Results by title

22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 635 start with h

cover of Holocaust: An American Understanding

Holocaust

An American Understanding

Lipstadt, Deborah E

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all.  In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans—from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States—tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history.
 
Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women’s movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey’s The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy.   
 
Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.
 
[more]
cover of Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley

Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley

Richard Jefferies

University of Alabama Press, 2009

By the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 B.P.), small wandering bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers began to annually follow the same hunting trails, basing their temporary camps on seasonal conditions and the presence of food. The Pleistocene glaciers had receded by this time, making food more plentiful in some areas and living conditions less hazardous. Although these Archaic peoples have long been known from their primary activities as hunters and gatherers of wild food resources, recent evidence has been found that indicates they also began rudimentary cultivation sometime during the Middle Holocene.
Richard Jefferies—an Archaic specialist—comprehensively addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists. Jefferies centers his research on a 380-mile section of the Lower Ohio River Valley, an area rife with both temporary and long-term Archaic sites. He covers the duration of the Holocene and provides a compendium of knowledge of the era, including innovative research strategies and results. Presenting these data from a cultural-ecological perspective emphasizing the relationships between hunter-gatherers and the environments in which they lived, Jefferies integrates current research strategies with emerging theories that are beginning to look at culture history in creative ways
[more]
cover of Holy Anorexia

Holy Anorexia

Rudolph M. Bell

University of Chicago Press, 1985

Is there a resemblance between the contemporary anorexic teenager counting every calorie in her single-minded pursuit of thinness, and an ascetic medieval saint examining her every desire? Rudolph M. Bell suggests that the answer is yes.

"Everyone interested in anorexia nervosa . . . should skim this book or study it. It will make you realize how dependent upon culture the definition of disease is. I will never look at an anorexic patient in the same way again."—Howard Spiro, M.D., Gastroenterology

"[This] book is a first-class social history and is well-documented both in its historical and scientific portions."—Vern L. Bullough, American Historical Review

"A significant contribution to revisionist history, which re-examines events in light of feminist thought. . . . Bell is particularly skillful in describing behavior within its time and culture, which would be bizarre by today's norms, without reducing it to the pathological."—Mary Lassance Parthun, Toronto Globe and Mail

"Bell is both enlightened and convincing. His book is impressively researched, easy to read, and utterly fascinating."—Sheila MacLeod, New Statesman
[more]
cover of Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir

Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear

A Japanese American Memoir

Kathleen Tamagawa, Edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Originally published in 1932, Kathleen Tamagawa’s pioneering Asian American memoir is a sensitive and thoughtful look at the personal and social complexities of growing up racially mixed during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893 to an Irish American mother and a Japanese father and raised in Chicago and Japan, Tamagawa reflects on the difficulty she experienced fitting into either parent’s native culture.
 

            She describes how, in America, her every personal quirk and quality was seen as quintessentially Japanese and how she was met unpredictably with admiration or fear—perceived as a “Japanese doll” or “the yellow menace.” When her family later moved to Japan, she was viewed there as a “Yankee,” and remained an outsider in that country as well. As an adult she came back to the United States as an American diplomat’s wife, but had trouble feeling at home in any place.
 

            This edition, which also includes Tamagawa’s recently rediscovered short story, “A Fit in Japan,” and a critical introduction, will challenge readers to reconsider how complex ethnic identities are negotiated and how feelings of alienation limit human identification in any society. 

 

[more]
cover of Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel

Holy Rebellion

Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel

Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks

Brandeis University Press, 2024

An in-depth study of Jewish religion and law in Israel from a gendered perspective.
 
In Holy Rebellion, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks examine social change in Israel through a rigorous analysis of the shifting entanglements of religion, gender, and law in times of cultural transformation. They explore theological, halakhic, political, and sociological processes and show how they interact with one another in ways that advance women’s rights, as well as how they are met with a conservative backlash in the discourses and actions of the rabbinic establishment. Irshai and Zion-Waldoks build on legal philosopher Robert Cover’s 1982 paper “Nomos and Narrative,” which explained how cultural narratives and legal norms are reciprocally enforced or transformed. Expanding on this notion, Irshai and Zion-Waldoks propose a “narrative ripeness test,” an analytic tool that evaluates the relationship between culture and law to assess how and when change within a minority cultural community may be accelerated or hindered by state intervention. 
 
Religious feminisms are emerging around the world, not solely in Israel, and this book helps elucidate how they create enduring and radical change. Many liberal states are also confronting an illiberal backlash and question the multicultural framework’s ability to serve the needs of minorities within minorities. Therefore, the theoretical framework offered by Irshai and Zion-Waldoks is applicable beyond the Israeli case, even as it offers deeper insights into an Israeli society in turmoil.
[more]
cover of Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform

Holy Terrors

Latin American Women Perform

Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

Holy Terrors presents exemplary original work by fourteen of Latin America’s foremost contemporary women theatre and performance artists. Many of the pieces—including one-act plays, manifestos, and lyrics—appear in English for the first time. From Griselda Gambaro, Argentina's most widely recognized playwright, to such renowned performers as Brazil's Denise Stoklos and Mexico’s Jesusa Rodríguez, these women are involved in some of Latin America's most important aesthetic and political movements. Of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds, they come from across Latin America—Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Peru, and Cuba. This volume is generously illustrated with over seventy images. A number of the performance pieces are complemented by essays providing context and analysis.

The performance pieces in Holy Terrors are powerful testimonies to the artists' political and personal struggles. These women confront patriarchy, racism, and repressive government regimes and challenge brutality and corruption through a variety of artistic genres. Several have formed theatre collectives—among them FOMMA (a Mayan women’s theatre company in Chiapas) and El Teatro de la máscara in Colombia. Some draw from cabaret and ‘frivolous’ theatre traditions to create intense and humorous performances that challenge church and state. Engaging in self-mutilation and abandoning traditional dress, others use their bodies as the platforms on which to stage their defiant critiques of injustice. Holy Terrors is a unique English-language presentation of some of Latin America's fiercest, most provocative art.

Contributors
Sabina Berman
Tania Bruguera
Petrona de la Cruz Cruz
Diamela Eltit
Griselda Gambaro
Astrid Hadad
Teresa Hernández
Rosa Luisa Márquez
Teresa Ralli
Diana Raznovich
Jesusa Rodríguez
Denise Stoklos
Katia Tirado
Ema Villanueva

[more]
cover of Holy Waters: Gender Segregation and the Rise of Haredi Politics in Israel

Holy Waters

Gender Segregation and the Rise of Haredi Politics in Israel

Shayna Weiss

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Examining the politics of pools and beaches, Holy Waters reveals a surprising history about Haredi Jews and Israel. By looking at the battles to establish gender segregating swimming in Israel, which required a partnership between the Israeli government and its Haredi population to reshape public space, the book argues that the establishment of Israel created a new Haredi pragmatic politics. Unlike some Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who rejected the Jewish state entirely, these radical moderates worked with the state to make it feel more Jewish, and to improve life for its Haredi population, without embracing Zionist ideology. Holy Waters examines three cases: a failure to prevent mixed swimming in Jerusalem, the successful establishment of a separate beach in Tel Aviv, and the mixed results of a Diaspora awareness campaign. Connecting historical controversies to today’s debates of gender segregation, the book demonstrates how these radical moderates still influence Israel today.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

[more]
cover of Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy

Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy

James Kale McNeley

University of Arizona Press, 1981

"The author has written a well-documented book on the Navajo concept of personality. . . . Holy Wind gives life, movement, thought, speech, and behavior and links the Navajo soul to the immanent powers of the universe. . . . A valuable case study." —Journal of Psychology & Theology

"An admirable volume . . . it illustrates how much we can learn about the importance of poetry as a fundamental activity by investigating the traditions of what should be acknowledged as the New World's unique classical past." —New Scholar

"This book is a fascinating analysis of what obviously is a central dimension in the traditional Navajo awareness of life." —New Mexico Historical Review
[more]
cover of Home Away From Home: A History of Basque Boardinghouses

Home Away From Home

A History of Basque Boardinghouses

Jeronima Echeverria

University of Nevada Press, 1999

In this meticulously researched study of Basque boardinghouses in the United States, Jeronima Echeverria offers a compelling history of the institution that most deeply shaped Basque immigrant life and served as the center of Basque communities throughout the West. She weaves into her narrative the stories of the boarding house owners and operators and the ways they made their establishments a home away from home for their fellow compatriots, as well as the stories of the young Basques who left the security of their beloved homeland to find work in the United States.

[more]
cover of Home Away from Home: Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States

Home Away from Home

Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States

Sawa Kurotani

Duke University Press, 2005

Drawing attention to domestic space as the critical juncture between the global and the local, Home Away from Home is an innovative ethnography of the daily lives of middle-class Japanese housewives who accompany their husbands on temporary corporate job assignments in the United States. These women are charged with the task of creating and maintaining restful Japanese homes in a foreign environment so that their husbands are able to remain productive, loyal workers for Japanese multinationals and their children are properly socialized and educated as Japanese citizens abroad. Arguing that the homemaking components of transnational communities have not received adequate attention, Sawa Kurotani demonstrates how gender dynamics and the politics of the domestic sphere are integral to understanding national identity and transnational mobility.

Kurotani interviewed and spent time with more than 120 women in three U.S. locations with sizable expatriate Japanese communities: Centerville, a pseudonymous Midwestern town; the New York metropolitan area; and North Carolina’s Research Triangle area. She highlights the contradictory situations faced by the transient wives. Their husbands’ assignments in the United States typically last from three to five years, and they frequently emphasize the temporariness of their situation, referring to it as a “long vacation.” Yet they are responsible for creating comfortable homes for their families, which necessitates producing a familiar and permanent environment. Kurotani looks at the dynamic friendships that develop among the wives and describes their feelings about returning to Japan. She conveys how their sense of themselves as Japanese women, of home, and of their relationships with family members are altered by their personal experiences of transnational homemaking.

[more]
cover of Home Before the Raven Caws

Home Before the Raven Caws

Richard Feldman

Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012

In 1903 Alaska governor John Brady collected fifteen old totem poles for preservation at Stika National Historical Park, creating one of the most famous collections of totem poles in the world. One pole became separated, and its fate remained a mystery for nearly ninety years. This revised edition of Home before the Raven Caws unravels the mystery of that missing pole from the Brady collection. The old Alaskan pole found its way to Indiana over a hundred years ago. A new version of the pole stands today at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. The first portion of the book serves as a general primer of the history and cultural significance, identification, carving, and raising of totem poles.
[more]
cover of Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States

Home Fronts

Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States

Lora Romero

Duke University Press, 1997

Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.
[more]
cover of Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition: A Black Feminist Anthology

Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition

A Black Feminist Anthology

Barbara Smith

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.
[more]
cover of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

Home Girls

A Black Feminist Anthology

Smith, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2000

The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published.

Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems.

[more]
cover of Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices

Home Girls

Chicana Literary Voices

Alvina E. Quintana

Temple University Press, 1996

"Home Girls makes an original, bold, and significant contribution to feminist studies, Chicana/o studies, and literature. Quintana accomplishes what few critics in Chicana/o studies have done: she applies different interpretive paradigms to her reading of Chicana texts, blending ethnography with literary criticism, ideological analysis with semiotics. Her reading of literary texts is rich in texture and detail." --Rosa Linda Fregoso, author of Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture Chicana writers in the United States write to inspire social change, to challenge a patriarchal and homophobic culture, to redefine traditional gender roles, to influence the future. Alvina E. Quintana examines how Chicana writers engage literary convention through fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography as a means of addressing these motives. Her analysis of the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga addresses a multitude of issues: the social and political forces that influenced the Chicana aesthetic; Chicana efforts to open a dialogue about the limitation of both Anglo-American feminism and Chicano nationalism; experimentations with content and form; the relationship between imaginative writing and self-reflexive ethnography; and performance, domesticity, and sexuality. Employing anthropological, feminist, historical, and literary sources, Quintana explores the continuity found among Chicanas writing across varied genres--a drive to write themselves into being.
[more]
cover of Home Is Where Your Politics Are: Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa

Home Is Where Your Politics Are

Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa

Jessica A. Scott

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Home Is Where Your Politics Are is a transnational consideration of queer and trans activism in the US South and South Africa. Through ethnographic exploration of queer and trans activist work in both places, Jessica Scott paints a vibrant picture of what life is like in relation to a narrative that says that queer life is harder, if not impossible, in rural areas and on the African continent. The book asks questions like, what do activists in these places care about and how do stories about where they live get in the way of the life they envision for the queer and trans people for whom they advocate? Answers to these questions provide insight that only these activists have, into the complexity of locally based advocacy strategies in a globalized world.
[more]
cover of Home Material: Ohio's Nineteenth-Century Regional Women's Fiction

Home Material

Ohio's Nineteenth-Century Regional Women's Fiction

Sandra Parker

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

This chronologically selected anthology of fiction by eight Ohio women makes accessible a literary tradition that begins with lost aspects of frontier life in the 1830s depicted by contemporaries Julia L. Dumont and Pamilla W. Ball. It ends with Jessie Brown Pounds’s retrospective recreation of the Western Reserve’s frontier culture at the century’s close.
[more]
cover of Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Michelle Citron

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

[more]
cover of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

Home Rule

National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

Nandita Sharma

Duke University Press, 2020

In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.
[more]
cover of Home Safe Home: Housing Solutions for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Home Safe Home

Housing Solutions for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Botein, Hilary

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Housing matters for everyone, as it provides shelter, security, privacy, and stability. For survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), housing takes on an additional meaning; it is the key to establishing a new life, free from abuse. IPV survivors often face such inadequate housing options, however, that they must make excruciating choices between cycling through temporary shelters, becoming homeless, or returning to their abusers. 
 
Home Safe Home offers a multifaceted analysis that accounts for both IPV survivors’ needs and the practical challenges involved in providing them with adequate permanent housing. Incorporating the varied perspectives of the numerous housing providers, activists, policymakers, and researchers who have a stake in these issues, the book also lets IPV survivors have their say, expressing their views on what housing and services can best meet their short and long-term goals. Researchers Hilary Botein and Andrea Hetling not only examine the federal and state policies and funding programs determining housing for IPV survivors, but also provide detailed case studies that put a human face on these policy issues. 
 
As it traces how housing options and support mechanisms for IPV survivors have evolved over time, Home Safe Home also offers innovative suggestions for how policymakers and advocates might work together to better meet the needs of this vulnerable population. 
 
[more]
cover of Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language

Home Signs

An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language

Joshua O. Reno

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An intimate account of an anthropologist’s relationship with his non-verbal son and how it has shaped and transformed his understanding of closeness and communication.

Home Signs grew out of the anthropologist Joshua Reno’s experience of caring for and trying to communicate with his teenage son, Charlie, who cannot speak. To manage interactions with others, Charlie uses what are known as “home signs,” gestures developed to meet his need for expression, ranging from the wiggle of a finger to a subtle sideways glance. Though he is nonverbal, he is far from silent: in fact, he is in constant communication with others.
 
In this intimate reflection on language, disability, and togetherness, the author invites us into his and Charlie’s shared world. Combining portraits of family life and interviews with other caregivers, Reno upends several assumptions, especially the idea that people who seem not to be able to speak for themselves need others to speak on their behalf. With its broad exploration of nonverbal communication in both human and nonhuman contexts, Home Signs challenges us to think harder about what it means to lead a “normal” life and to connect with another person.
[more]
cover of Home Team Away: Watching European Football in Urban China

Home Team Away

Watching European Football in Urban China

Yuan Gong

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Home Team Away calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle class subjectivity is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big Five leagues. Yuan Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home teams away, the Chinese middle class fans perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.

[more]
cover of Home Truths?: Video Production and Domestic Life

Home Truths?

Video Production and Domestic Life

David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett, and Maria Pini

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Over the past decade, the video camera has become a commonplace household technology. With falling prices on compact and easy-to-use cameras, as well as mobile phones and digital still cameras with video recording capabilities, access to moving image production technology is becoming virtually universal. Home Truths? represents one of the few academic research studies exploring this everyday, popular use of video production technology, looking particularly at how families use and engage with the technology and how it fits into the routines of everyday life.

The authors draw on interviews, observations, and the participants' videos themselves, seeking to paint a comprehensive picture of the role of video making in their everyday lives. While readers gain a sense of the individual characters involved in the project and the complexities and diversities of their lives, the analysis also raises a range of broader issues about the nature of learning and creativity, subjectivity and representation, and the "domestication" of technology---issues that are of interest to many in the fields of sociology and media/cultural studies.

David Buckingham is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and Director of the Institute's Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media.

Rebekah Willett is Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she teaches in Media, Culture and Communication.

Maria Pini previously worked as Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London University, and is now a researcher on the Camcorder Cultures project at the Institute of Education.

Cover art: Young videomaker ©iStockphoto.com/ kaisersosa67

Technologies of the Imagination: New Media in Everyday Life

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

[more]
cover of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel

Home and Harem

Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel

Inderpal Grewal

Duke University Press, 1996

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal’s study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East.

In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.

Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.

 

 

[more]
cover of Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Home and Hegemony

Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia

Kathleen M. Adams and Sara Dickey, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

In the intimate context of domestic service, power relations take on one of their most personalized forms. Domestic servants and their employers must formulate their political identities in relationship to each other, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes challenging broader social hierarchies such as those based on class, caste or rank, gender, race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and kinship relations.
This pathbreaking collection builds on recent examinations of identity in the postcolonial states of South and Southeast Asia by investigating the ways in which domestic workers and their employers come to know and depict one another and themselves through their interactions inside and outside of the home. This setting provides a particularly apt arena for examining the daily negotiations of power and hegemony.
Contributors to the volume, all anthropologists, provide rich ethnographic analyses that avoid a narrow focus on either workers or employers. Rather, they examine systems of power through specific topics that range from the notion of "nurture for sale" to the roles of morality and humor in the negotiation of hierarchy and the dilemmas faced by foreign employers who find themselves in life-and-death dependence on their servants.
With its provocative theoretical and ethnographic contributions to current debates, this collection will be of interest to scholars in Asian studies, women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
Kathleen M. Adams is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Loyola University of Chicago. Sara Dickey is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College.
[more]
cover of Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life

Home and Work

Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life

Christena E. Nippert-Eng

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Do you put family photos on your desk at work? Are your home and work keys on the same chain? Do you keep one all-purpose calendar for listing home and work events? Do you have separate telephone books for colleagues and friends? In Home and Work, Christena Nippert-Eng examines the intricacies and implications of how we draw the line between home and work.

Arguing that relationships between the two realms range from those that are highly "integrating" to those that are highly "segmenting," Nippert-Eng examines the ways people sculpt the boundaries between home and work. With remarkable sensitivity to the symbolic value of objects and actions, Nippert-Eng explores the meaning of clothing, wallets, lunches and vacations, and the places and ways in which we engage our family, friends, and co-workers. Commuting habits are also revealing, showing how we make the transition between home and work selves though ritualized behavior like hellos and goodbyes, the consumption of food, the way we dress, our choices of routes to and from work, and our listening, working, and sleeping habits during these journeys.

The ways each of us manages time, space, and people not only reflect but reinforce lives that are more "integrating" or "segmenting" at any given time. In clarifying what we take for granted, this book will leave you thinking in different ways about your life and work.
[more]
cover of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media

Homebodies

Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media

L. Archer Porter

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media sheds light on a fascinating yet often overlooked phenomenon: how ordinary people transform their private lives into captivating performances for the digital stage. Focusing on home dance videos shared on Instagram from 2010 to 2020, the book explores the delicate art of "intimaesthetics"—the aestheticization of intimacy through the interplay of body, space, and media—and the paradox of the homebody. These seemingly spontaneous performances reveal how users craft images of closeness and authenticity, drawing audiences into a curated version of their domestic lives. Yet, Porter argues, these intimate portrayals exist within a larger system of platform control, algorithmic surveillance, and the commodification of personal expression. 

Porter utilizes hand-drawn illustrations in place of screenshots, which reflects their commitment to critiquing the exploitative dynamics of digital visibility while respecting the personal nature of the media studied. By examining the intersection of personal agency, algorithmic control, and the commodification of authenticity, Homebodies provides a nuanced understanding of how technology redefines intimacy, identity, and creativity in the twenty-first century.

[more]
cover of Homeboys Forever: The Lifetime Consequences of Gang Membership

Homeboys Forever

The Lifetime Consequences of Gang Membership

Avelardo Valdez

University of Chicago Press, 2026

What is the end of the story after a lifetime in gangs?
 
Violence, addiction, imprisonment . . . we don’t have to look hard to see the negative consequences of gang involvement. But what does it look like to spend a life—from adolescence to adulthood—in gangs? Sociologist Avelardo Valdez and his research team have been following the lives of Mexican American men in San Antonio, Texas, over a remarkable twenty years, watching and listening as they navigate adolescent delinquency and gang involvement, advance into a life of crime, and—sometimes—attempt to break from gang life and build lives in conventional society.

When gang affiliation exploded in the 1990s, adolescent street gang membership surged in the Mexican American community of Westside San Antonio. Valdez was quick to begin investigating how young men embedded in a system with little support for lasting change turned to gang violence, drug use, and other risky behaviors. The honesty of these men’s accounts draws our attention to the economic, political, and sociocultural context of impoverished communities in San Antonio. Being constantly written off as troublemakers and criminals eroded the self-respect that these young men once had. They were once lithe, active, and full of self-confidence, but after a lifetime of constant harassment and entanglements with the legal system, they now have a perpetual look of exhaustion and defeat.

Encouraging readers to question who is at fault when young men become involved in gangs and other delinquent behaviors, Homeboys Forever is a humanizing account of marginalized youth who struggle to overcome the systemic inequities that have led to a lifetime of heartbreaking consequences. 
 
[more]
cover of Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

Homecoming Queers

Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

Danielson, Marivel T

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities.

Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

[more]
cover of Homegirls in the Public Sphere

Homegirls in the Public Sphere

By Marie "Keta" Miranda

University of Texas Press, 2003

Girls in gangs are usually treated as objects of public criticism and rejection. Seldom are they viewed as objects worthy of understanding and even more rarely are they allowed to be active subjects who craft their own public persona—which is what makes this work unique. In this book, Marie "Keta" Miranda presents the results of an ethnographic collaboration with Chicana gang members, in which they contest popular and academic representations of Chicana/o youth and also construct their own narratives of self identity through a documentary film, It's a Homie Thang!

In telling the story of her research in the Fruitvale community of Oakland, California, Miranda honestly reveals how even a sympathetic ethnographer from the same ethnic group can objectify the subjects of her study. She recounts how her project evolved into a study of representation and its effects in the public sphere as the young women spoke out about how public images of their lives rarely come close to the reality. As Miranda describes how she listened to the gang members and collaborated in the production of their documentary, she sheds new light on the politics of representation and ethnography, on how inner city adolescent Chicanas present themselves to various publics, and on how Chicana gangs actually function.

[more]
cover of Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11

Homeland Insecurity

The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11

Louis A. Cainkar

Russell Sage Foundation, 2009

In the aftermath of 9/11, many Arab and Muslim Americans came under intense scrutiny by federal and local authorities, as well as their own neighbors, on the chance that they might know, support, or actually be terrorists. As Louise Cainkar observes, even U.S.-born Arabs and Muslims were portrayed as outsiders, an image that was amplified in the months after the attacks. She argues that 9/11 did not create anti-Arab and anti-Muslim suspicion; rather, their socially constructed images and social and political exclusion long before these attacks created an environment in which misunderstanding and hostility could thrive and the government could defend its use of profiling. Combining analysis and ethnography, Homeland Insecurity provides an intimate view of what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim in a country set on edge by the worst terrorist attack in its history. Focusing on the metropolitan Chicago area, Cainkar conducted more than a hundred research interviews and five in-depth oral histories. In this, the most comprehensive ethnographic study of the post-9/11 period for American Arabs and Muslims, native-born and immigrant Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese, Jordanians, and others speak candidly about their lives as well as their experiences with government, public mistrust, discrimination, and harassment after 9/11. The book reveals that Arab Muslims were more likely to be attacked in certain spatial contexts than others and that Muslim women wearing the hijab were more vulnerable to assault than men, as their head scarves were interpreted by some as a rejection of American culture. Even as the 9/11 Commission never found any evidence that members of Arab- or Muslim-American communities were involved in the attacks, respondents discuss their feelings of insecurity—a heightened sense of physical vulnerability and exclusion from the guarantees of citizenship afforded other Americans. Yet the vast majority of those interviewed for Homeland Insecurity report feeling optimistic about the future of Arab and Muslim life in the United States. Most of the respondents talked about their increased interest in the teachings of Islam, whether to counter anti-Muslim slurs or to better educate themselves. Governmental and popular hostility proved to be a springboard for heightened social and civic engagement. Immigrant organizations, religious leaders, civil rights advocates, community organizers, and others defended Arabs and Muslims and built networks with their organizations. Local roundtables between Arab and Muslim leaders, law enforcement, and homeland security agencies developed better understanding of Arab and Muslim communities. These post-9/11 changes have given way to stronger ties and greater inclusion in American social and political life. Will the United States extend its values of freedom and inclusion beyond the politics of "us" and "them" stirred up after 9/11? The answer is still not clear. Homeland Insecurity is keenly observed and adds Arab and Muslim American voices to this still-unfolding period in American history.
[more]
cover of Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime

Homeland Maternity

US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

University of Illinois Press, 2019

In US security culture, motherhood is a site of intense contestation--both a powerful form of cultural currency and a target of unprecedented assault. Linked by an atmosphere of crisis and perceived vulnerability, motherhood and nation have become intimately entwined, dangerously positioning national security as reliant on the control of women's bodies. Drawing on feminist scholarship and critical studies of security culture, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz explores homeland maternity by calling our attention to the ways that authorities see both non-reproductive and "overly" reproductive women's bodies as threats to social norms--and thus to security. Homeland maternity culture intensifies motherhood's requirements and works to discipline those who refuse to adhere. Analyzing the opt-out revolution, public debates over emergency contraception, and other controversies, Fixmer-Oraiz compellingly demonstrates how policing maternal bodies serves the political function of securing the nation in a time of supposed danger--with profound and troubling implications for women's lives and agency.
[more]
cover of Homeless Families: THE STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY

Homeless Families

THE STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY

Barry Jay Seltser and Donald E. Miller

University of Illinois Press, 1993

How do homeless people perceive their plight? Specifically, how does their situation affect their sense of personal dignity? In intensive interviews with one hundred adult heads of homeless families, Barry Seltser and Donald Miller ask these questions, previously not dealt with in the growing literature on homelessness. Homeless Families sensitizes readers, challenging them to consider their own moral and social responses to homeless people.
 
[more]
cover of Homeless In Paradise: A Map of the Terrain

Homeless In Paradise

A Map of the Terrain

Robert Rosenthal

Temple University Press, 1993

[more]
cover of Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty

Homeless Mothers

Face to Face with Women and Poverty

Deborah R. Connolly

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

A first-person look at the challenges and cultural perceptions confronting homeless women. Homeless Mothers follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the increasingly black-and-white model of motherhood set up by society. Their voices, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonate throughout this book. Both an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed to draw out these women's life stories. Using their own words, by turns eloquent and awkward, poignant and harsh, she maps the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street. What emerges is a glimpse of the cultural, class, gender, and economic challenges these women experience, a glimpse as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes that so often displace homeless mothers and consign them to silence. "Connolly explores in rich detail the day-to-day experiences of women who use family shelters. Homeless Mothers is an insider's view on poverty and homelessness from the standpoint of mothers, families, and the social service providers who work with them. Connolly uses ethnographic methods and skills worthy of a good fiction writer to portray the daily lives, struggles, and intricate negotiations of homeless mothers." --Housing Studies Deborah R. Connolly is an advocate for the homeless and a senior research associate at Edgewood Center for Children and Families in San Francisco. She recently taught cultural anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
[more]
cover of Homeless and at Home in America: Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place

Homeless and at Home in America

Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place

Peter Augustine Lawler

St. Augustine's Press, 2007

[more]
cover of Homeless in Las Vegas: Stories from the Street

Homeless in Las Vegas

Stories from the Street

Kurt Borchard

University of Nevada Press, 2011

The homeless men and women represented in this book speak candidly about their plight, its origins, and the many obstacles to escaping it. They discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that Las Vegas’s focus on tourism, indulgence, and diversion offers its homeless residents. This compelling and emotionally charged ethnography counters many of the stereotypes of homeless men and women, revealing the remarkable diversity of their circumstances. It also offers their perspectives on social services and civic attitudes toward homelessness.
[more]
cover of Homelessness among Older Adults in Prague: Causes, Contexts and Prospects

Homelessness among Older Adults in Prague

Causes, Contexts and Prospects

Marie Vágnerová, Ladislav Csémy, and Jakub Marek

Karolinum Press, 2020

Following their engaging study Homelessness among Young People in Prague, the authors of this book turn their attention to an older population facing the same issue, a very different situation since these older adults grew up under a communist regime where an obligation to work was enshrined in law and living on the street could result in a prison sentence. Based on three years of research, this book provides a slew of data-based statistical insights, analyzing the efficacy of relief provided by both the state and nonprofit organizations, detailing how the clients of such organizations rate their services, to what extent they accept assistance, and whether they believe it has helped them. More importantly, it features extensive interviews with real people, making it the first Czech book on this issue to present homelessness from the perspective of those who live with it every day.  
 
[more]
cover of Homelessness among Young People in Prague

Homelessness among Young People in Prague

Marie Vágnerová, Ladislav Csémy, and Jakub Marek

Karolinum Press, 2014

The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. For young people, however, life on the street may be merely a temporary stage in their lives. This book tells of homelessness among young people—the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face.
           
Young homeless people describe a life in which they lose their privacy, the possibility to satisfy their basic needs, and, often, their self-respect in order to survive. The latter half of the book considers what happens when these young people return to society and how they navigate difficulties as they attempt to leave their past behind. Often, the struggle is not solely one of coping with the stigma of their experience; rather, they must face the legacies that linger long after their lives have turned a corner: drug addiction, criminal records, and accumulated debt.
           
Based on interviews with homeless people in Prague, Homelessness as an Alternative Existence of Young People paints an authentic picture of this social group and documents the often unseen social consequences of the transformation to capitalism from communism.
[more]
cover of Homeplaces: Dwelling and Habitability in Critical Times

Homeplaces

Dwelling and Habitability in Critical Times

João Biehl and Federico Neiburg, editors

Duke University Press, 2026

A home is dismantled to make another home habitable. This is where Homeplaces begins. Spanning continents, this landmark volume brings together leading anthropologists to chart “house-ing,” the unrelenting, reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity. Their oikographies—vivid, writerly ethnographies of home as sense and action—blow open the fantasy of the private domicile and reveal houses as live forms: porous, incomplete, bleeding into neighborhoods, economies, ecologies, and the dead. They detonate philosophical abstractions about dwelling and technocratic assumptions about homemaking, revealing why home plays such a vital role in worldmaking. Refusing end-times thinking, Homeplaces reveals incompleteness as generative drive. The dissolution of forms, bodies, and buildings becomes the material from which people craft shelter, dignity, and transcendence. As war, climate catastrophe, and toxic landscapes dehouse the planet, Homeplaces captures the stubborn human insistence on dwelling—provisional, fierce, and alive.
[more]
cover of Homesick

Homesick

Nicholas Shapiro

Duke University Press, 2025

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed over 120,000 trailers for emergency housing. Produced from engineered wood containing toxic amounts of formaldehyde, these shelters were vectors of illness and death. Although they were subsequently banned, FEMA trailers were resold and again used for housing, scattering their harm to other people and areas. In Homesick, Nicholas Shapiro draws on almost fifteen years working with impacted community members to trace how the story of toxic emergency housing units expands into a story of how all of our shelters became a seat of exposure and how we can collectively struggle for cleaner indoor air. Throughout, Shapiro questions the efficacy of the fundamental tools used to cultivate accountability, repair, and change, arguing for their reimagining. Detailing health effects as well as community and individual efforts to achieve better life, health, and justice, Shapiro highlights how homesickness for an otherwise future can herald meaningful change.
[more]
cover of Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860

Homesteads Ungovernable

Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860

By Mark M. Carroll

University of Texas Press, 2001

When he settled in Mexican Texas in 1832 and began courting Anna Raguet, Sam Houston had been separated from his Tennessee wife Eliza Allen for three years, while having already married and divorced his Cherokee wife Tiana and at least two other Indian "wives" during the interval. Houston's political enemies derided these marital irregularities, but in fact Houston's legal and extralegal marriages hardly set him apart from many other Texas men at a time when illicit and unstable unions were common in the yet-to-be-formed Lone Star State.

In this book, Mark Carroll draws on legal and social history to trace the evolution of sexual, family, and racial-caste relations in the most turbulent polity on the southern frontier during the antebellum period (1823-1860). He finds that the marriages of settlers in Texas were typically born of economic necessity and that, with few white women available, Anglo men frequently partnered with Native American, Tejano, and black women. While identifying a multicultural array of gender roles that combined with law and frontier disorder to destabilize the marriages of homesteaders, he also reveals how harsh living conditions, land policies, and property rules prompted settling spouses to cooperate for survival and mutual economic gain. Of equal importance, he reveals how evolving Texas law reinforced the substantial autonomy of Anglo women and provided them material rewards, even as it ensured that cross-racial sexual relationships and their reproductive consequences comported with slavery and a regime that dispossessed and subordinated free blacks, Native Americans, and Tejanos.

[more]
cover of Homeward To Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia

Homeward To Zion

The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia

William Mulder

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The classic history of this emblematic moment in U.S. immigration.

In the late nineteenth century, thirty thousand Mormons from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland immigrated to Utah, dissatisfied with conditions in their homelands. As their countrymen were farming rich fields in other parts of the United States, Scandinavian Mormons were making their way to Salt Lake City. Homeward to Zion tracks this movement from northern Europe to the western desert, examining the Mormon recruiting efforts in Scandinavia as well as the arduous journey across the Great Plains. Mulder draws extensively from personal narratives of these immigrants to relate their pioneering experience and their role in the history of Scandinavian migration and of the settlement of the American West.

[more]
cover of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison

Homeward

Life in the Year After Prison

Bruce Western

Russell Sage Foundation, 2018

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society.
 
Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction—the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed.  Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators.
 
Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.
 
[more]
cover of Homicidal Insanity, 1800-1985

Homicidal Insanity, 1800-1985

Janet Colaizzi, with a foreword by Jonas R. Rappeport

University of Alabama Press, 1989

Where madness meets the law, history leaves no easy verdict.

Homicidal insanity has remained a vexation to both the psychiatric and legal professions despite the panorama of scientific and social change during the past 200 years. The predominant opinion today among psychiatrists is that no correlation exists between dangerousness and specific mental disorders. But for generation after generation, psychiatrists have reported cases of insane homicide that were clinically similar. Although psychiatric theory changed and psychiatric nosology was inconsistent, the mental phenomena psychiatrists identified in such cases remained the same. The central thesis of Homicidal Insanity is that as psychiatric theory changed, psychiatrists regarded these phenomena variously as symptoms of mental disease or the disease in itself. It is possible to trace these phenomena throughout the history of Anglo-American psychiatric theory and practice. A secondary thesis of the book is that psychiatrists have used these phenomena as predictors and markers in the practical matters of preventing insane homicide and of testifying in the courts to defend the irresponsible and expose the culpable.

For 200 years, scientific and philosophical disagreement raised controversy and brought the issues to public attention. Still, to this day no rational method exists to discriminate the dangerous from the harmless in matters of involuntary commitment, nor insanity from crime in the courts.

[more]
cover of Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications

Homo Hierarchicus

The Caste System and Its Implications

Louis Dumont

University of Chicago Press, 1981

Louis Dumont's modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies that reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from the ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology encrusted in ancient religious texts which are revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, homo hierarchicus is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, homo aequalis.

This edition includes a lengthy new Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by Homo Hierarchicus and answers his critics. A new Postface, which sketches the theoretical and comparative aspects of the concept of hierarchy, and three significant Appendixes previously omitted from the English translation complete this innovative and influential work.
[more]
cover of Homol'ovi II: Archaeology of an Ancestral Hopi Village, Arizona

Homol'ovi II

Archaeology of an Ancestral Hopi Village, Arizona

Edited by E. Charles Adams and Kelley Ann Hays

University of Arizona Press, 1991

Homol'ovi II is a fourteenth-century, ancestral Hopi pueblo with over 700 rooms. Although known by archaeologists since 1896, no systematic excavations were conducted at the pueblo until 1984. This report summarizes the findings of the excavations by the Arizona State Museum of five rooms and an outside activity area, which now form the core of the interpretive program for Homolovi Ruins State Park. The significant findings reported here are that the excavated deposits date between A.D. 1340 and 1400; that nearly all the decorated ceramics during this period were imported from villages on the Hopi Mesas; that cotton was a principal crop which probably formed the basis of Homol'ovi II's participation in regional exchange; that chipped stone was a totally expedient technology in contrast to ground stone which was becoming more diverse; and that the katsina cult was probably present or developing at Homol'ovi II. These findings from the basis for future excavations that should broaden our knowledge of the developments taking place in fourteenth-century Pueblo society connecting the people whom archaeologists term the Anasazi with those calling themselves Hopi.
[more]
cover of Homol'ovi: An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster

Homol'ovi

An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster

E. Charles Adams

University of Arizona Press, 2002

Beginning sometime in the thirteenth century, people from the Hopi Mesas established a cluster of villages to the south along the Little Colorado River. They were attracted by the river’s resources and the region's ideal conditions for growing cotton. By the late 1300s, these Homol'ovi villages were the center of a robust trade in cotton among many clusters of villages near or on the southern Colorado Plateau and were involved in the beginning of katsina religion among Hopi people.

Charles Adams has directed fifteen years of research at these sites for the Arizona State Museum, including excavations in five of the seven primary Homol'ovi villages and in other villages predating them. Through this research he concludes that the founders of these settlements were Hopis who sought to protect their territory from migrating groups elsewhere in the Pueblo world. This book summarizes that research and broadens our understanding of the relationship of Homol'ovi to ancient and modern Hopi people.

Each Homol'ovi village had a unique history of establishment, growth, sociopolitical organization, length of occupation, and abandonment; and although the villages shared much in the way of material culture, their size and configuration were tremendously varied. By comparing Homol'ovi research to information from projects on other settlements in the area, Adams has been able to reconstruct a provocative history of the Homol'ovi cluster that includes relationships among the individual villages and their relationships to nearby clusters. He shows that social organization within villages is apparent by the number and variety of ritual structures, while political organization among villages is indicated by the need for cooperation to share water for irrigation and by the exchange of such materials as pottery, obsidian, and ground stone.

Adams advances several important theories about why Homol'ovi was founded where and when it was, who its founders were, and the importance of cotton in making Homol'ovi an important center of trade in the 1300s. He also considers why Pueblo settlements suddenly became so large, addressing theoretical issues pertaining to multiple settlements and the rise of enormous villages containing more than 1,000 rooms.

Homol'ovi is a rich work of synthesis and interpretation that will be important for anyone with an interest in Southwest archaeology, Arizona history, or Hopi culture. By considering the settlement trajectory of an entire cluster of sites, it will also prove valuable to archaeologists worldwide.
[more]
cover of Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space

Homophobias

Lust and Loathing across Time and Space

David A. B. Murray, ed.

Duke University Press, 2009

What is it about “the homosexual” that incites vitriolic rhetoric and violence around the world? How and why do some people hate queers? Does homophobia operate differently across social, political, and economic terrains? What are the ambivalences in homophobic discourses that can be exploited to undermine its hegemonic privilege? This volume addresses these questions through critical interrogations of sites where homophobic discourses are produced. It provides innovative analytical insights that expose the complex and intersecting cultural, political, and economic forces contributing to the development of new forms of homophobia. And it is a call to action for anthropologists and other social scientists to examine more carefully the politics, histories, and contexts of places and people who profess hatred for queerness.

The contributors to this volume open up the scope of inquiry into processes of homophobia, moving the analysis of a particular form of “hate” into new, wider sociocultural and political fields. The ongoing production of homophobic discourses is carefully analyzed in diverse sites including New York City, Australia, the Caribbean, Greece, India, and Indonesia, as well as American Christian churches, in order to uncover the complex operational processes of homophobias and their intimate relationships to nationalism, sexism, racism, class, and colonialism. The contributors also critically inquire into the limitations of the term homophobia and interrogate its utility as a cross-cultural designation.

Contributors. Steven Angelides, Tom Boellstorff, Lawrence Cohen, Don Kulick, Suzanne LaFont, Martin F. Manalansan IV, David A. B. Murray, Brian Riedel, Constance R. Sullivan-Blum

[more]
cover of Homosexual Desire

Homosexual Desire

Guy Hocquenghem

Duke University Press, 1993

Originally published in 1972 in France, Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire has become a classic in gay theory. Translated into English for the first time in 1978 and out of print since the early 1980s, this new edition, with an introduction by Michael Moon, will make available this vital and still relevant work to contemporary audiences. Integrating psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, this book describes the social and psychic dynamics of what has come to be called homophobia and on how the "homosexual" as social being has come to be constituted in capitalist society.
Significant as one of the earliest products of the international gay liberation movement, Hocquenghem's work was influenced by the extraordinary energies unleashed by the political upheavals of both the Paris "May Days" of 1968 and the gay and lesbian political rebellions that occurred in cities around the world in the wake of New York's Stonewall riots of June 1969.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the shattering effects of innumerable gay "comings-out," Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of anal desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.
Homosexual Desire remains an exhilarating analysis of capitalist societies' pervasive fascination with, and violent fear of, same-sex desire and addresses issues that continue to be highly charged and productive ones for queer politics.
[more]