72 books match the query 'Social structure' and 2 start with g

cover of Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

Gendering the Renaissance

Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

Meredith K. Ray

University of Delaware Press, 2023

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.
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cover of Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya

Gods and Vampires

Return to Chipaya

Nathan Wachtel

University of Chicago Press, 1994

When Nathan Wachtel, the distinguished historical anthropologist, returned to the village of Chipaya, the site of his extensive fieldwork in the Bolivian Andes, he learned a group of Uru Indians was being incarcerated and tortured for no apparent reason. Even more strangely, no one—not even his closest informant and friend—would speak about it.

Wachtel discovered that a series of recent deaths and misfortunes in Chipaya had been attributed to the evil powers of the Urus, a group usually regarded with suspicion by the other ethnic groups. Those incarcerated were believed to be the chief sorcerers and vampires whose paganistic practices had brought death to Chipaya by upsetting the social order. Wachtel's investigation, told in Gods and Vampires: Back to Chipaya, reveals much about relations between the Urus and the region's dominant ethnic groups and confronts some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary anthropology. His analysis shows that the Urus had become victims of the same set of ideals the Spanish had used, centuries before, to establish their hegemony in the region.

Presented as a personal detective story, Gods and Vampires is Wachtel's latest work in a series studying the ongoing impact of the Spanish conquest on the Andean consciousness and social system. Its insight into Bolivian society and the legacy of hegemony confronts some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary anthropologyand will be of great interest to scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, and Native American studies.
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