrapers are employed as players in moralistic, class-conscious stories, to post–World War II and its reimagining of American political and economic values and ends with the complicated prosperity of the 1950s and the lives of white-collar workers and their spouses.
Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, among works of other critical theorists, Schleier creates in this book a model for understanding architecture as a purveyor of desire and class values and, ultimately, contributes broadly to thinking on the rich intersection of the built environment, cinema, and gender.
In the 1940s, British shipping companies began the large-scale recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. On colonial ships, Nigerian sailors performed menial tasks for low wages and endured discrimination as cheap labor, while countering hardships by nurturing social connections across the black diaspora. Poor employment conditions stirred these seamen to identify with the nationalist sentiment burgeoning in postwar Nigeria, while their travels broadened and invigorated their cultural identities.
Working for the Nigerian National Shipping Line, they encountered new forms of injustice and exploitation. When mismanagement, a lack of technical expertise, and pillaging by elites led to the NNSL’s collapse in the early 1990s, seamen found themselves without prospects. Their disillusionment became a broader critique of corruption in postcolonial Nigeria.
In Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea, Lynn Schler traces the fate of these seamen in the transition from colonialism to independence. In so doing, she renews the case for labor history as a lens for understanding decolonization, and brings a vital transnational perspective to her subject. By placing the working-class experience at the fore, she complicates the dominant view of the decolonization process in Nigeria and elsewhere.
The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.
The ritual complexes of the Ehing, a farming people of southern Senegal, embody an elaborate set of prohibitions on social behavior and prescribe the general rules of Ehing social organization. Power is distributed and maintained in Ehing culture by the concept of Odieng (“hatchet”), which as a spirit acts upon human beings much as an ax does upon a tree, falling from above to punish its victims for transgression. Marc R. Schloss’s ethnography of the Ehing is a study of the meaning of Odieng’s power, explaining why its rules are so essential to the Ehing way of life.
Nicholas J. Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners.
From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.
Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter have individually and jointly written and edited a number of critical and reference works, including The English Novel: Twentieth Century Criticism (Vol. 2: Twentieth Century Novelists) and Modern American Literature (Supplement 2). Paul Schlueter's books include The Novels of Doris Lessing and Shirley Ann Grau. June Schlueter, Provost, and Dana Professor of English at Lafayette College, has edited Feminist Readings of Modern American Drama and Modern American Drama: The Female Canon.
In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly reign over Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished as a result of forced labor, execution, starvation, and disease. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, two regime shifts, and a contested U.N. intervention, only one former Khmer Rouge official has been successfully tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in an international court of law to date. It is against this background of war, genocide, and denied justice that Cathy J. Schlund-Vials explores the work of 1.5-generation Cambodian American artists and writers.
Drawing on what James Young labels “memory work”—the collected articulation of large-scale human loss—War, Genocide, and Justice investigates the remembrance work of Cambodian American cultural producers through film, memoir, and music. Schlund-Vials includes interviews with artists such as Anida Yoeu Ali, praCh Ly, Sambath Hy, and Socheata Poeuv. Alongside the enduring legacy of the Killing Fields and post-9/11 deportations of Cambodian American youth, artists potently reimagine alternative sites for memorialization, reclamation, and justice. Traversing borders, these artists generate forms of genocidal remembrance that combat amnesic politics and revise citizenship practices in the United States and Cambodia.
Engaged in politicized acts of resistance, individually produced and communally consumed, Cambodian American memory work represents a significant and previously unexamined site of Asian American critique.
Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated “subjects” of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia to recalibrate these human rights concerns from both sides of the Pacific.
The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The editors of and contributors to The Subject(s) of Human Rights examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.
In this searing personal narrative, the former state senator recounts his fight to expose and reform these acts of government misconduct. Not afraid to cite specific cases of soft corruption in New Jersey politics, he paints a vivid portrait of public servants who care more about political power and personal gain than the public good. By recounting events that he witnessed firsthand in the Garden State, he provides dramatic illustrations of ills that afflict American politics nationwide.
As he identifies five main forms of soft corruption, Schluter diagnoses the state government’s ethical malaise, and offers concrete policy suggestions for how it might be cured. Not simply a dive through the muck of New Jersey politics, Soft Corruption is an important first step to reforming our nation’s political system, a book that will inspire readers to demand that our elected officials can and must do better.
Visit: www.softcorruption.com (http://www.softcorruption.com)
To better understand these experiences, Schmalzbauer draws on interviews with 60 low-income Latino youth who graduated or were set to graduate from Amherst College, one of the most selective private colleges in the United States. The vast majority of these students were the first in their immigrant families to go to college in the U.S. She finds that while most of the students believed attending Amherst provided them with previously unimaginable opportunities, adjusting to life on campus came with significant challenges. Many of the students Schmalzbauer spoke with had difficulties adapting to the cultural norms at Amherst as well as with relating to their non-Latino, non-low-income peers. The challenges these students faced were not limited to life on campus. As they attempted to adapt to Amherst, many felt distanced from the family and friends they left behind who could not understand the new challenges they faced.
The students credit their elite education for access to extraordinary educational and employment opportunities. However, their experiences while in college and afterward reveal that the relationship between educational and social mobility is much more complicated and less secure than popular conversations about the “American Dream” suggest. Many students found that their educational attainment was not enough to erase the core challenges of growing up in a marginalized immigrant family: many were still poor, faced racism, and those who were undocumented or had undocumented family members still feared deportation.
Schmalzbeauer suggests ways elite colleges can better support low-income Latino students and lower the emotional price of educational mobility, including the creation of immigration offices on campus to provide programming and support for undocumented students and their families. She recommends educating staff to better understand the centrality of family for these students and the challenges they face, as well as educating more privileged students about inequality and the life experiences of their marginalized peers.
Meanings of Mobility provides compelling insights into the difficulties faced by low-income Latinos pursuing educational and social mobility in America’s elite institutions.
A fascinating book on the origins of writing.
Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.
In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.
In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.
Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.
In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.
In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.
Top 100 Books on Science, American Scientist, 2001
In 1992, the University of Texas Press published Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform and Before Writing, Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. In these two volumes, Denise Schmandt-Besserat set forth her groundbreaking theory that the cuneiform script invented in the Near East in the late fourth millennium B.C.—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device.
How Writing Came About draws material from both volumes to present Schmandt-Besserat's theory for a wide public and classroom audience. Based on the analysis and interpretation of a selection of 8,000 tokens or counters from 116 sites in Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey, it documents the immediate precursor of the cuneiform script.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science."
In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 3500 and 3000 BC the conventions of writing—everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs—spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.
Schmandt-Besserat's pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art documents a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.
David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings.
Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11.
In a state that locks up a disproportionate number of men and women of color, white prison workers occupy a complicated social position as representatives of institutional authority and bearers of social stigma. The job, by turns dangerous, dull, or dehumanizing, is aided by a quick wit, comedic timing, and verbal agility. The men and women who do this work rely on storytelling, practical jokes, and sarcasm to bond with each other, build flexible relationships with inmates, and create personal identities that work in and out of prison. Schmidt shows how this humorous occupational culture both upholds and undermines prisons as social institutions.
Issues of power and race, as well as sex and gender, infuse Schmidt's groundbreaking analysis, and she also engages with current scholarship about identity, occupational folklore, and family narrative. This eye-opening, provocative book reveals the invisible culture, beliefs, and aesthetics embedded in workplace humor.
"A valuable addition to Latin American and U.S. historiography." —Library Journal
"Schmidt sees American racism, bondholders cultures, the technocratic side of Progressivism, and the National City Bank looting of Haiti as the factors motivating Wilson's 1915 invasion....As a detailed case study in an exceptional manifestation of U. S. imperial control the book will attract a readership beyond students of Caribbean history." —Kirkus
"An important and well-documented account....an interesting case study in twentieth-century imperialism. Schmidt sees the occupation of Haiti as part of a general tendency in American foreign policy...Schmidt analyses in detail the mechanics of the invasion, and discusses the actions, attitudes, and policies of the U.S. administration....A model of academic elegance." —Caribbean Studies
"All the more convincing because the author has used previously inaccessible archive materials." —Journal of American History
This book lays out the two approaches to language policy -- linguistic assimilation and linguistic pluralism -- in clear and accessible terms. Filled with examples and narratives, it provides a readable overview of the U.S. "culture wars" and explains why the conflict has just now emerged as a major issue in the United States.
Professor Schmidt examines bilingual education in the public schools, "linguistic access" rights to public services, and the designation of English as the United States' "official" language. He illuminates the conflict by describing the comparative, theoretical, and social contexts for the debate. The source of the disagreement, he maintains, is not a disagreement over language per se but over identity and the consequences of identity for individuals, ethnic groups, and the country as a whole. Who are "the American people"? Are we one national group into which newcomers must assimilate? Or are we composed of many cultural communities, each of which is a unique but integral part of the national fabric? This fundamental point is what underlies the specific disputes over language policy. This way of looking at identity politics, as Professor Schmidt shows, calls into question the dichotomy between "material interest" politics and "symbolic" politics in relation to group identities.
Not limited to describing the nature and context of the language debate, Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States reaches the conclusion that a policy of linguistic pluralism, coupled with an immigrant settlement policy and egalitarian economic reforms, will best meet the aims of justice and the common good. Only by attacking both the symbolic and material effects of racialization will the United States be able to attain the goals of social equality and national harmony.
With their cameras and notebooks in hand, photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House embarked on an ambitious project to document the libraries committed to serving Arkansas’s smallest communities. Remote Access is the culmination of this fascinating three-year effort, which took the artists to every region of their home state.
Schmidt’s carefully constructed color images of libraries and the communities they serve and House’s rich black-and-white portraits of library patrons and staff shine alongside the authors’ personal essays about their experiences. The pages here come alive with a deep connection to Arkansas’s history and culture as we accompany the authors on visits to a section of the Trail of Tears near Parkin, to the site of the tragic 1959 fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, and to Maya Angelou’s childhood home in Stamps, among many other significant destinations.
Through this testament to the essential role of libraries in the twenty-first century, Schmidt and House have created a clear-eyed portrait of contemporary rural life, delving into issues of race, politics, gender, and isolation as they document the remarkable hard work and generosity put forth in community efforts to sustain local libraries.
The first book-length history of this controversial concept, Susanne Schmidt’s Midlife Crisis recounts the surprising origin story of the midlife debate and traces its movement from popular culture into academia. Schmidt’s engaging narrative telling of the feminist construction—and ensuing antifeminist backlash—of the midlife crisis illuminates a lost legacy of feminist thought, shedding important new light on the history of gender and American social science in the 1970s and beyond.
Informed by the work of seventy-five distinguished historians, this five-volume series sets before us an engaging, panoramic chronicle that extends from antiquity to the present day.
The inaugural volume brings women from the margins of ancient history into the fore. It offers fresh insight into more than twenty centuries of Greek and Roman history and encompasses a landscape that stretches from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Pillars of Hercules to the banks of the Indus. The authors draw upon a wide range of sources including gravestones, floor plans, papyrus rolls, vase paintings, and literary works to illustrate how representations of women evolved during this age. They journey into the minds of men and bring to light an imaginative history of women and of the relations between the sexes.
The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture. Disproportionately the victims are like Duarte-Rodriguez—immigrants, the poor, and people of color. They have largely been blamed and forgotten.
In Right of Way, journalist Angie Schmitt shows us that deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.” They don’t happen because of jaywalking or distracted walking. They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality. These deaths are the forgotten faces of an increasingly urgent public-health crisis that we have the tools, but not the will, to solve.
Schmitt examines the possible causes of the increase in pedestrian deaths as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Her investigation unveils why pedestrians are dying—and she demands action. Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety. Ultimately, Schmitt argues that we need improvements in infrastructure and changes to policy to save lives.
Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 125
Camels Back Cave is in an isolated limestone ridge on the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Recent archaeological investigations there have exposed a series of stratified deposits spanning the entire Holocene era (10,000 BP–present), deposits that show intermittent human occupations dating back through the past 7,600 years. Most human visits to the cave were brief—many likely representing overnight stays—and visitors did not dig pits or move sediment. As a result, fieldworkers were able to recognize and remove thirty-three stratigraphic horizons; radiocarbon analysis provided a pristine, high-resolution chronological sequence of human use. The brevity of visits and the undisturbed nature of the deposits also allowed researchers to identify portions of eight “living surfaces” where they exposed and mapped artifacts and ecofacts across contiguous blocks of units.
Aside from presenting model field techniques, this volume provides new and unique information on regional Holocene climates and biotic communities, cave taphonomy and small mammal hunting, as well as updated human chronologies for Great Basin occupation.
With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive—although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library’s history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels.
Libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book explains book culture for a world where the physical and the virtual blend with ever increasing intimacy.
Part autobiographical journal, part social-historical novel, Wild Man tracks Tobias Schneebaum's fascinating and almost epic life story, from his earliest contemplation of homoerotic desire through his life in Peru, Borneo, and beyond. A young man from New York, Schneebaum "disappeared" in 1955 on the eastern slopes of the Andes. He was, in actuality, living for more than a year among the remote Harakhambut people, discovering a way of being that was strange, primitive, and powerfully attractive to him. This longing to find the "wild man" in other cultures—and in himself—eventually led him on an odyssey through South America, India, Tibet, Africa, Borneo, New Guinea, and Southeast Asia. He lived among isolated forest peoples, including headhunters and cannibals, in regions where few, if any, white men had ever been.
In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their hopes and fears about the postcarbon future led them to prepare for the social breakdown they foresee—all of which are fervently discussed and debated via websites, online forums, videos, and novels. By exploring the worldview of peakists, and the unexpected way that the fear of peak oil and climate change transformed many members of this left-leaning group into survivalists, Schneider-Mayerson builds a larger analysis of the rise of libertarianism, the role of oil in modern life, the political impact of digital technologies, the racial and gender dynamics of post-apocalyptic fantasies, and the social organization of environmental denial.
Urban development after disaster, the fading of black political clout, and the onset of gentrification
Like no other American city, New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina offers powerful insight into issues of political economy in urban development and, in particular, how a city’s character changes after a disaster that spurs economic and political transition. In New Orleans, the hurricane upset an existing stalemate among rival factions of economic and political elites, and its aftermath facilitated the rise of a globally oriented faction of local capital.
In Renew Orleans? Aaron Schneider shows how some city leaders were able to access fragmented local institutions and capture areas of public policy vital to their development agenda. Through interviews and surveys with workers and advocates in construction, restaurants, shipyards, and hotel and casino cleaning, Schneider contrasts sectors prioritized during post-Katrina recovery with neglected sectors. The result is a fine-grained view of the way labor markets are structured to the advantage of elites, emphasizing how dual development produces wealth for the few while distributing poverty and exclusion to the many on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity.
Schneider shows the way exploitation operates both in the workplace and the community, tracing working-class resistance that joins struggles for dignity at home and work. In the process, working classes and popular sectors put forth their own alternative forms of development.
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes determined in 1927 that sterilization was a legitimate means of safeguarding the nation’s health, he was asserting the state’s right to regulate the production of the national body. His opinion represented a culmination of arguments about reproduction and immigration that had been circulating for years but that intensified during the Progressive Era. Arguments about reproductive and immigration practices surged to the foreground, and tectonic shifts in the conceptual schemes and practices of reproduction in the United States followed.
Drawing on feminist historiography and genre studies, Corporal Rhetoric: Regulating Reproduction in the Progressive Era explores the rhetoric of medical research, new technologies, and material practices that shifted the idea of childbirth as an act of God or Nature to a medical procedure enacted by male physicians on the bodies of women made passive by both drugs and discourse. Barbara Schneider considers how efficiency, the hallmark of scientific management, was raised to a cardinal virtue by its inclusions in the powerful mediums of presidential speeches, national educational policies, and eugenics discourse to reclassify babies, long regarded as gifts, as either valuable assets or defective products.
Schneider shows how the legal system drew upon medicine, scientific management, and the emerging discipline of sociology to restrict women’s labor in order to preserve reproductive capacity, categorized by Supreme Court opinions as a public good rather than a private capacity. Throughout, she ties the arguments developed during this era to current debates about mothering rhetorics, reproductive rights, immigration, and conceptions of the nation.
By weaving together medical research reports, clinical practices, case studies, legal opinions and legislative acts, and the epistemology of scientific management, Schneider illuminates the network that women such as Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, Lillian Gilbreth and multiple others negotiated as they sought to give women room to exercise their reproductive capacity. Through her analysis of the machinery of these discourses and the material uptake of their genres in the daily practices of reproductive bodies, Schneider offers a provisional theory of corporal rhetoric that begins to answer the call for a new material theory of the body.
This collection of original essays discusses the increasingly rapid spread of AIDS among women, considering the varying experiences and responses of women of color, lesbians, and economically impoverished women. The essays range widely from policy assessments to case studies, focusing on women as sufferers, caretakers, policy activists, community organizers, and educators.
The critique uses a novel device in that the same set of ethnographic “facts” are looked at through different theories. This reveals a good deal about the different theories. By the same token, of course, this critique goes into the question of what a “fact” of “kinship” might be and how to recognize one either at home or in the field.
Schneider’s critique also uses history to raise cogent questions about how kinship has been studied. But it is not as 20/20 hindsight that history is used. Due respect is paid to the climate of the time, as well as the climatic changes and the ways in which these helped to create the emperor’s clothes. Right, wrong, or indifferent, Schneider’s study of how the emperor “kinship” was dressed and then redressed as the winds of change threatened disarray, proves challenging to the theories by which anthropology lives, as well as to the specifically privileged domain of “kinship.” The implications of this study for a wide range of problems within theoretical anthropology are striking.
In this work, based on conversations with Richard Handler, Schneider tells the story of his days devoted to anthropology—as a student of Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. With a master’s sense of the telling anecdote, he describes his education at Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap and among the Mescalero Apache, and his years teaching at the London School of Economics, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Musing on the current state and the future of anthropology, Schneider’s cast of characters reads like a who’s who of postwar social science. His reflections on anthropological field research and academic politics address some of the most pressing ethical and epistemological issues facing scholars today, while yielding tales of unexpected amusement.
With its humor and irony, its wealth of information and searching questions about the state of anthropology, Schneider on Schneider not only provides an important resource for the history of twentieth-century social science, but also brings to life the entertaining voice of an engaging storyteller.
To show how the statistics can both disguise and highlight problems, Schneider alternates a discussion of the numbers with vivid encounters with individual children and adults: the middle-class black high school student's offhand explanation about how to get a gun; a vital statistics bureau worker's astonishment at his own classification as Hispanic; a young woman's pleasure in holding down a job after teachers dismissed her as learning disabled; and a latchkey child's nightmare of coming home from school to an empty house when she was sick.
This book guides us through the morass of numbers bandied about to describe the state of America's children—what the numbers tell us and what they don't—and it offers a call for action. Comprehensive in its treatment of all groups of children and accessible in style, this book is essential for anyone concerned about children in American society.
Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans—in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses.
Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies.
Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.
When it comes to sizing up America’s public schools, test scores are the go-to metric of state policy makers and anxious parents looking to place their children in the “best” schools. Yet ample research indicates that standardized tests are a poor way to measure a school’s performance. It is time—indeed past time—to rethink this system, Jack Schneider says.
Beyond Test Scores reframes current debates over school quality by offering new approaches to educational data that can push us past our unproductive fixation on test scores. Using the highly diverse urban school district of Somerville, Massachusetts, as a case study, Schneider and his research team developed a new framework to more fairly and comprehensively assess educational effectiveness. And by adopting a wide range of measures aligned with that framework, they were able to more accurately capture a broader array of school strengths and weaknesses. Their new data not only provided parents, educators, and administrators with a clearer picture of school performance, but also challenged misconceptions about what makes a good school.
With better data, Schneider shows, stakeholders at the federal, state, and local levels can undo the damage of present accountability systems and build greater capacity in our schools. Policy makers, administrators, and school leaders can better identify where assistance is needed. Educators can engage in more evidence-based decision making. And parents can make better-informed choices for their children. Perhaps most importantly, better data can facilitate communication among all these groups, allowing them to take collective action toward shared, concrete goals.
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