A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY393 start with S start with S
Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.
Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.
Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.
Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'.
A disturbing exposé of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services’ unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.
Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
Innovative and engaging, Shadow Traces illuminates how photographs shape the history of marginalized people and outlines a method for using such materials in interdisciplinary research.
In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.
Through his ambitious rebuilding plan, the Viceroy sought to assert the power of the colonial state over the Church, the upper classes, and other groups. Agreeing with most inhabitants of the fervently Catholic city that the earthquake-tsunami was a manifestation of God’s wrath for Lima’s decadent ways, he hoped to reign in the city’s baroque excesses and to tame the city’s notoriously independent women. To his great surprise, almost everyone objected to his plan, sparking widespread debate about political power and urbanism. Illuminating the shaky foundations of Spanish control in Lima, Walker describes the latent conflicts—about class, race, gender, religion, and the very definition of an ordered society—brought to the fore by the earthquake-tsunami of 1746.
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications. Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research, Shaky Foundations addresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
In Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, Stephanie Fetta asserts that our bodies are fundamental to how we live and how we make meaning. Anchored by two psychoanalytic theories, bioenergetic analysis developed by Alexander Lowen and affect theory put forth by Silvan Tomkins, Fetta examines Latinx fiction to draw attention to the cultural role of the intelligent, emotional, and communicative body—the soma—in relation to shame. She argues that we bring the soma—the physical, emotive, and social register of our subjectivity—to the text as we do to our lives,proposing that the power of racialization operates at the level of somatic expression and reception through habituated, socially cued behaviors that are not readily subject to intentional control.
Fetta examines shame beyond individual experiences, looking at literary renderings of the cultural practice of racial shaming that are deeply embedded into our laws, hiring practices, marketing strategies, and more. Grounding her analysis in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, Shaming into Brown focuses on exposing the underpinnings of racialized shame and does so through analyzing “scenes of racialization” in prominent works by authors such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Analyzing a Chinese city’s dazzling rise to global megacity status
Until around 1990, Shanghai was China’s premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. Shanghai’s remarkable growth in economy, infrastructure, and global presence has prompted questions about the Shanghai “miracle.” This collection places the city’s unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai’s politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces.
Contributors: Stephen W. K. Chiu, Chinese U of Hong Kong; K. C. Ho, National U of Singapore; John D. Kasarda, U of North Carolina; Hanlong Lu, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences; Tai-lok Lui, Chinese U of Hong Kong; Ann R. Markusen, U of Minnesota; Anthony M. Orum, U of Illinois, Chicago; Yuan Ren, Fudan U Shanghai; Saskia Sassen, Columbia U; Jiaming Sun, Texas A&M U, Commerce; Fulong Wu, Cardiff U; Pingkang Yu, George Washington U; Tingwei Zhang, U of Illinois, Chicago; Zhenhua Zhou, Development Research Center, Shanghai Municipal Government.
The myths, magic, and meaning surrounding shapeshifters are brought vividly to life in John B. Kachuba’s compelling and original cultural history. Rituals in early cultures worldwide seemingly allowed shamans, sorcerers, witches, and wizards to transform at will into animals and back again. Today, there are millions of people who believe that shapeshifters walk among us and may even be world leaders. Featuring a fantastic and ghoulish array of examples from history, literature, film, TV, and computer games, Shapeshifters explores our secret desire to become something other than human.
This eloquent volume examines how memoirs, films, photographs, art, and literature, as well as family conversations and personal remembrances, embody the impulse to preserve what is destroyed. The contributors -- all distinguished women scholars, most of them survivors or daughters of survivors--examine classic memorializations such as Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Roman Vishniac's photographs of prewar Jews as well as several less-well-known works. They also address ways in which children of survivors of the Holocaust--and of other catastrophic traumas--struggle with inherited or vicarious memory, striving to come to terms with losses that centrally define them although they experience them only indirectly.
Shaping Losses considers the limitations of Holocaust representations and testimonies that capture shards of the experience but are necessarily selective and reductive. Contributors discuss artistic efforts to "preserve the rawness" of memory, to resist redemptive closure in Holocaust narratives and public memorials, and to prevent the Holocaust from being sealed in "the cold storage of history." The authors probe the nature of memory and of trauma, studying the use of language within and outside a traumatic context such as Auschwitz and pinpointing the qualities that make traumatic memory ineffable, untransmittable, and perhaps unreliable. Within the "haunted terrain of traumatized memory" that all Holocaust testimonies inhabit, the impulse to give form to emptiness--to shape loss--emerges as a necessary betrayal, a vital effort to bridge the gap between history and memory.
In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams’ formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team’s local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds.
Using extensive, embedded experiences on two NASA spacecraft teams, this is the first book to apply organizational studies of work to the laboratory environment in order to analyze the production of scientific knowledge itself. Engaging and deeply researched, Shaping Science demonstrates the significant influence that the social organization of a scientific team can have on the practices of that team and the results they yield.
In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant, and modern rather than by skin color or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most "authentic" group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.
As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor.
In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor.
This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.
An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.
The AIDS epidemic has touched the lives of all Americans. An entire generation has been forced to redefine the way it looks at intimacy. Our very images of ourselves are being altered in the wake of this tragic illness. Yet we are only now beginning to discover the true extent of the change AIDS has wrought on American society. This massive challenge to public health is creating a fault line beneath our institutions, threatening to undermine much that we have taken for granted about the pillars of our culture. Looking out across the landscape of AIDS, we sense a fundamental shift in the way we think about ourselves, about others, and about government.
Shattered Mirrors is a deeply moving meditation on the impact AIDS is having on American consciousness. AIDS has become a moral lesson for our nation, Monroe Price argues, but not the narrow lesson about the dangers of deviancy that certain segments of society have professed. The AIDS epidemic challenges some of our most cherished ideas about individual autonomy, free expression, fairness, and confidence in the future. As this book points out, the ultimate legacy of the AIDS epidemic is far more than its terrible impact on the health of the citizenry.
As the disease grinds on, several traditional barriers between church and state, government and the media, citizen and consumer have begun to erode, while other barriers of class, race, and lifestyle are growing larger. It is too early to say whether these and similar changes will be permanent, but as long as there is uncertainty about how devastating AIDS will prove to be to our society, we will continue to debate its meaning and how we should respond to the threat it poses to all of us. In the long run, Price maintains, AIDS may force us to reexamine the role government should play in shaping our personal lives. More than this, it may well oblige us to redefine what we mean by identity and community in a democracy under siege.
After the Holocaust, the empty, silent spaces of bombed-out synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish districts were all that was left in many German and Polish cities with prewar histories rich in the sights and sounds of Jewish life. What happened to this scarred landscape after the war, and how have Germans, Poles, and Jews encountered these ruins over the past sixty years?
In the postwar period, city officials swept away many sites, despite protests from Jewish leaders. But in the late 1970s church groups, local residents, political dissidents, and tourists demanded the preservation of the few ruins still standing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this desire to preserve and restore has grown stronger. In one of the most striking and little-studied shifts in postwar European history, the traces of a long-neglected Jewish past have gradually been recovered, thanks to the rise of heritage tourism, nostalgia for ruins, international discussions about the Holocaust, and a pervasive longing for cosmopolitanism in a globalizing world.
Examining this transformation from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Michael Meng finds no divided memory along West–East lines, but rather a shared memory of tensions and paradoxes that crosses borders throughout Central Europe. His narrative reveals the changing dynamics of the local and the transnational, as Germans, Poles, Americans, and Israelis confront a built environment that is inevitably altered with the passage of time. Shattered Spaces exemplifies urban history at its best, uncovering a surprising and moving postwar story of broad contemporary interest.
As Armstrong shows, humans have treated sheep with awe, cruelty or disdain for many thousands of years. Our exploitation of them for milk, meat, and wool—but also for artistic and cultural purposes—has shaped both our history and theirs. Despite all that we owe them we have often dismissed sheep as the least witted and least interesting of mammals: to be accused of “sheepishness” or behaving “like a flock of sheep” is to be denigrated for lack of courage, individuality, or will. Yet, as this book demonstrates, sheep actually possess highly sophisticated social skills and emotional intelligence. Above all, Sheep demonstrates that sometimes the most mundane animals turn out to be the most surprising.
Shells on a Desert Shore describes the Seri knowledge of mollusks and includes names, folklore, history, uses, and much more. Cathy Moser Marlett’s research of several decades, conducted in the Seri language, builds on work begun in 1951 by her parents, Edward and Becky Moser. The language, spoken by fewer than a thousand people today, is considered endangered. Marlett presents what she has learned from Seri consultants over recent decades and also draws from her own childhood experiences while living in a Seri village. The information from the people who had lived as hunter-gatherers provides a window into a lifestyle no longer recalled from personal experience by most Seris today—and perhaps a window into the lives of other peoples who made the Gulf’s shores their home.
The book offers a wealth of information about Seri history, as well as species accounts of more than 150 mollusks from the Seri area on the central Gulf coast. Chapters describe how the people ate mollusks or used them medicinally, how the mollusks were named, and how their shells were used. The author provides several hundred detailed drawings and photographs, many of them archival.
Shells on a Desert Shore is a fresh, original presentation of a significant part of the Seri way of life. Unique because it is written from the perspective of a participant in the Seri culture, the book will stand as a definitive, irreplaceable work in ethnography, a time capsule of the Seri people and their connection to the sea.
From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe, the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic “stagflation,” political scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of “globalization,” as networks of interdependence bound peoples and societies in new and original ways.
The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements. Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental protection, population control, and human rights attracted unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market revolution.
The Shock of the Global examines the large-scale structural upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first time an international system in the throes of enduring transformations.
An examination of the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace, Shoveling Smoke is a pathbreaking and detailed ethnography of the contemporary Indian advertising industry. It is also a critical and innovative intervention into current theoretical debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and visual culture. William Mazzarella traces the rise in India during the 1980s of mass consumption as a self-consciously sensuous challenge to the austerities of state-led developmentalism. He shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship between the local and the global and, ironically, turned advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity.
In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act--and especially her death--into one of the first media spectacles in American history.
In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death, and always--if obliquely--at themselves. At the same time, he reveals how deeply an obsession with race penetrated different facets of American life, from public memory to private fantasy. Concluding the book is a piece of historical detective work in which Reiss attempts to solve the puzzle of Heth's real identity before she met Barnum. His search yields a tantalizing connection between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her master.
Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture.
Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice.
"Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."—Virginia Quarterly Review
The contributors to this volume offer creative and open-minded explorations of the construct of sustainability that are informed by their work with deaf individuals, deaf communities, families of deaf children, and other stakeholders. Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities describes sustainability in relation to:
· identity, resilience, and well-being
· participatory citizenship
· historical perspectives on sign language use in educational contexts
· sign language learning and teaching
· human rights and inclusive education
· literate thought and literacy
· the sign language factor and the development of sign language communities in sub-Saharan Africa
· sign language legislation
These changing communities’ understanding of what is required to become sustainable—in areas such as full participation and citizenship in society, economic well-being, access to quality education, and cultural and linguistic identity—is also taking new forms. This work contributes to the paradigm shifts regarding deaf emancipation and deaf education taking place around the world.
"I didn't want to remain a hick from the mountains... In my cultural naivete I saw McDonald's as a place somehow where modern culture capital could be dispensed. Keeping these memories in mind as years later I monitored scores of conversations about the Golden Arches in the late 1990's, it became apparent that McDonald's is still considered a marker of a modern identity."
So begins a complicated journey into the power of one of the most recognizable signs of American capitalism: The Golden Arches. The Sign of the Burger examines how McDonald's captures our imagination: as a shorthand for explaining the power of American culture; as a symbol of the strength of consumerism; as a bellwether for the condition of labor in a globalized economy; and often, for better or worse, a powerful educational tool that often defines the nature of culture for hundreds of millions the world over.
While many books have offered simple complaints of the power of McDonald's, Joe Kincheloe explores the real ways McDonald's affects us. We see him as a young boy in Appalachia, watching the Golden Arches going up as the—hopeful—arrival of the modern into his rural world. And we travel with him around the world to see how this approach of the modern affects other people, either through excitement or through attempts at resisting McDonald's power, often in unfortunate ways. Through it all, Kincheloe makes clear, with lucidity and depth, the fact that McDonald's growth will in many ways determine both the nature of accepting and protesting its ever-expanding presence in our global world.
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Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
n 1968, Tommie Smith and his teammate John Carlos won the gold and silver medals, respectively, for the 200 meter dash. Receiving their medals on the dais, they raised their fists and froze a moment in time that will forever be remembered as a powerful day of protest. In this, his autobiography, Smith tells the story of that moment, and of his life before and after it, to explain what that moment meant to him.
In Silent Gesture, Smith recounts his life before and after the 1968 Olympics: his life-long commitment to athletics, education, and human rights. He dispels some of the myths surrounding his and Carlos' act on the dais -- contrary to legend, Smith wasn't a member of the Black Panthers, but a member of the US Olympic Project for Human Rights -- and describes in detail the planning and risks involved in his protest. Smith also details his many years after Mexico City of devotion to human rights, athletics, and education. A unique resource for anyone concerned with international sports, history, and the African American experience, Silent Gesture contributes a complete picture of one of the most famous moments in sports history, and of a man whose actions always matched his words.
Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.
Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.
Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.
The methods of historian Bertell Ollman, particularly a dialectical approach and “doing history backwards,” are used to examine small-scale mineral production in Porco, Bolivia. The research is based on nine seasons of archaeological fieldwork and historical research, with a particular focus on labor and technology. Van Buren argues that artisanal mineral production must be understood in relation to large-scale mining rather than as a traditional practice and that the Bolivian case is a culturally specific instantiation of a broader economic phenomenon that began under colonial regimes.
Too many laws, too many lawyers--that's the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principles. In this book, Epstein demonstrates how.
The first four rules, which regulate human interactions in ordinary social life, concern the autonomy of the individual, property, contract, and tort. Taken together these rules establish and protect consistent entitlements over all resources, both human and natural. These rules are backstopped by two more rules that permit forced exchanges on payment of just compensation when private or public necessity so dictates. Epstein then uses these six building blocks to clarify many intractable problems in the modern legal landscape. His discussion of employment contracts explains the hidden virtues of contracts at will and exposes the crippling weaknesses of laws regarding collective bargaining, unjust dismissal, employer discrimination, and comparable worth. And his analysis shows how laws governing liability for products and professional services, corporate transactions, and environmental protection have generated unnecessary social strife and economic dislocation by violating these basic principles.
Simple Rules for a Complex World offers a sophisticated agenda for comprehensive social reform that undoes much of the mischief of the modern regulatory state. At a time when most Americans have come to distrust and fear government at all levels, Epstein shows how a consistent application of economic and political theory allows us to steer a middle path between too much and too little.
Long before today’s culture wars, the “Third Great Awakening” rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women.
Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how revivalists negotiated that era’s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. While most studies of this movement have focused on its male leaders and their interactions with society, Thekla Ellen Joiner raises new questions about gender and race by exploring Third Awakening revivalism as the ritualized performance of an evangelical social system defined by middle-class Protestant moral aspirations for urban America. Rather than approaching these events merely as the achievements of persuasive men, she views them as choreographed collective rituals reinforcing a moral order defined by ideals of femininity, masculinity, and racial purity.
Joiner reveals how revivalist rhetoric and ritual shifted from sentimentalist identification of sin with males to a more hard-nosed focus on females, castigating “loose women” whose economic and sexual independence defied revivalist ideals and its civic culture. She focuses on Dwight L. Moody’s 1893 World’s Fair revival, the 1910 Chapman-Alexander campaign, and the 1918 Billy Sunday revival, comparing the locations, organization, messages, and leaders of these three events to depict the shift from masculinized to feminized sin. She identifies the central role women played in the Third Awakening as the revivalists promoted feminine virtue as the corrective to America’s urban decline. She also shows that even as its definition of sin became more feminized, Billy Sunday’s revivalism began to conform to Chicago’s emerging color line.
Enraged by rapid social change in cities like Chicago, these preachers spurred Protestant evangelicals to formulate a gendered and racialized moral regime for urban America. Yet, as Joiner shows, even as revivalists demonized new forms of entertainment, they used many of the modern cultural practices popularized in theaters and nickelodeons to boost the success of their mass conversions.
Sin in the City shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right’s sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms. Providing cultural and gender analysis too often lacking in the study of American religious history, it offers a new model for understanding the development of a gendered theology and set of religious practices that influenced Protestantism in a period of enormous social change.
"Since when is Fran Drescher Jewish?" This was Chiara Francesca Ferrari's reaction when she learned that Drescher's character on the television sitcom The Nanny was meant to be a portrayal of a stereotypical Jewish-American princess. Ferrari had only seen the Italian version of the show, in which the protagonist was dubbed into an exotic, eccentric Italian-American nanny. Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish? explores this "ventriloquism" as not only a textual and cultural transfer between languages but also as an industrial practice that helps the media industry foster identification among varying audiences around the globe.
At the heart of this study is an in-depth exploration of three shows that moved from global to local, mapping stereotypes from both sides of the Atlantic in the process. Presented in Italy, for example, Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons is no longer a belligerent, alcoholic Scotsman but instead easily becomes a primitive figure from Sardinia. Ironically, The Sopranos—a show built around Italian-Americans—was carefully re-positioned by Italian TV executives, who erased the word "mafia" and all regional references to Sicily. The result of Ferrari's three case studies is evidence that "otherness" transcends translation, as the stereotypes produced by the American entertainment industry are simply replaced by other stereotypes in foreign markets. As American television studios continue to attempt to increase earnings by licensing their shows abroad, Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish? illuminates the significant issues of identity raised by this ever-growing marketplace, along with the intriguing messages that lie in the larger realm of audiovisual cultural exchange.
Sing and Sing On is the first study of the forced migration of musicians out of the Horn of Africa dating from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, a political event that overthrew one of the world’s oldest monarchies and installed a brutal military regime. Musicians were among the first to depart the region, their lives shattered by revolutionary violence, curfews, and civil war. Reconstructing the memories of forced migration, Sing and Sing On traces the challenges musicians faced amidst revolutionary violence and the critical role they played in building communities abroad.
Drawing on the recollections of dozens of musicians, Sing and Sing On details personal, cultural, and economic hardships experienced by musicians who have resettled in new locales abroad. Kay Kaufman Shelemay highlights their many artistic and social initiatives and the ways they have offered inspiration and leadership within and beyond a rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. While musicians held this role as sentinels in Ethiopian culture long before the revolution began, it has taken on new meanings and contours in the Ethiopian diaspora. The book details the ongoing creativity of these musicians while exploring the attraction of return to their Ethiopian homeland over the course of decades abroad. Ultimately, Shelemay shows that musicians are uniquely positioned to serve this sentinel role as both guardians and challengers of cultural heritage.
Laura Tunbridge explores the renewed vitality of this refugee musical form between the world wars, offering a fresh perspective on a period that was pervaded by anxieties of displacement. Through richly varied case studies, Singing in the Age of Anxiety traces how lieder were circulated, presented, and consumed in metropolitan contexts, shedding new light on how music facilitated unlikely crossings of nationalist and internationalist ideologies during the interwar period.
Pundits often wax eloquent about the power of music, asserting that it can, in some positive way, change the world. Such statements often rest on an unexamined claim that music can and does foster social justice. Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change tackles the premise underlying such claims, analyzing groups of amateur singers who are explicitly committed to an agenda of social justice.
Combining ethnographic observation derived from her experience as a student and performer of South Indian music with close readings of archival materials, Weidman traces the emergence of this politics of voice through compelling analyses of the relationship between vocal sound and instrumental imitation, conventions of performance and staging, the status of women as performers, debates about language and music, and the relationship between oral tradition and technologies of printing and sound reproduction. Through her sustained exploration of the way “voice” is elaborated as a trope of modern subjectivity, national identity, and cultural authenticity, Weidman provides a model for thinking about the voice in anthropological and historical terms. In so doing, she shows that modernity is characterized as much by particular ideas about orality, aurality, and the voice as it is by regimes of visuality.
This book is a study of a Soviet cultural phenomenon of the 1950s through the 1980s known as guitar poetry—songs accompanied by guitar and considered poetry in much the same way as those of, for example, Bob Dylan. Platonov’s is the most comprehensive book in English to date to analyze guitar poetry, which has rarely received scholarly attention outside of Russia. Going well beyond the conventional, text-centered view of guitar poetry as a form of political or artistic dissent, largely a function of the Cold War climate in which it began, Platonov argues for a more complex understanding of guitar poetry as a means of self-invention and community formation. Although grounded in literary studies, the book effectively brings historical, anthropological, and musicological perspectives to bear on an understudied phenomenon of the post-Stalin period.
2003 — Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Award – The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write "proper" English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to "talk in a way that feel peculiar to [their] mind," as a character in Alice Walker's The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself.
Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.
In a new work anticipating the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Patrice Higonnet demonstrates why the American and French Revolutions, although roughly contemporaneous and inspired by many of the same ideals, followed utterly different trajectories: the Americans proceeded to stabilize and build upon their revolution, while the French stumbled from bloodbath to republic to empire to monarchy again.
Eighteenth-century American society, individualistic to a degree, nevertheless managed to ground its politics in communitarian philosophy and to deny the existence of social cleavages, thus creating a pluralist ideology that successfully balanced the two strains. In contrast, argues Higonnet, individualistic politics in France collapsed in 1791 for lack of a foundation, and French society drifted toward terrorism as the rival claims of libertarian and communitarian principles struggled on the national scene. Higonnet works out these ideas in a learned and persuasive new perspective on the two major democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century.
This is a book for serious readers of history that can also refresh college courses in American history, French history, the history of revolutions, comparative studies, intellectual history, and the history of the eighteenth century in the Western world.
"Intellectually deft and lively to read, Skate Life is an important addition to the literature on youth cultures, contemporary masculinity, and the role of media in identity formation."
---Janice A. Radway, Northwestern University, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
"With her elegant research design and sophisticated array of anthropological and media studies approaches, Emily Chivers Yochim has produced one of the best books about race, gender, and class that I have read in the last ten years. In a moment where celebratory studies of youth, youth subcultures, and their relationship to media abound, this book stands as a brilliantly argued analysis of the limitations of youth subcultures and their ambiguous relationship to mainstream commercial culture."
---Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California
"Yochim has made a valuable contribution to media and cultural studies as well as youth and American studies by conducting this research and by coining the phrase 'corresponding cultures,' which conceptualizes the complex and dynamic processes skateboarders employ to negotiate their identities as part of both mainstream and counter-cultures."
---JoEllen Fisherkeller, New York University
Skate Life examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (such as, for example, Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Dogtown and Z-Boys). The book uses these elements to argue that adolescent boys can both critique dominant norms of masculinity and maintain the power that white heterosexual masculinity offers. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of "corresponding cultures," conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both argue with and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, Skate Life asks important questions of the literature on youth and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities.
Emily Chivers Yochim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts, Allegheny College.
Cover design by Brian V. Smith
Ostfeld and Yadon surveyed over 1,300 people about their political views, including party affiliation, their opinions on welfare, and the importance of speaking English in the U.S. The authors created a matrix grounded in their “Roots of Race” framework, which predicts the relationship between skin color and political attitudes for each ethnoracial group based on the blurriness of the group’s boundaries and historical levels of privilege. They draw upon three distinct measures of skin color to conceptualize the relationship between skin color and political views: “Machine-Rated Skin Color,” measured with a light-reflectance meter; “Self-Assessed Skin Color,” using the Yadon-Ostfeld Skin Color Scale; and “Skin Color Discrepancy,” the difference between one’s Machine-Rated and Self-Assessed Skin Color.
Ostfeld and Yadon examine patterns that emerge among these measures, and their relationships with life experiences and political stances. Among Latinos, a group with relatively blurry group boundaries and low levels of historical privilege, the authors find a robust relationship between political views and Self-Assessed Skin Color. Latinos who overestimate the lightness of their skin color are more likely to hold conservative views on current racialized political issues, such as policing. Latinos who overestimate the darkness of their skin color, on the other hand, are more likely to hold liberal political views. As America’s major political parties remain divided on issues of race, this suggests that for Latinos, self-reported skin color is used as a means of aligning oneself with valued political coalitions.
African Americans, another group with low levels of historical privilege but with more clearly defined group boundaries, demonstrated no significant relationship between skin color and political attitudes. Thus, the lived experiences associated with being African American appeared to supersede the differences in life experiences due to skin color.
Whites, a group with more historical privilege and increasingly blurry group boundaries, showed a clear relationship between machine-assessed skin color and attitudes on political issues. Those with darker Machine-Rated Skin Color are more likely to hold conservative views, suggesting that they are responding to the threat of losing their privilege in a multicultural society.
At a time when the U.S. is both more diverse and politically divided, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in Americais a timely account of the ways in which skin color and politics are intertwined.
How does the notion of colorblind equality fit with the social and economic realities of black Americans? Challenging the increasingly popular argument that blacks should settle down, stop whining, and get jobs, Skin Trade insists that racism remains America's premier national story and its grossest national product. From Aunt Jemima Pancakes to ethnic Barbie dolls, corporate America peddles racial and gender stereotypes, packaging and selling them to us as breakfast food or toys for our kids.
Moving from the realm of child's play through the academy and the justice system, Ann duCille draws on icons of popular culture to demonstrate that it isn't just race and gender that matter in America but race and gender as reducible to skin color, body structure, and other visible signs of difference. She reveals that Mattel, Inc., uses stereotypes of gender, race, and cultural difference to mark--and market--its Barbie dolls as female, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. The popularity of these dolls suggests the degree to which we have internalized dominant definitions of self and other.
In a similar move, Skin Trade interrogates the popular discourse surrounding the trial of O. J. Simpson, arguing that much of the mainstream coverage of the case was a racially coded message equally dependent on stereotypes. Focusing on Newsweek and Time in particular, duCille shows how the former All-American was depicted as un-American. She explores other collusions and collisions among race, gender, and capital as well. Especially concerned with superficial distinctions perpetuated within the academic community, the author argues that the academy indulges in its own skin trade in which both race and gender are hot properties.
By turns biting, humorous, and hopeful, Skin Trade is always riveting, full of strange connections and unexpected insights.
When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.
With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.
Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.
In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil.
This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East—an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.
Isaac Royall (1677-1739) was the largest slave owner in Massachusetts in the mid- eighteenth century, and in this book the Royall family and their slaves become the central characters in a compelling cultural-historical narrative. The family's ties to both Massachusetts and Antigua provide a comparative perspective on the transcontinental development of modern ideologies of individualism, colonialism, slavery, and race.
Alexandra A. Chan examines the critical role of material culture in the construction, mediation, and maintenance of social identities and relationships between slaves and masters at the farm. She explores landscapes and artifacts discovered at the site not just as inanimate objects or “cultural leftovers,” but rather as physical embodiments of the assumptions, attitudes, and values of the people who built, shaped, or used them. These material things, she argues, provide a portal into the mind-set of people long gone-not just of the Royall family who controlled much of the material world at the farm, but also of the enslaved, who made up the majority of inhabitants at the site, and who left few other records of their experience.
Using traditional archaeological techniques and analysis, as well as theoretical per- spectives and representational styles of post-processualist schools of thought, Slavery in the Age of Reason is an innovative volume that portrays the Royall family and the people they enslaved “from the inside out.” It should put to rest any lingering myth that the peculiar institution was any less harsh or complex when found in the North.
Alexandra A.Chan currently works in cultural resource management as an archaeolog- ical consultant and principal investigator. As assistant professor of anthropology at Vassar College, 2001-2004, she also developed numerous courses in historical archaeology, archaeological ethics, comparative colonialism, and the archaeology of early African America. She was the project director of the excavations at the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, 2000-2001, and continues to serve on the Academic Advisory Council of the museum.
Slavery’s Descendants brings together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation’s histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all.
The stories in Slavery’s Descendants deal with harrowing topics—rape, lynching, cruelty, shame—but they also describe acts of generosity, gratitude, and love. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery to reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time.
Funding for the production of this book was provided by Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund (https://www.furthermore.org).
Smell and History collects many of the most important recent essays on the history of scent, aromas, perfumes, and ways of smelling. With an introduction by Mark M. Smith—one of the leading social and cultural historians at work today and the preeminent champion in the United States of the emerging field of sensory history—the volume introduces to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to historians of all fields the richness, relevance, and insightfulness of the olfactory to historical study.
Ranging from antiquity to the present, these ten essays, most of them published since 2003, consider how olfaction and scent have shaped the history of medicine, gender, race-making, class formation, religion, urbanization, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization; how habits and practices of smelling informed ideas about the Enlightenment, modernity, and memory; how smell shaped perceptions of progress and civilization; and how people throughout history have used smell as a way to organize categories and inform worldviews.
The 1966 edition of the leading medical textbook states that pregnant women can safely smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet today, women who smoke during pregnancy are among the most vilified figures in public health campaigns. Laury Oaks argues this shift is not due solely to medical findings indicating that cigarette smoking may harm the fetus. Also responsible are a variety of social factors that converged more than a decade ago to construct the demonized category of the “pregnant smoker.”
This book charts the emergence of smoking during pregnancy as a public health concern and social problem. Oaks looks at the emphasis public health educators place on individual responsibility, the current legal and social assertion of fetal personhood, the changing expectations of pregnant and prepregnant women, and the advent of antismoking campaigns. She explores how public health educators discuss “the problem” with one another, how they communicate with pregnant smokers, and how these women themselves understand the “risk” of fetal harm. Finally, Oaks discusses the various meanings of “objective” statistics on the effects of smoking on the fetus, exploring the significance of cultural context in assessing the relative importance of those numbers. She argues that rather than bombarding pregnant women with statistics, health educators should consider the daily lives of these women and their socioeconomic status to understand why some women choose to smoke during pregnancy. Without downplaying the seriousness of the health risks that smoking poses to women and their babies, the book supports new efforts that challenge the moral policing of pregnant smokers.
Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.
The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.
Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend such one-dimensional characterizations, earning distinction in ways that regularly go unsung.
Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House’s often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions. Critically unpacking the iconic eatery from a less reductive perspective offers readers a more realistic and nuanced portrait of Waffle House, shedding light on how it both reflects and influences a prevailing southern imaginary—an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies that frames understandings about a vibrant if also paradoxical geographic region.
Matejowsky discusses Waffle House’s roots in established southern foodways and traces the chain’s development from a lunch-counter restaurant that emerged across the South. He also considers Waffle House’s place in American and southern popular culture, highlighting its myriad depictions in music, television, film, fiction, stand-up comedy, and sports. Altogether, Matejowsky deftly and persuasively demonstrates how Waffle House serves as a microcosm of today’s South with all the accolades and criticisms this distinction entails.
Chalfen’s “Polaroid People” are recognizable—if ironically viewed—relatives, uncles, aunts, and All-American kids. As members of “Kodak Culture” they watch home movies, take pictures of newborn babies, and even, in their darker moments, scratch out the faces of disliked relatives in group photographs. He examines who shoots these photos and why, as well as how they think (or don’t) of planning, editing, and exhibiting their shots. Chalfen’s analysis reveals the culturally structured behavior underlying seemingly spontaneous photographic activities.
In a remarkable act of recovery, So Much to Be Angry About conjures an influential but largely obscured strand in the nation’s radical tradition—the “movement” printing presses and publishers of the late 1960s and 1970s, and specifically Appalachian Movement Press in Huntington, West Virginia, the only movement press in Appalachia. More than a history, this craft- and activist-centered book positions the frontline politics of the Appalachian Left within larger movements in the 1970s. As Appalachian Movement Press founder Tom Woodruff wrote: “Appalachians weren’t sitting in the back row during this struggle, they were driving the bus.”
Emerging from the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at Marshall University, and working closely with organizer and poet Don West, Appalachian Movement Press made available an eclectic range of printed material, from books and pamphlets to children’s literature and calendars. Many of its publications promoted the Appalachian identity movement and “internal colony” theory, both of which were cornerstones of the nascent discipline of Appalachian studies. One of its many influential publications was MAW, the first feminist magazine written by and for Appalachian women.
So Much to Be Angry About combines complete reproductions of five of Appalachian Movement Press’s most engaging publications, an essay by Shaun Slifer about his detective work resurrecting the press’s history, and a contextual introduction to New Left movement publishing by Josh MacPhee. Amply illustrated in a richly produced package, the volume pays homage to the graphic sensibility of the region’s 1970s social movements, while also celebrating the current renaissance of Appalachia’s DIY culture—in many respects a legacy, Slifer suggests, of the movement publishing documented in his book.
Winner of the 2022 North American Society for Sport History Book Award!
The early history of soccer in the United States has received relatively little scholarly attention. While the sport’s failure to make cultural inroads has been the source of much reflection and retrospection, other pastimes such as baseball, basketball, and American football have been covered far more extensively. Soccer Frontiers helps to fill this gap and correct the widespread notion that soccer was unfamiliar in the United States before thelate twentieth century.
Editors Chris Bolsmann and George N. Kioussis’s collection sheds light on America’s little-known soccer history by focusing on the game’s presence in major American cities between 1863 and 1913. As waves of immigrants arrived and American cities began to industrialize and become sizable cultural hubs, soccer, too, began to flourish. With essays focused on the years between the Civil War and World War I—a period which saw the creation of both the English Football Association and the US Soccer Federation—this volume also offers diverse regional representation, moving from New England to the South to the West Coast.
Soccer Frontiers seeks to identify the distinctive yet understudied traits of American soccer, thereby contributing an important missing piece to the broader puzzle of American sport history.
CHRIS BOLSMANN is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. He is coauthor, with Dilwyn Porter, English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game and coeditor of two books with Peter Alegi: Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space and South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond.
GEORGE N. KIOUSSIS is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sport History, Sport in History, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Soccer & Society. He currently serves as an editor for Sport in History.
In Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game’s Struggle for Status, G. Edward White seeks to answer two questions. The first is why the sport of soccer failed to take root in the United States when it spread from England around much of the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second is why the sport has had a significant renaissance in America since the last decade of the twentieth century, to the point where it is now the 4th largest participatory sport in the United States and is thriving, in both men’s and women’s versions, at the high school, college, and professional levels.
White considers the early history of “Association football” (soccer) in England, the persistent struggles by the sport to establish itself in America for much of the twentieth century, the role of public high schools and colleges in marginalizing the sport, the part played by FIFA, the international organization charged with developing soccer around the globe, in encumbering the development of the sport in the United States, and the unusual history of women’s soccer in America, which evolved in the twentieth century from a virtually nonexistent sport to a major factor in the emergence of men’s—as well as women's—soccer in the U.S. in the twentieth century.
Incorporating insights from sociology and economics, White explores the multiple factors that have resulted in the sport of soccer struggling to achieve major status in America and why it currently has nothing like the cultural impact of other popular American sports—baseball and American football— which can be seen by the comparative lack of attention paid to it in sports media, its low television ratings, and virtually nonexistent radio broadcast coverage.
This book provides a thinking fan’s guide to the world’s most popular game, proposing a way of engaging soccer that sparks intellectual curiosity and employs critical consciousness. Using stories and data, along with ideas from sociology, psychology, and across the social sciences, it provides readers with new ways of understanding fanaticism, peak performance, talent development, and more. Drawing on concepts ranging from cognitive bias to globalization, it illuminates meanings of the game for players and fans while investigating impacts on our lives and communities. While it considers soccer cultures across the globe, the book also analyzes what makes U.S. soccer culture special, including its embrace of the women’s game.
As a scholar, former minor league player and coach, and fan, Andrew Guest offers a distinctive perspective on soccer in society. Whatever name you call it, and whatever your interest in it, Soccer in Mind will enrich your own view of the one truly global game.
American sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for cultural, social, and political possibility. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sports largely avoid any political stance other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John M. Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer—a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity despite its struggle to establish major league status—a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality.
As a rhetorician who draws on both critical theory and culture, Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, and class. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how those possibilities are constrained can provide valuable insights into neoliberal logics of power, profit, politics, and selfhood.
In Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent phenomena: the equal pay dispute between the US women’s national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as “underdogs” despite the nation’s quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. An invaluable addition to a growing bookshelf on soccer titles, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch serves as a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms.
Minnis proposes that, faced with the threat of food shortages, nonstratified societies survive by employing a series of responses that are increasingly effective but also are increasingly costly and demand increasingly larger cooperative efforts. The model Minnis develops allows him to infer, from evidence of such factors as population size, resource productivity, and climate change, the occurrence of food crises in the past. Using the Classic Mimbres society as a test case, he summarizes the regional archeological sequence and analyzes the effects of environmental fluctuations on economic and social organization. He concludes that the responses of the Mimbres people to their burgeoning population were inadequate to prevent the collapse of the society in the late twelfth century.
In its illumination of the general issue of responses to food shortages, Social Adaptation to Food Stress will interest not only archeologists but also those concerned with current food shortages in the Third World. Cultural ecologists and human geographers will be able to derive a wealth of ideas, methods, and data from Minnis's work.
From roads, railways, statues, and bridges, infrastructure provides a unique lens through which to view our own national histories and societies. Serving as an important conduit between individuals and the state, infrastructure can help mediate citizenship, reshape social relations between people both within and across communities, and has the capacity to underpin—or indeed, undermine—nation-building.
Over the last century, infrastructure has transformed Latin America. Roads, railways, and airports have increased connectivity between spaces, peoples, and markets. Cables, switches, and tunnels have connected households to electricity grids, water systems, and digital technology. Public buildings, parks, and monuments have reshaped towns and cities and emerged as sites to construct and contest citizenship. Infrastructure has been welcomed and celebrated in Latin America, but it has also been resisted and destroyed.
Based on recent, original research, the essays in this collection cover a range of pressing infrastructural considerations, including sustainability, water conflict, extractive mining, and public housing in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico to better understand how infrastructure has reshaped Latin America over the past century.
Volume 1 depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900, three years after the country’s first commercial film exhibitor saw the new medium in Great Britain. An artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Ruling until 1941, Reza Shah implemented a Westernization program intended to unite, modernize, and secularize his multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. Cinematic representations of a fast-modernizing Iran were encouraged, the veil was outlawed, and dandies flourished. At the same time, photography, movie production, and movie houses were tightly controlled. Film production ultimately proved marginal to state formation. Only four silent feature films were produced in Iran; of the five Persian-language sound features shown in the country before 1941, four were made by an Iranian expatriate in India.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010
Volume 2 spans the period of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule, from 1941 until 1978. During this time Iranian cinema flourished and became industrialized, at its height producing more than ninety films each year. The state was instrumental in building the infrastructures of the cinema and television industries, and it instituted a vast apparatus of censorship and patronage. During the Second World War the Allied powers competed to control the movies shown in Iran. In the following decades, two distinct indigenous cinemas emerged. The more popular, traditional, and commercial filmfarsi movies included tough-guy films and the “stewpot” genre of melodrama, with plots reflecting the rapid changes in Iranian society. The new-wave cinema was a smaller but more influential cinema of dissent, made mostly by foreign-trained filmmakers and modernist writers opposed to the regime. Ironically, the state both funded and censored much of the new-wave cinema, which grew bolder in its criticism as state authoritarianism consolidated. A vital documentary cinema also developed in the prerevolutionary era.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010
In Volume 3, Naficy assesses the profound effects of the Islamic Revolution on Iran's cinema and film industry. Throughout the book, he uses the term Islamicate, rather than Islamic, to indicate that the values of the postrevolutionary state, culture, and cinema were informed not only by Islam but also by Persian traditions. Naficy examines documentary films made to record events prior to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. He describes how certain institutions and individuals, including prerevolutionary cinema and filmmakers, were associated with the Pahlavi regime, the West, and modernity and therefore perceived as corrupt and immoral. Many of the nation's moviehouses were burned down. Prerevolutionary films were subject to strict review and often banned, to be replaced with films commensurate with Islamicate values. Filmmakers and entertainers were thrown out of the industry, exiled, imprisoned, and even executed. Yet, out of this revolutionary turmoil, an extraordinary Islamicate cinema and film culture emerged. Naficy traces its development and explains how Iran's long war with Iraq, the gendered segregation of space, and the imposition of the veil on women encouraged certain ideological and aesthetic trends in film and related media. Finally, he discusses the structural, administrative, and regulatory measures that helped to institutionalize the new evolving cinema.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010
The extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film, TV, and the new media since the consolidation of the Islamic Revolution animates Volume 4. During this time, documentary films proliferated. Many filmmakers took as their subject the revolution and the bloody eight-year war with Iraq; others critiqued postrevolution society. The strong presence of women on screen and behind the camera led to a dynamic women's cinema. A dissident art-house cinema—involving some of the best Pahlavi-era new-wave directors and a younger generation of innovative postrevolution directors—placed Iranian cinema on the map of world cinemas, bringing prestige to Iranians at home and abroad. A struggle over cinema, media, culture, and, ultimately, the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, emerged and intensified. The media became a contested site of public diplomacy as the Islamic Republic regime as well as foreign governments antagonistic to it sought to harness Iranian popular culture and media toward their own ends, within and outside of Iran. The broad international circulation of films made in Iran and its diaspora, the vast dispersion of media-savvy filmmakers abroad, and new filmmaking and communication technologies helped to globalize Iranian cinema.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010
In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world.
Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective enterprise: people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.
The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.
Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, The Social Lives of Forests attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.
Integrating literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence with recent scholarship on memory, identity, rhetoric, and international relations, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past enhances our understanding of both the function of memory in Athenian public discourse and the history of Athenian-Theban relations. It should be of interest not only to students of Greek history and oratory but to everybody interested in memory studies, Athenian democracy, and political decision making.
Human beings evolved in the company of others and flourish in proportion to their positive social ties. To understand the human brain, we must situate its biology in the wider context of society. To understand society, we must also consider how the brains and minds of individuals shape interactions with other human beings. Social Neuroscience offers a comprehensive new framework for studying the brain, human development, and human behavior.
In this book, leading researchers in the fields of neurobiology, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology elucidate the connections between brain biology and the brain’s functioning in the social world, providing a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary explanation of how humans think and act, as well as the ways we define and treat pathological behavior. Synthesizing the insights and perspectives of these experts, Social Neuroscience examines how neural processes make the brain sensitive to social experience, how cognition shapes social behavior, and how social networks create a range of responses among different individuals to the same environmental stimuli.
The mutually reinforcing connections between brain, mind, and society have profound implications for human health, from the emotionally damaging effects of severe social deprivation to the neurological impact of parental abuse and neighborhood violence. The authors explore these connections, with special focus on mental illnesses, including schizophrenia—a disorder characterized by marked social deficits in which a neurological basis is now well established.
Existing theories of revolution explain earlier revolutions better than the Iranian revolution. In Iran most of the protest was in urban areas, the peasants never played a major role, and power was transferred to the clergy, not to an intelligentsia. In the 1970s, oil revenues increased, the economy developed rapidly but unevenly, and the state's expanded intervention undermined market forces and politicized capital accumulation. Systematic repression of workers, aid to the upper class, and attacks on secular and religious opposition showed that the state was serving the interests of particular groups. When the state tried to check high inflation by imposing price controls on bazaaris (merchants, shopkeepers, artisans), their protests forced the state to introduce reforms, providing an opportunity for industrial workers, white-collar workers, intellectuals, and the clergy to mobilize against the state. Thus, structural features rendered the state vulnerable to challenge and attack.
Parsa's thorough explanation of the collective actions of each major group in Iran in the three decades prior to the revolution shows how a coalition of classes and groups, using mosques as safe gathering places and led by a segment of the clergy, brought down the monarch of 1979. In the years since the revolution, the conflicts that existed before the revolution seem to be reemerging, in slightly altered form. The clergy now has control, and the state has become centrally and powerfully involved in the economy of the country.
First published in 1953, Howard R. Bowen’s Social Responsibilities of the Businessman was the first comprehensive discussion of business ethics and social responsibility. It created a foundation by which business executives and academics could consider the subjects as part of strategic planning and managerial decision-making. Though written in another era, it is regularly and increasingly cited because of its relevance to the current ethical issues of business operations in the United States. Many experts believe it to be the seminal book on corporate social responsibility.
This new edition of the book includes an introduction by Jean-Pascal Gond, Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City University of London, and a foreword by Peter Geoffrey Bowen, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, who is Howard R. Bowen's eldest son.
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