Results by title

1861 books match the query 'Social life and customs' and 68 start with d

cover of Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals: A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity

Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals

A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity

Edited by Linda R. Manzanilla and Claude Chapdelaine

University of Michigan Press, 2009

With major differences in size, urban plans, and population density, the capitals of New World states had large heterogeneous societies, sometimes multiethnic and highly specialized, making these cities amazing backdrops for complex interactions.
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cover of Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and Power Among an Andean People

Domination and Cultural Resistance

Authority and Power Among an Andean People

Roger Neil Rasnake

Duke University Press, 1988

Domination and Cultural Resistance examines the social life of the Yura, a Quechua-speaking Andean ethnic group of central Bolivia, and focuses especially on their indigenous authorities, the kuraqkuna or elders. Combining ethnohistorical research with contemporary fieldwork, Roger Neil Rasnake traces the evolution of leadership roles within the changing composition of the native Andean social groupings, the ayllus—from the consolidation of pre-Hispanic Aymara polities, through the pressures of the Spanish colonial regime and the increasing fragmentation of the republican era, to the present.
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cover of Don’t Make Me Go to Town: Ranchwomen of the Texas Hill Country

Don’t Make Me Go to Town

Ranchwomen of the Texas Hill Country

By Rhonda Lashley Lopez

University of Texas Press, 2011

Many people dream of "someday buying a small quaint place in the country, to own two cows and watch the birds," in the words of Texas ranchwoman Amanda Spenrath Geistweidt. But only a few are cut out for the unrelenting work that makes a family ranching operation successful. Don't Make Me Go to Town presents an eloquent photo-documentary of eight women who have chosen to make ranching in the Texas Hill Country their way of life. Ranging from young mothers to elderly grandmothers, these women offer vivid accounts of raising livestock in a rugged land, cut off from amenities and amusements that most people take for granted, and loving the hard lives they've chosen.

Rhonda Lashley Lopez began making photographic portraits of Texas Hill Country ranchwomen in 1993 and has followed their lives through the intervening years. She presents their stories through her images and the women's own words, listening in as the ranchwomen describe the pleasures and difficulties of raising sheep, Angora goats, and cattle on the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio. Their stories record the struggles that all ranchers face—vagaries of weather and livestock markets, among them—as well as the extra challenges of being women raising families and keeping things going on the home front while also riding the range. Yet, to a woman, they all passionately embrace family ranching as a way of life and describe their efforts to pass it on to future generations.

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cover of Down Syndrome Culture: Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Down Syndrome Culture

Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Benjamin Fraser

University of Michigan Press, 2024

People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. 

Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.
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cover of Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community

Down by the Riverside

A South Carolina Slave Community

Charles Joyner

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Charles Joyner takes readers on a journey back in time, up the Waccamaw River through the Lowcountry of South Carolina, past abandoned rice fields once made productive by the labor of enslaved Africans, past rice mills and forest clearings into the antebellum world of All Saints Parish. In this community, and many others like it, enslaved people created a new language, a new religion--indeed, a new culture--from African traditions and American circumstances.

Joyner recovers an entire lost society and way of life from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the plantation whites and their guests, from quantitative analysis of census and probate records, and above all from the folklore and oral history of the enslaved Americans. His classic reconstruction of daily life in All Saints Parish is an inspiring testimony to the ingenuity and solidarity of a people.

This anniversary edition of Joyner's landmark study includes a new introduction in which the author recounts his process of writing the book, reflects on its critical and popular reception, and surveys the past three decades of scholarship on the history of enslaved people in the United States.

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cover of Down the River: or Practical Lessons Under The Code Duello

Down the River

or Practical Lessons Under The Code Duello

George W Hooper

University of Alabama Press, 2007

This delightful divertissement is a lampoon of dueling culture set in southeastern Alabama, penned by a cousin of the better known humorist Johnson Jones Hooper. Interestingly George W. Hooper did not identify himself as the author, perhaps for fear that some enterprising duelist would decide he had been personally lampooned and take umbrage.
 
The main character is a figure familiar in outline to readers of John Gorman Barr, J. J. Hooper, Joseph G. Baldwin, and other practitioners of what is known as the humor of the Old Southwest. This tetchy blowhard is able to find a personal slight in every social circumstance of the most casual nature, to determine the only resolution that could preserve his personal honor is a duel, and then to find elaborate reasons why the affair d’honneur must be postponed indefinitely. The protagonist is accompanied by a Watson-like admirer of comparable wooden-headedness, who admiringly keeps track of all this punctilio—and constantly just barely avoids offending his patron at every turn.
 
The work ends with the provisions of the real “Code Duello,” which cede nothing to the fiction in sheer ridiculousness.
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cover of Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

Dragging Wyatt Earp

A Personal History of Dodge City

Robert Rebein

Ohio University Press, 2013

In Dragging Wyatt Earp essayist Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas. In chapters ranging from memoir to reportage to revisionist history, Rebein contrasts his hometown’s Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

Along the way, Rebein covers a vast expanse of place and time and revisits a number of Western myths, including those surrounding Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, George Armstrong Custer, and of course Wyatt Earp himself. Rebein rides a bronc in a rodeo, spends a day as a pen rider at a local feedlot, and attempts to “buck the tiger” at Dodge City’s new Boot Hill Casino and Resort.

Funny and incisive, Dragging Wyatt Earp is an exciting new entry in what is sometimes called the nonfiction of place. It is a must- read for anyone interested in Western history, contemporary memoir, or the collision of Old and New West on the High Plains of Kansas.

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cover of Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

Drama, Play, and Game

English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

Lawrence M. Clopper

University of Chicago Press, 2001

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question.

Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

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cover of Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father

Drawing to an Inside Straight

The Legacy of an Absent Father

Jodi Varon

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Life can sometimes hinge on the turn of a card—not only the gambler’s life but also the lives of those close to him. For Jodi Varon, one fateful turn changed her father’s life—propelling her into a search far from home that will lead readers to a new contemplation of family ties and lost cultural legacies.
 
Benjamin Varon never rode a horse and preferred his beef hanging in a cooler, but he still thought of himself as a cattleman—that is, until he disappeared after losing his meat-supply business in a high-stakes poker game. In recalling how a hardscrabble New Yorker sought his fortune in Colorado’s cattle country, Varon also relates a daughter’s quest to understand and forgive.
 
Drawing to an Inside Straight is a bittersweet story of growing up in Denver during the 1960s. As Varon recalls life at home with parents Benjamin and Irene—Jews of decidedly different backgrounds, he a Ladino-speaking Sephardi from New York, she a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi from Denver’s close-knit Jewish community—she tells of a childhood nourished by pireshkes and cronson, hamantashen and challah. These stories and other culinary delights are contrasted with her father’s childhood of stolen fruit and his longing for the aromas of the Mediterranean spice markets of his ancestors.
 
Against the backdrop of America in the Vietnam era, and amid tales of Joseph McCarthy’s tyranny, Burma-Shave divination, domestic nerve-gas stockpiling, suburban wife-swapping, murder, and suicide, Varon offers an intriguing look at Sephardic history and culture. Behind her own story looms that of Benjamin, who transformed himself from an immigrant’s son sneaking into Yankee Stadium, to a tough GI, to a quixotic dreamer willing to stake his hard-won business in a game of chance. 
 
Rather than cast off his European past, Benjamin embraced it, insisted upon it, tried to celebrate what was different. All the while, he was dogged by his favorite Ladino adage—“We left on a horse. We came back on a donkey”—which served to remind him of the caprices of fortune that would follow him to that fateful poker game. Varon’s story of her own journey to Spain, in search of her father’s lost heritage and his adoration of the Sephardim’s Golden Age, helps seal her understanding as it heals wounds left open too long.
 
            Varon’s account is an insightful view of what it means to be American without losing one’s past to the proverbial melting pot, with its insider’s look at Sephardic culture and depictions of Denver’s ethnic communities that challenge stereotypes of the Anglo-American West. Drawing to an Inside Straight is a book that will make an immediate connection with readers—even those whose fathers weren’t compulsive gamblers—who struggle with mixed emotions about childhood or are in search of their own roots.
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cover of Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America

Drawing with Great Needles

Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America

Edited by Aaron Deter-Wolf and Carol Diaz-Granados

University of Texas Press, 2013

For thousands of years, Native Americans throughout the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains used the physical act and visual language of tattooing to construct and reinforce the identity of individuals and their place within society and the cosmos. The act of tattooing served as a rite of passage and supplication, while the composition and use of ancestral tattoo bundles was intimately related to group identity. The resulting symbols and imagery inscribed on the body held important social, civil, military, and ritual connotations within Native American society. Yet despite the cultural importance that tattooing held for prehistoric and early historic Native Americans, modern scholars have only recently begun to consider the implications of ancient Native American tattooing and assign tattooed symbols the same significance as imagery inscribed on pottery, shell, copper, and stone.

Drawing with Great Needles is the first book-length scholarly examination into the antiquity, meaning, and significance of Native American tattooing in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains. The contributors use a variety of approaches, including ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts, ancient art, evidence of tattooing in the archaeological record, historic portraiture, tattoo tools and toolkits, gender roles, and the meanings that specific tattoos held for Dhegiha Sioux and other Native speakers, to examine Native American tattoo traditions. Their findings add an important new dimension to our understanding of ancient and early historic Native American society in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains.

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cover of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project

Dream Street

W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project

W. Eugene Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2023

New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh project.
 
In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.
 
In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.
 
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cover of Dreaming the Mississippi

Dreaming the Mississippi

Katherine Fischer

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Offering a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation, Dreaming the Mississippi challenges old stereotypes through the experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope-swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. In an engaging voice, earnest and energetic, Katherine Fischer describes how the river’s natural and human histories overlap and interweave as she tells of her own gradual immersion in its life—which led her to buy a house so close to its banks that each spring she must open her basement doors to accept its inevitable floods.
            Fischer blends stories of people living along the river with accounts of national and global consequence. She weaves humorous accounts of river rats and towboat pilots with stories of sandbagging against a flood tide that refuses to be contained. She tells of river hangouts—“joints” that literally join segments of humanity along the river—as she revels in the colorful clientele of her favorite waterfront taverns. Some chapters connect the wildness of this mythical river to outside regions such as the Great Salt Lake and Florida, taking the lure of the mighty Mississippi as far as Japan. Another chapter, about the river’s mouth, “Gulf,” considers the gulf between engineers and naturalists—and between America’s haves and have-nots—as it offers heartfelt reflections on Katrina’s wrath.
            Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets. In conveying her understanding of contemporary life along the river’s length, Katherine Fischer has much to teach us not only about reverence for this glorious American waterway but also about our eternal connections to the natural world.
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cover of Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain

Dreams, Questions, Struggles

South Asian Women in Britain

Amrit Wilson

Pluto Press, 2006

From schoolgirls to matriarchs, single mothers to extended families, and businesswomen to factory workers, the experience of Asian women in Britain today is polarised by class and religion.

This book explores the lives and struggles of two generations of British Asian women to present a political account of their experiences: personal and public, individual and collective, their struggles take on power structures within the family, the community and, on occasion, the British state.

Combining their personal testimony within a theoretical framework, Amrit Wilson locates their experiences in the wider context of global and regional politics. She examines what impact the feminist movement has had on their lives, and explores issues such as domestic violence, Asian marriages, representations of Asian women, mental disturbance and suicide.
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cover of Dreamworlds of Alabama

Dreamworlds of Alabama

Allen Shelton

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

“I speak in what others often hear as a strange accent. My past can’t be located. I live in Buffalo, New York, an exile from the South. But these aren’t Yankee dreams, even though my past seems like a fabrication, a dreamworld in which I’m a paper character and not a historical participant, with scars from barbed wire ripping under the pressure and flying through the air like a swarm of bees, or a horse rearing up and banging its head into mine from within, exploding my forehead.” —from the Preface

Wisteria draped on a soldier’s coffin, sent home to Alabama from a Virginia battlefield. The oldest standing house in the county, painted gray and flanked by a pecan orchard. A black steel fence tool, now perched atop a pile of books like a prehistoric bird of prey. In Dreamworlds of Alabama, Allen Shelton explores physical, historical, and social landscapes of northeastern Alabama. His homeplace near the Appalachian foothills provides the setting for a rich examination of cultural practices, a place where the language of place and things resonates with as much vitality and emotional urgency as the language of humans.

Throughout the book, Shelton demonstrates how deeply culture is inscribed in the land and in the most intimate spaces of the person—places of belonging and loss, insight and memory.

Born and raised in Jacksonville, Alabama, Allen Shelton is associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State College.

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cover of Dress in American Culture

Dress in American Culture

Edited by Patricia A. Cunningham and Susan Voso Lab

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

     Early Americans accommodated, adapted, and manipulated their clothing to adjust to their physical and social environment. This book focuses on the relationship of dress to the struggle of indigenous and immigrant Americans to fill expected and unexpected needs and express political ideologies and ethnic identity. In doing so the contributors hope to prompt readers to reconsider the place of dress in the interpretation of American culture. The casual reader of this book of essays may be surprised to learn that it has little to do with different styles of clothing or the vagaries of fashion. 
     The contributors reveal the politics, or power, of dress, especially in its function as a symbol of American ideals, and examine changes in clothing behavior that occurred as Americans faced new experiences.
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cover of Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform

Dressed as in a Painting

Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform

Kimberly Wahl

University of New Hampshire Press, 2013

In Dressed as in a Painting, Kimberly Wahl provides a lucid exploration of the interrelations between fashion, art, and Aestheticism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although artistic forms of dress have been the subject of short studies before, no book has focused exclusively on Aesthetic dress and its various expressions in the visual cultures of Victorian Britain. More important, no book has attempted to investigate the gap between the material facts of artistic clothing as it was embodied on the wearer, and its presence as an idealized sartorial trope in the visual and textual print culture of the period.
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cover of During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta 1848-2006

During Wind and Rain

The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta 1848-2006

Margaret Jones Bolsterli

University of Arkansas Press, 2008

n telling the story of five generations of her family and its farm in the Arkansas Delta, Margaret Jones Bolsterli brings together her own research, historical perspective, and family lore as it reaches her from the days of her great-grandfather down to her nephew. The result is a family saga that is at once universal and personal, historical and timeless. During Wind and Rain moves from the land’s acquisition in 1848 through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression, and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization, fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The transformation of dense swamp and forest to today’s commercial agriculture is the story of two hundred acres worked by people sowing their fate with sweat, ingenuity, and luck. From the hoes of Bolsterli’s great-grandfather Uriah’s time to her nephew Casey’s machinery capable of cultivating an acre in five minutes, During Wind and Rain poignantly portrays five generations of farmers motivated by dreams of “a crop so good that the memory of it can warm the drafty floors of adversity for the rest of one's life.”
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cover of Dynamics Of Folklore: Revised and Expanded Edition

Dynamics Of Folklore

Revised and Expanded Edition

Barre Toelken

Utah State University Press, 1996

One of the most comprehensive and widely praised introductions to folklore ever written. Toelken's discussion of the history and meaning of folklore is delivered in straightforward language, easily understood definitions, and a wealth of insightful and entertaining examples.

Toelken emphasizes dynamism and variety in the vast array of folk expressions he examines, from "the biology of folklore," to occupational and ethnic lore, food ways, holidays, personal experience narratives, ballads, myths, proverbs, jokes, crafts, and others. Chapters are followed by bibliographical essays, and over 100 photographs illustrate the text. This new edition is accessible to all levels of folklore study and an essential text for classroom instruction.

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