Results by title
1861 books match the query 'Social life and customs' and 17 start with j
Jaialdi
A Celebration of Basque CultureNancy Zubiri
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Organized and staffed entirely by volunteers, Jaialdi attracts 35,000 to 50,000 visitors from around the world. Attendees enjoy festivities featuring Basque culture, including dancing, music, food, and competitive feats of strength. Photographer Jon C. Hodgson captures the spirit and merriment of the festival in vivid detail, taking readers on a journey into the heart of Basque culture. Coupled with author Nancy Zubiri’s observations from her own attendance at nearly every Jaialdi since 1987, the book reveals how Boise’s Basque community has committed to host the festival and why the celebration remains so popular today.
The Basque diaspora to the United States began in the late 1800s when these determined immigrants came seeking a new life filled with opportunities. Many were sheepherders who adapted to American life while maintaining their ties to the traditions of the Basque Country. Jaialdi: A Celebration of Basque Culture illuminates how this festival honors these traditions and captures the essence of the ancient Basque people, who are preserving their heritage while embracing life in the twenty-first-century West.
Jane Austen
A CompanionRoss, Josephine
Rutgers University Press, 2003
This illuminating, entertaining, up-to-date companion is the only general guide to Jane Austen, her work, and her world. Josephine Ross explores the literary scene during the time Austen's works first appeared: the books considered classics then, the "horrid novels" and romances, and the grasping publishers. She looks at the architecture and décor of Austen's era that made up "the profusion and elegance of modern taste." Regency houses for instance, Chippendale furniture, and "picturesque scenery." On a smaller scale she answers questions that may baffle modern readers. What, for example, was "hartshorn"? How did Lizzy Bennet "let down" her gown to hide her muddy petticoat? Ross shows us the fashions, and the subtle ways Jane Austen used clothes to express character. Courtship, marriage, adultery, class and "rank," mundane tasks of ordinary life, all appear, as does the wider political and military world.
This book will add depth to all readers' enjoyment of Jane Austen, whether confirmed addicts or newcomers wanting to learn about one of the world's most popular and enduring writers.
Javanese Lives
Women and Men in Modern Indonesian SocietyWilliams, Walter L.
Rutgers University Press, 1991
Java is the most populous island of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world. Yet despite its importance, outsiders know little about the country or its people. With the help of Indonesian students and scholars, Walter L. Williams has collected and translated the life histories of twenty-seven Javanese women and men. The people interviewed tell how they have coped with rapid social and economic change, and the transformation of their traditions. Williams has carefully selected the individuals he includes to represent a wide diversity of Java's people. We hear from fascinating men and women of various religions, from the rich and the poor, and from different ethnic backgrounds. Diversity is a constant theme, as evidenced by a poor pedicab driver who can barely scrape along, by a rich businesswoman who explains how she balances her professional and domestic roles, by an educated and respected homosexual school principal, and by an illiterate mother of fourteen children. All of them present in their lives a unique Javanese approach to living.
These oral histories were derived from elderly people, who have a larger perspective on the changes they have seen in their lifetimes. The focus of the first section of the book is the way people have adapted in their daily lives to massive social and economic changes. In the middle section, we hear from the Javanese who represent traditional values in the midst of change. Finally, we hear from educators and parents who tell us of their concerns for Indonesian youth and the future of Indonesia.
Jazz Internationalism
Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black MusicJohn Lowney
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities—and challenges—of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates.
Jersey Genesis
The Story of the Mullica RiverBeck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1983
Jesus in America and Other Stories from the Field
Claudia Gould
Utah State University Press, 2009
Drawing on ethnographic field work she conducted among Christians in her home state of North Carolina, Claudia Gould crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them draw us into the complex essence of religious experience among southern American Christians.
Jewish Life in Muslim Libya
Rivals and RelativesHarvey E. Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Harvey E. Goldberg shows that the cultural and religious worlds of the Jewish and Muslim communities in Libya were deeply intertwined in daily life and largely remained so despite political and social changes under successive Ottoman and Italian rule. He documents the intricate symbolic linkages of Jews and Muslims in different periods and in a variety of settings. His accounts of traditional Jewish weddings, of mock fights between Jewish teams that took place in early nineteenth-century Tripoli, and of the profession of street peddling demonstrate that, despite age-old images of Jews as outsiders or infidels, Jews were also an essential and familiar part of the local Islamic society.
Goldberg's narrative continues through the British Military Administration in Libya, a period which saw growing Libyan nationalism and, in 1945, three days of riots in which more than 130 Jews were killed. Goldberg reflects on how these events both expressed and exacerbated a rupture in the social fabric linking Muslims and Jews, setting the scene for the mass emigration of Libyan Jews from their homeland.
Jewish Lives under Communism
New PerspectivesKaterina Capková
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America
Edited by Eitan P. Fishbane and Jonathan D. Sarna
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna
By Alison Rose
University of Texas Press, 2008
Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna explores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres.
Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images.
As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna applies the lens of gender in important new ways.
Jews Welcome Coffee
Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern GermanyRobert Liberles
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Jews in the Center
Conservative Synagogues and Their MembersWertheimer, Jack
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Why do well-educated, highly Americanized, and financially secure Jews join a synagogue and participate in its religious life? This study of Conservative Jews examines the largest movement of synagogue-affiliated Jews in the United States, a group that outnumbers the combined membership of Reform and Orthodox congregations and a population that adheres to a centrist version of Judaism. The scholars who contribute to this study ask a series of provocative questions: How do these Jews negotiate the tensions between the traditional values of their religion and modern sensibilities? What meaning do they find in synagogue participation? How crucial are rabbis in the "success" of congregations?
Written by a team of scholars employing the tools of demography, ethnography, sociology, history, and comparative religious studies, Jews in the Center offers the most comprehensive view of any religious movement within American Judaism----and indeed, one of the most detailed studies of any denomination in American religious life.
Jews in the Center seeks to understand how synagogues function as congregations and to what extent they allow for individual self-expression. By focusing on a mainstream population, this book sheds light on religious people who generally receive the least attention----the broad center who neither retreat from society nor blur all boundaries between their religion and modern American culture.
Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine
Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern FrontierKevin D. Murphy
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
Murphy shows how Fisher, as pastor of the Congregational church in Blue Hill from 1796 to 1837, helped spearhead the transformation of a frontier settlement on the eastern shores of the Penobscot Bay into a thriving port community; how he used his skills as an architect, decorative painter, surveyor, and furniture maker not only to support himself and his family, but to promote the economic growth of his village; and how the fluid professional identity that enabled Fisher to prosper on the eastern frontier could only have existed in early America where economic relations were far less rigidly defined than in Europe.
Among the most important artifacts of Jonathan Fisher's life is the house he designed and built in Blue Hill. The Jonathan Fisher Memorial, as it is now known, serves as a point of departure for an examination of social, religious, and cultural life in a newly established village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fisher's house provided a variety of spaces for agricultural and domestic work, teaching, socializing, artmaking, and more.
Through the eyes of Jonathan Fisher, we see his family grow and face the challenges of the new century, responding to religious, social, and economic change—sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. We appreciate how an extraordinarily energetic man was able to capitalize on the wide array of opportunities offered by the frontier to give shape to his personal vision of community.
Journeys of Love
Kashmiris, Music, and the Poetics of MigrationThomas Hodgson
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In Journeys of Love, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson offers a sensitive corrective to harmful portrayals of immigrants—specifically, Pakistanis living in England—as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, a stereotype that has often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these migrants—many of whom come from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir—occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphors, that are central to surviving migration and its attendant losses.
Hodgson shows how Mirpuris in England, as well as those who remain in Pakistan, carry on traditions of reciting a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century Sufi saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, translated by Hodgson here as Journeys of Love. With its themes of remaining true to one’s home, the oppressed being saved, having patience, and keeping faith in God, this work has become the story of movement and displacement in its narrative arc, as well as through the way it provides spiritual and ethical frameworks for settling in new lands. These hidden poetics of migration transform across generations as young Mirpuris develop new expressions of the connections across continents. These poetics reveal the connections between Kashmir’s rural village life and urban centers abroad, offering a sensitive and illuminating portrait of migration and multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.
Journeys to the Edge
In the Footsteps of an AnthropologistPeter M. Gardner
University of Missouri Press, 2013
Because Gardner’s primary research since 1962 has been with hunter-gatherers, much of his story transpires either in the equatorial jungle of south India or more than one hundred miles beyond the end of the road in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Other ventures transport readers to Japan and back to India, allowing them to savor ancient sights and sounds. Gardner closes the book with a journey of quite another sort, as he takes us into the world of nature, Taoist philosophy, and the experimental treatment of advanced cancer.
Throughout this fast-moving book, Gardner deftly describes the goals and techniques of his research, as well as his growing understanding of the cultures to which he was exposed. Few personal accounts of fieldwork describe enough of the research to give a complete sense of the experience in the way this book does. Anyone with an interest in travel and adventure, including the student of anthropology as well as the general reader, will be totally intrigued by Gardner’s story, one of a daily existence so very different from our own.
Juju
A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular MusicChristopher Alan Waterman
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Just As We Were
A Narrow Slice of Texas WomanhoodBy Prudence Mackintosh
University of Texas Press, 1996
When a Texas debutante bows her forehead to the floor in the famous "Texas dip," society columnists all across the country speculate interminably over what it is that sets Texas women apart. But really, how could they know? Even women born and bred in Texas can't always answer that question.
Prudence Mackintosh comes very close to an answer, though, in this endlessly entertaining book. Writing with both a wry sense of humor and an insider's compassion, she offers us a fascinating look into the world of privileged, educated, well-married, well-connected, and mostly wealthy white Texas women.
What really sets these women apart, Ms. Mackintosh tells us, is the comfortable yet demanding path they follow from their idyllic girlhoods to prominent positions in society. In thirteen essays, some of which originally appeared in Texas Monthly magazine, she charts the way stations that mark this path: summer camps in the Texas Hill Country, exclusive private schools like Dallas' Hockaday, sorority membership, and acceptance into the Junior League.
Prudence Mackintosh has been both an outsider and an insider in this privileged world, and her observations are shot through with wit and real insight. Just As We Were may not be the final word on elite Texas women, but no other book has described their world with greater irony or accuracy.