Results by title
4413 books match the query 'Anthropology' and 182 start with f
Fields of the Tzotzil
The Ecological Bases of Tradition in Highland ChiapasBy George A. Collier
University of Texas Press, 1975
Fields of the Tzotzil is the first study of social processes in contemporary highland Maya communities to encompass a regional view of the highlands of Chiapas as a system. In viewing tradition, not as a survival of traits, but as a dynamic process of adaptation by local systems to their placement in larger social and economic systems, it lays to rest the theory that tribal peoples apparently are politically and economically isolated. In addition, its broad regional perspective sheds light on the problems of understanding the position of traditional ethnic groups in contemporary society.
The approach of the book is ecological in two senses. First, all the topics dealt with concern the traditional behavior of Indian groups as revealed in their relationship to the land. Second, the analysis seeks out factors that condition land use, not just locally, but as part of a larger system that includes influences of the market and the impact of nationalist agrarian policy. Thus, the author examines land inheritance patterns and food production, as well as the interethnic relations in the region in which Indians are subordinate to mestizos. He discusses in detail corn farming, craft specialization, wage labor, and Indian colonization efforts under the Mexican ejido—all factors that directly affect land use and are thus part of the environment in highland Chiapas.
The study is unique in its use of previously inaccessible historical source material and its use of novel methodological aids. Aerial photography was used in data collection, and the computer was used in ethnographic census analysis. The result is a book that reveals the Indian groups of Chiapas as apparent enclaves whose ethnicity is a dynamic, adaptive response to their position of marginal dependency. While their plight is extreme, it is nevertheless structurally similar to the position of ethnic groups in most large social systems.
Fieldwork Dilemmas
Anthropologists In Postsocialist StatesHermine G. De Soto
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
In Fieldwork Dilemmas ten anthropologists disclose the political and physical dangers inherent in field research. Focusing on former socialist states, they vividly depict the upheavals of everyday life in eastern Euorpe, revealing how their informants and the communities in which they live undergo political and economic dislocations, plummeting living standards, emerging gender inequalities, and ethnic and nationalist violence.
Reports from Armenia, Bulgaria, eastern Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Uzbekistan show how fieldworkers struggle to reconcile previous experiences with postsocialist stereotypes about Soviet culture, the West, and the effects of the penetration of capitalism into noncapitalist societies. These fieldwork dilemmas are analyzed by anthropologists who are learning to position themselves professionally and personally in the field under often unstable, unpredictable situations. This volume will interest not only anthropologists but fieldworkers of all kinds, and not only scholars of eastern Europe but all those who study rapid societal changes.
Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground
An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, AlaskaElizabeth Marino
University of Alaska Press, 2015
Publications from the New York Times to Esquire have covered this disappearing village, yet few have taken the time to truly show the community and the two millennia of traditions at risk. In Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground, Elizabeth Marino brings Shishmaref into sharp focus as a place where people in a close-knit, determined community are confronting the realities of our changing planet every day. She shows how physical dangers challenge lives, while the stress and uncertainty challenge culture and identity. Marino also draws on Shishmaref’s experiences to show how disasters and the outcomes of climate change often fall heaviest on those already burdened with other social risks and often to communities who have contributed least to the problem. Stirring and sobering, Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground proves that the consequences of unchecked climate change are anything but theoretical.
Fighting Like a Community
Andean Civil Society in an Era of Indian UprisingsRudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The indigenous population of the Ecuadorian Andes made substantial political gains during the 1990s in the wake of a dynamic wave of local activism. The movement renegotiated land development laws, elected indigenous candidates to national office, and successfully fought for the constitutional redefinition of Ecuador as a nation of many cultures. Fighting Like a Community argues that these remarkable achievements paradoxically grew out of the deep differences—in language, class, education, and location—that began to divide native society in the 1960s.
Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld explores these differences and the conflicts they engendered in a variety of communities. From protestors confronting the military during a national strike to a migrant family fighting to get a relative released from prison, Colloredo-Mansfeld recounts dramatic events and private struggles alike to demonstrate how indigenous power in Ecuador is energized by disagreements over values and priorities, eloquently contending that the plurality of Andean communities, not their unity, has been the key to their political success.
Fighting for Andean Resources
Extractive Industries, Cultural Politics, and Environmental Struggles in PeruVladimir R. Gil Ramón, Foreword by Enrique Mayer
University of Arizona Press, 2020
2021 American Anthropological Association´s, finalist of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize in Critical Anthropology
Mining investment in Peru has been presented as necessary for national progress; however, it also has brought socioenvironmental costs, left unfulfilled hopes for development, and has become a principal source of confrontation and conflict.
Fighting for Andean Resources focuses on the competing agendas for mining benefits and the battles over their impact on proximate communities in the recent expansion of the Peruvian mining frontier. The book complements renewed scrutiny of how globalization nurtures not solely antagonism but also negotiation and participation.
Having mastered an intimate knowledge of Peru, Vladimir R. Gil Ramón insightfully documents how social technologies of power are applied through social technical protocols of accountability invoked in defense of nature and vulnerable livelihoods. Although analyses point to improvements in human well-being, a political and technical debate has yet to occur in practice that would define what such improvements would be, the best way to achieve and measure them, and how to integrate dimensions such as sustainability and equity.
Many confrontations stem from frustrated expectations, environmental impacts, and the virtual absence of state apparatus in the locations where new projects emerged. This book presents a multifaceted perspective on the processes of representation, the strategies in conflicts and negotiations of development and nature management, and the underlying political actions in sites affected by mining.
Fighting to Care
Children, Cancer, and Agency in a Pediatric Hospital in ArgentinaRafael E. Wainer
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Fighting to Care explores the lived experiences of children with pediatric blood cancer in Argentina, centering the struggles to care from the moment a child is labelled as experiencing "strangeness in the blood.” The book focuses on the notion of "permeable bodies" to understand children’s corporeal and subjective dynamic experience of cancer treatment and interpersonal care. Despite their vulnerability, throughout the course of demanding treatment, children display significant agency, actively navigating their medical journeys through various forms of communication and action. Fighting to Care also highlights the collective forms of care and the personal and interpersonal pain experienced by children, their families, and healthcare professionals in contexts of urgency and against health bureaucracies. In Argentina, caregiving, that is, fighting to care, is deeply intertwined with fighting for health rights within a public healthcare system that, while historically universal and free, is complex and impacted by recurring economic crises and social inequalities.
Figures of Deportation
Borders, Mobilities, and Andean World-MakingUlla D. Berg
Duke University Press, 2027
Filipino Crosscurrents
Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and GlobalizationKale Bantigue Fajardo
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Filipino seamen currently compose approximately twenty percent of the 1.2 million international maritime transportation workers. Ninety percent of the world’s goods and commodities are transported by ship. Taken together, these statistics attest to the critical role Filipino seamen play in worldwide maritime trade. In Filipino Crosscurrents, an interdisciplinary ethnography, Kale Bantigue Fajardo examines the cultural politics of seafaring, Filipino maritime masculinities, and globalization in the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted on ships and in the ports of Manila and Oakland, as well as on an industrial container ship that traveled across the Pacific, Fajardo argues that Filipino seamen have become key figures through which the Philippine state and economic elites promote Filipino masculinity and neoliberal globalization. From government officials to working-class seamen and seafarers’ advocates, Fajardo’s wide-ranging analysis exposes the gaps in dominant narratives of Filipino seamen in national, regional, and global contexts.
Writing in a hybrid style that weaves together ethnographic description, cultural critique, travelogue, and autobiography, Fajardo invites readers to reconsider the meanings of masculinity and manhood.
Filled with the Spirit
Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church CoalitionEllen Lewin
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In Filled with the Spirit, Ellen Lewin gives us a deeply empathetic ethnography of the worship and community central to TFAM, telling the story of how the doctrine of radical inclusivity has expanded beyond those it originally sought to serve to encompass people of all races, genders, sexualities, and religious backgrounds. Lewin examines the seemingly paradoxical relationship between TFAM and traditional black churches, focusing on how congregations and individual members reclaim the worship practices of these churches and simultaneously challenge their authority. The book looks closely at how TFAM worship is legitimated and enhanced by its use of gospel music and considers the images of food and African American culture that are central to liturgical imagery, as well as how understandings of personal authenticity tie into the desire to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Throughout, Lewin takes up what has been mostly missing from our discussions of race, gender, and sexuality—close attention to spirituality and faith.
Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk
Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee
Duke University Press, 2005
LiPuma and Lee explain how derivatives are essentially wagers—often on the fluctuations of national currencies—based on models that aggregate and price risk. They describe how these financial instruments are changing the face of capitalism, undermining the power of nations and perpetrating a new and less visible form of domination on postcolonial societies. As they ask: How does one know about, let alone demonstrate against, an unlisted, virtual, offshore corporation that operates in an unregulated electronic space using a secret proprietary trading strategy to buy and sell arcane financial instruments? LiPuma and Lee provide a necessary look at the obscure but consequential role of financial derivatives in the global economy.
Finding Cholita
Billie Jean Isbell
University of Illinois Press, 2008
Fire Otherwise
Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing WorldEdited by Cynthia T. Fowler and James R. Welch
University of Utah Press, 2018
First Find Your Child a Good Mother
The Construction of Self in Two African CommunitiesRiesman, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 1992
Through a systematic comparison of the life circumstances, child-rearing practices, and personalities of the FulBe and their former slaves, the RiimaayBe, this book develops an alternative theory of the way personality is formed in the Fulani society of West Africa. Riesman discusses the different characters, economies, and life plans of adult men and women of both groups, focusing on their ideas about the value of relatives. He further presents detailed observations of child-rearing practices, and concludes that the FulBe and RiimaayBe do not differ in these practices. Contrasting Fulani and Western notions of parenting, he suggests that child-rearing practices are themselves irrelevant to the formation of adult personality, but that a people's ideas about the meaning of life, social relations, and the development of character are very important. Finally, Riesman outlines a sociocultural theory of personality and its formation, and uses this theory to make sense of the differences between FulBe and RiimaayBe.
First Light
Kanaka 'Oiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a WakeaIokepa Casumbal-Salazar
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Understanding the Hawai‘i Island summit of Mauna a Wākea as a place of ancestral connection, cultural resurgence, and political resistance for Native Hawaiians
First Light is a site-specific study of Native Hawaiian resistance to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna a Wākea, the sacred mountain on the island of Hawai‘i. Drawing on personal interviews, oral histories, archival research, participant observation, and popular, legal, scientific, and Indigenous discourses, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explores both the campaign to build the observatory and the movement against it. He asks how astronomers have become stewards of Mauna a Wākea while Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Aboriginal Hawaiians), in protest, are recast as obstructing progress and clinging to ancient superstitions.
Contextualizing contemporary resistance to telescope expansion within the past 132 years of struggle against U.S. empire in Hawai‘i, Casumbal-Salazar argues the Kanaka-led efforts to protect their ancestral lands did not begin with the TMT and only become legible when understood in the broader history of resistance to U.S. settler hegemony as told through the voices and actions of kiaʻi ʻāina (land defenders). First Light explores how settler science, capital, and law have been mobilized in ways that rationalize industrial development projects like the TMT and promote a vision of “coexistence” that enables the dehumanization of Kānaka ‘Ōiwi and their alienation from ʻāina.
Challenging the assumptions and aggressions of neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and U.S. military occupation, First Light reinforces calls for a moratorium on new telescope development and a literacy in Kanaka ‘Ōiwi movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty).
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First-Time
The Historical Vision of an African American PeopleRichard Price
University of Chicago Press, 2002
First-Time's unique style of presentation preserves the integrity of both its oral and documentary sources, uniting them in a profound meditation on the roles of history and memory. This second edition includes a new preface by the author, discussing First-Time's impact and recounting the continuing struggles of the Saramaka people.
Fistula Politics
Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in NigerHeller, Alison
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Fixing Sex
Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived ExperienceKatrina Karkazis
Duke University Press, 2008
Drawing extensively on interviews with adults with intersex conditions, parents, and physicians, Karkazis moves beyond the heated rhetoric to reveal the complex reality of how intersexuality is understood, treated, and experienced today. As she unravels the historical, technological, social, and political forces that have culminated in debates surrounding intersexuality, Karkazis exposes the contentious disagreements among theorists, physicians, intersex adults, activists, and parents—and all that those debates imply about gender and the changing landscape of intersex management. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? As this illuminating book reveals, debates over treatment for intersexuality force reassessment of the seemingly natural connections between gender, biology, and the body.
Flame Wars
The Discourse of CybercultureMark Dery
Duke University Press, 1994
The subcultural practices of the "incurably informed," to borrow the cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan’s coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be part-time residents in virtual communities. Yet, as the essays in this expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly confirm, there is more to fringe computer culture than cyberspace. Within these pages, readers will encounter flame warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom the computer is an occult engine; and William Gibson’s "Agrippa," a short story on software that can only be read once because it gobbles itself up as soon as the last page is reached. Here, too, is Lady El, an African American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or "compu-sex"; the teleoperated weaponry and amok robots of the mechanical performance art group, Survival Research Laboratories; an interview with Samuel Delany, and more.
Rallying around Fredric Jameson’s call for a cognitive cartography that "seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the global system," the contributors to Flame Wars have sketched a corner of that map, an outline for a wiring diagram of a terminally wired world.
Contributors. Anne Balsamo, Gareth Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Pauline, Peter Schwenger, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer
Flexible Citizenship
The Cultural Logics of TransnationalityAihwa Ong
Duke University Press, 1998
Explaining how intensified travel, communications, and mass media have created a transnational Chinese public, Aihwa Ong argues that previous studies have mistakenly viewed transnationality as necessarily detrimental to the nation-state and have ignored individual agency in the large-scale flow of people, images, and cultural forces across borders. She describes how political upheavals and global markets have induced Asian investors, in particular, to blend strategies of migration and of capital accumulation and how these transnational subjects have come to symbolize both the fluidity of capital and the tension between national and personal identities. Refuting claims about the end of the nation-state and about “the clash of civilizations,” Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization and an incisive contribution to the anthropology of Asia-Pacific modernity and its links to global social change.
This pioneering investigation of transnational cultural forms will appeal to those in anthropology, globalization studies, postcolonial studies, history, Asian studies, Marxist theory, and cultural studies.
Flexible Families
Nicaraguan Transnational Families in Costa RicaCaitlin Fouratt
Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
The book situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration—specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers—represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity.
In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.
Flip the Script
European Hip Hop and the Politics of PostcolonialityJ. Griffith Rollefson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Through analysis of recorded music and other media, as well as interviews and fieldwork with hip hop communities, J. Griffith Rollefson shows how this music created by black Americans is deployed by Senegalese Parisians, Turkish Berliners, and South Asian Londoners to both differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to the dominant culture. By listening closely to the ways these postcolonial citizens in Europe express their solidarity with African Americans through music, Rollefson shows, we can literally hear the hybrid realities of a global double consciousness.
Floating Power
Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South RelationsGökçe Günel
Duke University Press, 2026
Flogging Others
Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the PresentG. Geltner
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Florentine Codex
Book 10: Book 10: The PeopleBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1981
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Ten gives a broad overview of the different occupations, classes, and characteristics of Aztecs during this time period. Arguably the most fascinating part of this book is the detailed documentation of human anatomy and commonly used cures for physical ailments.
Florentine Codex
Book 11: Book 11: Earthly ThingsBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1963
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Eleven is a beautifully written and careful documentation of all of the animals and plants known to the Aztecs in the sixteenth century. As the volume with the most illustrations, Earthly Things allows the reader to look at the natural world through the eyes of the Aztec.
Florentine Codex
Book 12: Book 12: The Conquest of MexicoBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1975
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Twelve contains a meticulous retelling of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, from the days leading up to the first arrival of Cortes to the eventual submission of the Tlatilulcans, the Tenochtitlans, and their rulers to the Spaniards.
Florentine Codex
Book 1: Book 1: The GodsBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1981
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book One describes in detail the gods of the Aztec people, including Uitzilopochtli, Tlatoc, and Quetzalcoatl. This colorful and clear translation brings to life characteristics of each god, describing such items as clothing or adornment worn by individual gods, as well as specific personality traits.
Florentine Codex
Book 2: The CeremoniesBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1981
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Two gives comprehensive accounts of the religious ceremonies and days of feasting during the time of the Aztecs, including prayers, songs, and the duties and roles of Aztecs inside the temples during the ceremonies. This book also details the various tributes and sacrifices given to specific gods.
Florentine Codex
Book 6: Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral PhilosophyBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1969
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Six includes prayers to various gods asking for cures, riches, rain, and for the gods to bless or admonish a chosen ruler. In addition to these prayers, the book displays examples of formal conversation used in Aztec life, from the ruler and ambassador to others in the noble class.
Florentine Codex
Book 7: Book 7: The Sun, the Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the YearsBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1953
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Seven tells the origin stories of the sun, the moon, and the stars—which gods created them, what powers they each embody, and how they are related to Aztec astrology. This book also discusses the meaning and cause behind hail, lightning, rainbows, wind, and different types of weather.
Florentine Codex
Book 8: Book 8: Kings and LordsBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1954
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Eight lists the rulers of Tenochtitlan from the first, Acamapichtli, to the sixteenth, Don Cristobal Cecepatic. It also documents the rulers of the ancient Aztec cities of Tlatillco, Texcoco, and Uexotla. Several chapters are devoted to describing the various articles of clothing that the rulers and noblemen wore and the foods they ate for differing ceremonies and activities.
Florentine Codex
Book 9: Book 9: The MerchantsBernardino de Sahagun
University of Utah Press, 1959
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Nine begins with how commerce grew in Mexico from the trade of only feathers to jewelry, precious stones, animal skins, embroidered clothing, and chocolate. It discusses how the merchants prepare for a journey and the celebrations that take place when they arrive home safely. This book also lists different types of merchants, such as lapidaries, who worked with precious stones, and ornamenters, who made feather articles.
Flower Worlds
Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American SouthwestEdited by Michael D. Mathiowetz and Andrew D. Turner
University of Arizona Press, 2021
The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds. During the last thirty years, archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, Indigenous scholars, and linguists have emphasized the antiquity and geographical extent of similar Flower World beliefs among ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World.
Flower Worlds are not simply ethereal, otherworldly domains, but rather they are embodied in lived experience, activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the use of material objects and ritual spaces. This comprehensive book illuminates the origins of Flower Worlds as a key aspect of religions and histories among societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. It also explores the role of Flower Worlds in shaping ritual economies, politics, and cross-cultural interaction among Indigenous peoples.
Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.
Contributors: Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, James M. Córdova, Davide Domenici, Ángel González López, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael D. Mathiowetz, Cameron L. McNeil, Felipe S. Molina, Johannes Neurath, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, David Delgado Shorter, Karl A. Taube, Andrew D. Turner, Lorena Vázquez Vallín, Dorothy Washburn
Flowering of the Cumberland
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Flows of Violence
Water, Infrastructures, and the State in Buenaventura, ColombiaFelipe Fernández
University of Arizona Press, 2025
Flows of Violence offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants.
The book critically examines how everyday crime and state neglect intersect, altering the improvised practices of water storage and access among the population. It also highlights the innovative mechanisms employed by social movements and ordinary citizens to cope with and resist these challenges.
Flows of Violence is an essential read for scholars in anthropology, geography, and Latin American studies, offering valuable insights into the sociopolitical impacts of infrastructure. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond.
Fluent Bodies
Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial ImbalanceJean M. Langford
Duke University Press, 2002
Interweaving theory with narrative, Langford explores the strategies of contemporary practitioners who reconfigure Ayurvedic knowledge through institutions and technologies such as hospitals, anatomy labs, clinical trials, and sonograms. She shows how practitioners appropriate, transform, or circumvent the knowledge practices implicit in these institutions and technologies, destabilizing such categories as medicine, culture, science, symptom, and self, even as they deploy them in clinical practice. Ultimately, this study points to the future of Ayurveda in a transnational era as a remedy not only for the wounds of colonialism but also for an imagined cultural emptiness at the heart of global modernity.
Folk Practices in North Mexico
Birth Customs, Folk Medicine, and Spiritualism in the Laguna ZoneBy Isabel Kelly
University of Texas Press, 1965
The Mexican folkways described in this monograph, of scientific interest to anthropologists, will fascinate laypeople as well. Isabel Kelly collected these notes in the 1950s, as a diversion when official field work was not feasible, in the vicinity of Torreón and particularly in the nearby village of El Cuije, in northern Mexico. She recounts folk customs and habits, focusing on beliefs and practices related to health and healing and on notions concerning magic. These form, Kelly believes, a core of folk culture which has survived tenaciously in the rural areas and on the outskirts of the cities, among mestizo families of scant education and limited economic resources.
These people are well acquainted with simple, matter-of-fact illnesses which result from natural causes and which respond to treatment by herbal and other home remedies or by modern medicines. But they also recognize the evil eye and the emotional upset known as “fright.” They are thoroughly familiar with the ever-present danger of ailments which are not “natural” and God-sent, but which are deliberately inflicted by an enemy, through the artifice of a sorcerer or a spiritualist. Such “instigated” illnesses may take any form, from a cold in the head to a false pregnancy. If a person suspects that poor health results from such malevolence, he or she spurns Western medicine and looks instead to the witch or to the spiritualist as the only hope of a cure.
El Cuije pays an annual quota from community funds to make available modern health services provided by the government. But community funds are similarly drawn upon to provide “medical” attention for those who repair to the sorcerers. Once a week the village truck takes all presumed witchcraft victims to a nearby town, where they receive clinical treatment from professional sorcerers.
Kelly sees little that is genuinely indigenous in the beliefs and practices described; many of them demonstrably result from infiltration from the Old World in the years following the Spanish Conquest. She considers spiritualistic curing—important in northern Mexico and many other parts of Latin America—in some detail, but the specific outlines of its history in northern Mexico still awaited clarification at the time of her research.
Folklore in Utah
A History and Guide to ResourcesDavid Stanley
Utah State University Press, 2004
Over thirty scholars examine the development of folklore studies through the lens of over one hundred years of significant activity in a state that has provided grist for the mills of many prominent folklorists. In the past the Folklore Society of Utah has examined the work of such scholars in biographical and other essays published in its newsletters. This book incorporates those essays and goes well beyond them to include many other topices, offering a thorough history of folklore studies and a guide to resources for those pursuing research in Utah now and in the future.
The essays survey the development and contributions of folklore studies in Utah from 1892 to 2004 but also represent developments in both academic and public-sector folklore throughout the United States. Following a thorough historical introduction, part I profiles the first folklorists working in the state, including Hector Lee, Thomas Cheney, Austin and Alta Fife, Wayland Hand, and Lester Hubbard. Part II looks at the careers of prominent Utah folklorists Jan Harold Brunvand, Barre Toelken, and William B. Wilson, as well as the works of the next, current generation of folklorists. Part III covers studies in major folklore genres, with essays on the study of material culture, vernacular architecture, and Mormon, ethnic, Native American, and Latino folklore. Part IV examines public folklore programs including organizations, conferences, and tourism. Back matter describes academic programs at Utah institutions of higher education, summarizes the holdings of the various folklore archives in the state, and provides a complete cross-indexed bibliography of articles, books, and recordings of Utah folklore.
Following Father Chiniquy
Immigration, Religious Schism, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century IllinoisCaroline B. Brettell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2016
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the attention of the Catholic and Protestant religious communities around the world focused on a few small settlements of French Canadian immigrants in northeastern Illinois. Soon after arriving in their new home, a large number of these immigrants, led by Father Charles Chiniquy, the charismatic Catholic priest who had brought them there, converted to Protestantism. In this anthropological history, Caroline B. Brettell explores how Father Chiniquy took on both the sacred and the secular authority of the Catholic Church to engineer the religious schism and how the legacy of this rift affected the lives of the immigrants and their descendants for generations. This intriguing study of a nineteenth-century migration of French Canadians to the American Midwest offers an innovative perspective on the immigrant experience in America.
Brettell chronicles how Chiniquy came to lead approximately one thousand French Canadian families to St. Anne, Illinois, in the early 1850s and how his conflict with the Catholic hierarchy over the ownership and administration of church property, delivery of the mass in French instead of Latin, and access to the Bible by laymen led to his excommunication. Drawing on the concept of social drama—a situation of intensely lived conflict that emerges within social groups—Brettell explains the religious schism in terms of larger ethnic and religious disagreements that were happening elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. Brettell also explores legal disputes, analyzes the reemergence of Catholicism in St. Anne in the first decade of the twentieth century, addresses the legacy of Chiniquy in both the United States and Quebec, and closely examines the French Canadian immigrant communities, focusing on the differences between the people who converted to Protestantism and those who remained Catholic.
Occurring when nativism was pervasive and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party was at its height, Chiniquy’s religious schism offers an opportunity to examine a range of important historical and anthropological issues, including immigration, ethnicity, and religion; changes in household and family structure; the ways social identities are constructed and reconstructed through time; and the significance of charismatic leadership in processes of social and religious change. Through its multidisciplinary approach, Brettell’s enlightening study provides a pioneering assessment of larger national tensions and social processes, some of which are still evident in modern immigration to the United States.
Food Allergy Advocacy
Parenting and the Politics of CareDanya Glabau
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy
The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood.
By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare.
Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.
Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely GrocerCathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer
In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.
Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.
Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely GrocerCathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer
In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.
Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.
Food, Diaspora, and Memory
Edited by Zoë Antoinette Eddy
Lever Press, 2027
Across diasporic communities, food serves as a repository of memory, a marker of identity, and a powerful means of creating and sustaining belonging in the face of displacement. Food, Diaspora, and Memory brings together an international collection of contributors to explore how food mediates the complex relationships among migration, culture, family, and place. The essays explore how recipes, meals, culinary traditions, and food narratives function as living archives through which individuals and communities maintain connections to ancestral homelands while simultaneously creating new forms of belonging in their adopted homes. Together, the contributors reveal food as both a deeply personal and profoundly social medium through which diasporic communities navigate questions of identity, memory, and cultural negotiation.
By bringing together global perspectives on food, diaspora, and cultural resilience, Food, Diaspora, and Memory offers a timely contribution to some of the most pressing social and cultural questions of our time and demonstrates the continuing power of food to sustain communities across borders, generations, and histories.
Food, Farms, and Solidarity
French Farmers Challenge Industrial Agriculture and Genetically Modified CropsChaia Heller
Duke University Press, 2012
Foods of Association
Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate SociabilityNina L. Etkin
University of Arizona Press, 2009
This fascinating book examines the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to their health implications. Nina Etkin covers a wealth of topics, exploring human evolutionary history, the Slow Food movement, ritual and ceremonial foods, caffeinated beverages, spices, the street foods of Hawaii and northern Nigeria, and even bottled water. Her work is framed by a biocultural perspective that considers both the physiological implications of consumption and the cultural construction and circulation of foods. For Etkin, the foods and beverages we consume are simultaneously “biodynamic substances and cultural objects.”
The book begins with a look at the social eating habits of our primate relatives and discusses our evolutionary adaptations. It then offers a history of social foods in the era of European expansion, with a focus on spices and “caffeinated cordials.” (Of course, there were some powerful physiological consequences of eating foods brought home by returning explorers, and those are considered too—along with consequences for native peoples.) From there, the book describes “street food,” which is always served in communal settings. Etkin then scrutinizes ceremonial foods and beverages, and considers their pharmacological effects as well. Her extensive examination concludes by assessing the biological and cultural implications of bottled water.
While intended primarily for scholars, this enticing book serves up a tantalizing smorgasbord of food for thought.
Foodways of the Ancient Andes
Transforming Diet, Cuisine, and SocietyMarta P Alfonso-Durruty
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of Foodways of the Ancient Andes offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. The volume spans time periods and localities in the Andean region to reveal how food is intertwined with multiple aspects of the human experience, from production and consumption to ideology and sociopolitical organization. It illustrates the Andean peoples’ resilience in the face of challenges brought about by food scarcity and environmental change. Chapters dissect the intersection of food, power, and status in early states and empires; examine the impact of food during times of conflict and instability; and illuminate how sacred and high-status foods contributed to the building of the Inka Empire.
Featuring forty-six contributors from ten countries, the chapters employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show that food can provide not only simple nutrition but also a multitude of strategies, social and political relationships, and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.
Contributors
Aleksa K. Alaica
Sonia Alconini
Marta Alfonso-Durruty
Sarah I. Baitzel
Véronique Bélisle
Carolina Belmar
Carrie Anne Berryman
Matthew E. Biwer
Deborah E. Blom
Tamara L. Bray
Matthew T. Brown
Maria C. Bruno
José M. Capriles
Katherine L. Chiou
Susan D. deFrance
Lucia M. Diaz
Richard P. Evershed
Maureen E. Folk
Alexandra Greenwald
Chris Harrod
Christine A. Hastorf
Iain Kendall
Kelly J. Knudson
BrieAnna S. Langlie
Cecilia Lemp
Petrus le Roux
Marcos Martinez
Anahí Maturana-Fernández
Weston C. McCool
Melanie J. Miller
Nicole Misarti
Flavia Morello
Patricia Quiñonez Cuzcano
Omar Reyes
Arturo F. Rivera Infante
Manuel San Román
Francisca Santana-Sagredo
Beth K. Scaffidi
Augusto Tessone
Andrés Troncoso
Tiffiny A. Tung
Mauricio Uribe
Natasha P. Vang
Sadie L. Weber
Kurt M. Wilson
Michelle E. Young
Football and Colonialism
Body and Popular Culture in Urban MozambiqueNuno Domingos
Ohio University Press, 2017
In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”
In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.
Footnotes
On ShoesEdited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Footprints of Hopi History
Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'atEdited by Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, T. J. Ferguson, and Chip Colwell
University of Arizona Press, 2018
The fourteen chapters in Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at focus on these Hopi footprints as they are understood through a variety of research techniques, including archaeology, ethnography, documentary history, plant genetics, and educational outreach. The editors and contributors offer fresh and innovative perspectives on Hopi archaeology and history, and demonstrate how one tribe has significantly advanced knowledge about its past through collaboration with archaeologists and cultural anthropologists.
The book features managerial uses of research, cultural landscape theory, use of GIS in research, archaeological interpretations of social identity and immigration, analysis of corn genetics, heritage education of youth, and research of oral traditions and documentary history. Footprints of Hopi History highlights the Hopi tribe’s leadership in sustained efforts to create bridges between tribal goals and anthropology, forging a path for others to follow.
Contributors
E. Charles Adams
Wesley Bernardini
Joëlle Clark
Chip Colwell
T. J. Ferguson
Dennis Gilpin
Kelley Hays-Gilpin
George Gumerman IV
Saul L. Hedquist
Maren P. Hopkins
Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma
Lee Wayne Lomayestewa
Patrick D. Lyons
Shirley Powell
Gregson Schachner
Thomas E. Sheridan
Mark D. Varien
Laurie D. Webster
Peter M. Whiteley
Michael Yeatts
For Money and Elders
Ritual, Sovereignty, and the Sacred in KenyaRobert W. Blunt
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.