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Kainua (Marzabotto)
Edited by Elisabetta Govi
University of Texas Press, 2023

This volume brings together leading scholars of Etruria to provide up-to-date findings from the key archaeological site of Kainua. Located in what is now the Italian town of Marzabotto, Kainua is the only Etruscan site whose complete urban layout has been preserved, making it possible to trace houses, roads, drainage systems, cemeteries, craft workshops, and an acropolis.

Under excavation since the 1850s, Kainua offers a trove of insights into Etruscan culture and society. The volume’s editor, Elisabetta Govi, and her fellow experts examine the material evidence underlying our understanding of the history, economy, religion, and social structures of Kainua, including trade routes that linked the city with the wider Mediterranean. Particularly exciting are recent discoveries of sanctuaries dedicated to Tinia and Uni, analogous to the Greek Zeus and Hera, which provide new information about Etruscan cults. Kainua (Marzabotto) also draws on the latest research to reconstruct the city’s foundation rites, a sacred charter, and urban plan. Finally, the authors explore the site’s archaeological history, discussing new knowledge made possible since the introduction of modern techniques of remote sensing and 3D modeling.

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Kaleidoscope of Poland
A Cultural Encyclopedia
Oscar E. Swan
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Foreword by Adam Zamoyski

Kaleidoscope of Poland is a highly readable volume containing short articles on major personalities, places, events, and accomplishments from the thousand-year record of Polish history and culture. Featuring approximately 900 compact text entries and 600 illustrations, it will be a handy reference at home, a perfect supplement to traditional guide books when traveling, an aid to language study, or simply browsed with enjoyment from cover to cover by anyone with an interest in Poland.
The entries describe essential features of Poland from the mundane to the sublime. Whether it is bagels or the Bug River, Chopin or Madame Curie, the authors offer colorful and often witty snapshots of significant individuals, customs, folklore, historic events, phrases, places, geography, and much, much more. Beginning with the emergence of the Polish state in 966 under Mieszko I, to the resurrection of present-day Poland within the European Union, it’s also a sweeping account of the tumult and triumphs the nation has witnessed through much of its history.
This highly entertaining yet informative book is essentially a “cultural dictionary”—offering a knowledge base that can be referred to time and time again. Kaleidoscope of Poland will be welcomed by readers of Polish descent, students of Polish, or anyone planning to visit Poland—anyone seeking a greater insight into this fascinating land.
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Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography
Hula, Navigation, and Oratory
Renee Pualani Louis
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Hawai'ian performance cartography is an interactive presentation of place as ‘experienced space’ that situates mapping in the environment, and encodes spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices.
 
An important symbolic element in Hawai'ian cartography is the storied place name, which reflects Hawai'ian spatial knowledge of the environment. Many Hawai'ian place names performed in daily rituals were a conscious act of locating genealogical connections, recreating cultural landscapes, and regenerating cultural mores. They constitute a critically important body of Hawai'ian cultural knowledge. When Hawai'ian place names were incorporated into Western cartographic maps they were transformed epistemologically. They went from representing place as a repository of cultural knowledge to representing place as an object on the landscape. Hawai'ian spatial knowledge presentation is interactive, multi-sensual, and multi‐ dimensional.
 
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography interweaves methodology with personal narrative and performance presentation in a playbill format. Three of the seven chapters are presented as “Acts” in a play. The remaining four chapters serve as intermissions or interludes together with a prologue and an epilogue for setting the stage and providing closure. To help make the topic more accessible, complex terms have been minimized, making academic theory easier for the educated reader to understand. The book will fill an important gap in Indigenous and Native Studies and will be welcomed by anyone interested in traditional Hawai’ian performance cartography.
 
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Kayanerenkó
wa: The Great Law of Peace
Kayanesenh Paul Williams
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

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Keepers of the Sacred Chants
The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society
Jonathan D. Hill
University of Arizona Press, 1993
The Wakuenai of the upper Rio Negro region in southern Venezuela employ a form of singing called malikai for ceremonies of childbirth, initiation, and healing. This ritual chanting is a rich amalgam of myth and music, and serves as a means of integrating individuals into a vertical hierarchy of power relations between mythic ancestors and human descendants. Jonathan Hill here shows how the musical and semantic transformations of everyday discourse in malikai integrate the everyday world into a poetic process of empowerment.
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Keewaydinoquay, Stories from My Youth
Keewaydinoquay Peschel
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In the captivating art of the oral tradition-told in the author's own voice-Keewaydinoquay, Stories from My Youth brings to life the childhood years of a Michigan woman of both Native American and white. Presented here with the clarity and charm of a master storyteller, the words of Keewaydinoquay contain layers of understanding, conveyed by both what is said and how it is said. The values of the worldview that she shares with us are ones that resonate on far more than just an intellectual level.

The stories span generations and cultures and shed a rare light on the living conditions of Native Americans in Michigan in the early 1900s. They recount Keewaydinoquay's education in the public schools, illuminate the role Christianity played in Native American culture, and reveal the importance of maintaining traditional customs.

Keewaydinoquay was one of the very few Native American women who was steeped both in the ancient folkways of her people as well as erudite in the American university system. Ultimately she wove her native tradition and university learning together into a unique perspective that helped people understand the importance of nature and the human spirit.

Keewaydinoquay Peschel was Lecturer of Ethnobotany and Philosophy of the Western Great Lakes Indians at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of several books, including Blue Berry: First Fruit of the Anishinaabeg. She passed over in 1999. Lee Boisvert attended the University of Michigan as a member of the Residential College from 1967 to 1969, and was awarded a Bachelor in Science in Sociology with double minors in Native American Studies and Gerontology by Central Michigan University in 1993.
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Killing Time
Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800–1850
Scott C. Martin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995

Scott C. Martin examines leisure as a “contested cultural space” in which nineteenth-century Americans articulated and developed ideas about ethnicity, class, gender, and community.  This new perspective demonstrates how leisure and sociability mediated the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society.  Martin argues persuasively that southwestern Pennsylvanians used leisure activities to create identities and define values in a society being transformed by market expansion.  The transportation revolution brought new commercial entertainments and recreational opportunities but also fragmented and privatized customary patterns of communal leisure.

By using leisure as a window on the rapid changes sweeping through the region, Martin shows how southwestern Pennsylvanians used voluntary associations, private parties, and public gatherings to construct social identities better suited to their altered circumstances.  The prosperous middle class devised amusements to distinguish them from workers who, in turn, resisted reformers’ attempts to constrain their use of free time.  Ethnic and racial minorities used holiday observances and traditional celebrations to define their place in American society, while women tested the boundaries of the domestic sphere through participation in church fairs, commercial recreation, and other leisure activities.

This study illuminates the cultural history of the region and offers broader insights into perceptions of free time, leisure, and community in antebellum America.

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The Kind of Things Saints Do
Laura Valeri
University of Iowa Press, 2002
From the Anglo-American woman who makes a spectacle of herself trying to be Cuban in Miami to the estranged son leading his father on a hostile hike in New Mexico, Valeri's characters carry a heavy load of desire and anger. Proud, loud, and hungry for whatever comes next, each person desperately searches for an understanding that lessens his or her burden. The saints here are pure only in their anger, desperation, and desire to be loved, holy only in their quest to keep going.

These stories grow through subtle shifts—the bad becomes not so bad, the worst livable. It is the saintly moments of unexpected understanding that shape the collection: one gigolo's lover picks up another at a bus stop and they agree on his worthlessness, the love-worn man reminds the newly divorced woman of her physical power, the estranged son shelters his father from an unexpected storm.

Valeri navigates the reader through the bones and scars of those who ache with wanting something else and become a little older and a little wiser for it. The Kind of Things Saints Do is a collection of human imperfections and missed connections that grows into a kaleidoscope of aspiration and hope.
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Kings for Three Days
The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival
Jean Muteba Rahier
University of Illinois Press, 2013
 
With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

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Kingship and Sacrifice
Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii
Valerio Valeri
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Valeri presents an overview of Hawaiian religious culture, in which hierarchies of social beings and their actions are mirrored by the cosmological hierarchy of the gods. As the sacrifice is performed, the worshipper is incorporated into the god of his class. Thus he draws on divine power to sustain the social order of which his action is a part, and in which his own place is determined by the degree of his resemblance to his god. The key to Hawaiian society—and a central focus for Valeri—is the complex and encompassing sacrificial ritual that is the responsibility of the king, for it displays in concrete actions all the concepts of pre-Western Hawaiian society. By interpreting and understanding this ritual cycle, Valeri contends, we can interpret all of Hawaiian religious culture.
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The Kinks
Songs of the Semi-Detached
Mark Doyle
Reaktion Books, 2020
Of all the great British rock bands to emerge from the 1960s, none had a stronger sense of place than the Kinks. Often described as the archetypal English band, they were above all a quintessentially working-class band with a deep attachment to London, particularly the patch of suburban North London where most of the members grew up. In this illuminating study, Mark Doyle examines the relationship between the Kinks and their city, from their early songs of teenage rebellion to their later album-length works of social criticism, providing a unique perspective on the way in which the band responded to the shifting nature of working-class life. Along the way, he finds fascinating and sometimes surprising connections with figures as diverse as Edmund Burke, John Clare, Charles Dickens, and the Covent Garden Community Association. More than just a book about the Kinks, this is a book about a city, a nation, and a social class undergoing a series of profound, sometimes troubling changes—and about a group of young men who found a way to describe, lament, and occasionally even celebrate those changes through song.
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Kinship in Bali
Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz
University of Chicago Press, 1978
This work constitutes the first book-length examination of Balinese kinship in English and an important theoretical analysis of the central ethnographic concept of "kinship system." Hildred and Clifford Geertz's findings challenge the prevailing anthropological notion of a kinship system as an autonomous set of institutionalized social relationships. Their research in Bali suggests that kinship cannot be studied in isolation but must be perceived as a symbolic subsystem governed by ideas and beliefs unique to each culture.
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Kiowa Ethnogeography
By William C. Meadows
University of Texas Press, 2008

Examining the place names, geographical knowledge, and cultural associations of the Kiowa from the earliest recorded sources to the present, Kiowa Ethnogeography is the most in-depth study of its kind in the realm of Plains Indian tribal analysis. Linking geography to political and social changes, William Meadows applies a chronological approach that demonstrates a cultural evolution within the Kiowa community.

Preserved in both linguistic and cartographic forms, the concepts of place, homeland, intertribal sharing of land, religious practice, and other aspects of Kiowa life are clarified in detail. Native religious relationships to land (termed "geosacred" by the author) are carefully documented as well. Meadows also provides analysis of the only known extant Kiowa map of Black Goose, its unique pictographic place labels, and its relationship to reservation-era land policies. Additional coverage of rivers, lakes, and military forts makes this a remarkably comprehensive and illuminating guide.

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A Kiss across the Ocean
Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad
Richard T. Rodríguez
Duke University Press, 2022
In A Kiss across the Ocean Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. He recounts these bands’ importance for him and other Latinx kids and discusses their frequent identification with these bands’ glamorous performance of difference. Whether it was Siouxsie Sioux drawing inspiration from Latinx contemporaries and cultural practices or how Soft Cell singer Marc Almond’s lyrics were attuned to the vibrancy of queer Latinidad, Rodríguez shows how Latinx culture helped shape British post-punk. He traces the fandom networks that link these groups across space and time to illuminate how popular music establishes and facilitates intimate relations across the Atlantic. In so doing, he demonstrates how the music and styles that have come to define the 1980s hold significant sway over younger generations equally enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations. 
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Kitchenspace
Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico
By Maria Elisa Christie
University of Texas Press, 2008

Throughout the world, the kitchen is the heart of family and community life. Yet, while everyone has a story to tell about their grandmother's kitchen, the myriad activities that go on in this usually female world are often devalued, and little scholarly attention has been paid to this crucial space in which family, gender, and community relations are forged and maintained. To give the kitchen the prominence and respect it merits, Maria Elisa Christie here offers a pioneering ethnography of kitchenspace in three central Mexican communities, Xochimilco, Ocotepec, and Tetecala.

Christie coined the term "kitchenspace" to encompass both the inside kitchen area in which everyday meals for the family are made and the larger outside cooking area in which elaborate meals for community fiestas are prepared by many women working together. She explores how both kinds of meal preparation create bonds among family and community members. In particular, she shows how women's work in preparing food for fiestas gives women status in their communities and creates social networks of reciprocal obligation. In a culture rigidly stratified by gender, Christie concludes, kitchenspace gives women a source of power and a place in which to transmit the traditions and beliefs of older generations through quasi-sacramental food rites.

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Knickerbocker
The Myth behind New York
Bradley, Elizabeth L
Rutgers University Press, 2009

Bradley's stunning volume offers a surprising and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of New York history, and invites readers into the world of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the antihero who surprised everyone by becoming the standard-bearer for the city's exceptional sense of self, or what we now call a New York "attitude."

A 2010 AAUP Best of the Best title

“A briskly engaging book.” —Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books

“This is cultural history at its best.” —Journal of American Culture

“Elizabeth L. Bradley sorts, catalogues and deciphers the shifting Knickerbocker currents in a metropolis constantly reinventing itself. She does the sturdy Dutchman proud in a scholarly and polished rendition.” —Star-Ledger

“Bradley creates an engaging account of the city through the fictional Knickerbocker, who was a steady presence ‘over two centuries of wrenching urban transformation, from the post-colonial to the postmodern.’ Bradley is a perceptive and lively writer and does a superb job of tracing the many strands of the Knickerbocker myth. She provided the historical context necessary to illustrate the ways the Knickerbocker brand was invoked and provides deft analysis of the cultural meanings it accrued.” —Bookforum
 

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Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls
Sense Perceptions in Byzantium
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
Harvard University Press

How does sense perception contribute to human cognition? How did the Byzantines understand that contribution? Byzantine culture in all its domains showed deep appreciation for sensory awareness and sensory experience. The senses were reckoned as modes of knowledge—intersecting realms both human and divine, bodily and spiritual, physical and intellectual.

Scholars have attended to aspects of sight and sound in Byzantine culture, but have generally left smell, taste, and touch undervalued and understudied. Through collected essays that redress the imbalance, the contributors explore how the Byzantines viewed the senses; how they envisaged sensory interactions within their world; and how they described, narrated, and represented the senses at work. The result is a fresh charting of the Byzantine sensorium as a whole.

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Knowing the Day, Knowing the World
Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology
Lesley Green and David R. Green
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Based on more than a decade of research in Palikur lands known as Arukwa in the state of Amapá, Brazil, Knowing the Day, Knowing the World reconsiders the dialogue between formal scholarship and Amerindian ways of knowing. Beginning and ending with a public archaeology project in the region, the book engages head-on with Amerindian ways of thinking about space, time, and personhood. Demonstrating that Palikur knowledges are based on movement and a careful theorization of what it means to be present in a place, the book makes a sustained case for engaging with different ways of knowing. It shows how this kind of research can generate rich dialogues about nature, reality, and the ethical production of knowledge.
 
The structure of the book reflects a gradual comprehension of Palikur ways of knowing during the course of field research. The text enters into the ethnographic material from the perspective of familiar disciplines—history, geography, astronomy, geometry, and philosophy—and explores the junctures in which conventional disciplinary frameworks cannot adequately convey Palikur understandings. Beginning with reflections on questions of personhood, ethics, and ethnicity, the authors rethink assumptions about history and geography. They learn and recount an alternative way of thinking about astronomy from the Palikur astronomical narratives, and they show how topological concepts embedded in everyday Palikur speech extend to different ways of conceptualizing landscape. In conclusion, they reflect on the challenges of comprehending alternative cosmologies and consider the insights that come from allowing ethnographic material to pose questions of modernist frameworks.
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Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection
An Annotated Selection
Young-mee Yu Cho
Rutgers University Press, 2024
William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.
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The Korean Popular Culture Reader
Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Over the past decade, Korean popular culture has become a global phenomenon. The "Korean Wave" of music, film, television, sports, and cuisine generates significant revenues and cultural pride in South Korea. The Korean Popular Culture Reader provides a timely and essential foundation for the study of "K-pop," relating the contemporary cultural landscape to its historical roots. The essays in this collection reveal the intimate connections of Korean popular culture, or hallyu, to the peninsula's colonial and postcolonial histories, to the nationalist projects of the military dictatorship, and to the neoliberalism of twenty-first-century South Korea. Combining translations of seminal essays by Korean scholars on topics ranging from sports to colonial-era serial fiction with new work by scholars based in fields including literary studies, film and media studies, ethnomusicology, and art history, this collection expertly navigates the social and political dynamics that have shaped Korean cultural production over the past century.

Contributors. Jung-hwan Cheon, Michelle Cho, Youngmin Choe, Steven Chung, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Stephen Epstein, Olga Fedorenko, Kelly Y. Jeong, Rachael Miyung Joo, Inkyu Kang, Kyu Hyun Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Pil Ho Kim, Boduerae Kwon, Regina Yung Lee, Sohl Lee, Jessica Likens, Roald Maliangkay, Youngju Ryu, Hyunjoon Shin, Min-Jung Son, James Turnbull, Travis Workman
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A Kosher Christmas
'Tis the Season to be Jewish
Joshua Eli Plaut
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Christmas is not everybody’s favorite holiday. Historically, Jews in America, whether participating in or refraining from recognizing Christmas, have devised a multitude of unique strategies to respond to the holiday season. Their response is a mixed one: do we participate, try to ignore the holiday entirely, or create our own traditions and make the season an enjoyable time? This book, the first on the subject of Jews and Christmas in the United States, portrays how Jews are shaping the public and private character of Christmas by transforming December into a joyous holiday season belonging to all Americans.

Creative and innovative in approaching the holiday season, these responses range from composing America’s most beloved Christmas songs, transforming Hanukkah into the Jewish Christmas, creating a national Jewish tradition of patronizing Chinese restaurants and comedy shows on Christmas Eve, volunteering at shelters and soup kitchens on Christmas Day, dressing up as Santa Claus to spread good cheer, campaigning to institute Hanukkah postal stamps, and blending holiday traditions into an interfaith hybrid celebration called “Chrismukkah” or creating a secularized holiday such as Festivus.

Through these venerated traditions and alternative Christmastime rituals, Jews publicly assert and proudly proclaim their Jewish and American identities to fashion a universally shared message of joy and hope for the holiday season.

See also: http://www.akosherchristmas.org

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Kusiq
An Eskimo Life History from the Arctic Coast of Alaska.
Waldo Bodfish Sr.
University of Alaska Press, 1991
If you are a casual reader who wants an intriguing glimpse into Eskimo life, a novice oral historian who wants to know how it is done right, or a student of Alaska who wants an Inupiat perspective of the changes that swept the western Arctic this century, read Kusiq.
(Journal of the West)

A vivid 'inside' account of an observant Eskimo male who mastered much of the traditional subsistence technology and lore and who lived through the end of commercial whaling, the development and decline of introduced reindeer herding and the fur market, and through World War II and its aftermath. In its scope as well as in the presentation of historical, cultural, and linguistic context,Kusiq is far more extensive than [other] autobiographies.
(American Indian Culture and Research Journal)

Kusiq represents a new wave in literature, the expressions of cultural awakenings among native American cultures, the attempt to redefine the native world in written form, to recast history, a history for too long the domain of the white system.
(ARCTIC)

It would be difficult to find a better, more interesting first-person account of Eskimo life during the first half of this century. [It is] second in an ambitious series of oral histories developed by the University of Alaska Press.
(Scan-A-Book)

The collaborators for this book include William Schneider, curator of oral history at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Leona Kisautaq Okakok, manager of the Arctic Education Foundation at the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; and James Mumigana Nageak, coordinator of bilingual and multicultural instruction at the North Slope Borough School District. Schneider recorded and compiled Bodfish's stories, while Okakok and Nageak, both Inupiaq Eskimo language specialists, contributed their skills in interviewing, translating, and clarifying Inupiaq concepts. The book contains twelve chapters of Bodfish's narrative, background and commentary by the collaborators, and information on pronunciation, personal names, genealogical relations, and place names.
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