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160 books match the query 'Cross-cultural studies' and 8 start with r

cover of Race

Race

Gregory, Steven

Rutgers University Press, 1994

 “What unites these essays is a common focus on the ‘social construction’ of racial categories and a desire to expose the exercise of racism and its intersection with other forms of social domination such as class, gender, and ethnicity . . . Fascinating.”––Multicultural Review

“The coming together of theoretical, multiethnic, and ‘on-the-ground’ perspectives makes this book a particularly valuable contribution to the discourse on race.”––Paula Giddings

“Timely and thoughtful. . . contributes to our understanding of how race operates as a social process and in the contextualization of power and status.”––Contemporary Sociology

“A treasure chest full of gems. Virtually every article is fascinating and important, and as a collection, its impact is tremendous. Neo-conservative myths and fantasies fall like nine-pins before its well-researched and tightly argued papers.”––Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena

“A timely antidote to that reaction tome, The Bell Curve.”––Daily News (New York)

“Let’s be clear from the start what this book is about,” writes Roger Sanjek.  “Race is the framework of ranked categories, segmenting the human population, that was developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion.”To contemporary social scientists, this ranking is baseless, though it has had all-too-real effects.

Drawing on anthropology, history, sociology, ethnic studies, and women's studies, this volume explores the role of race in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. The contributors show how racial ideologies intersect with gender, class, nation and sexuality in the formation of complex social identities and hierarchies. The essays address such topics as race and Egyptian nationalism, the construction of “whiteness” in the United States, and the transformation of racial categories in post-colonial Haiti. They demonstrate how social elites and members of subordinated groups construct and rework racial meanings and identities within the context of global political, economic, and cultural change. Race provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded survey of contemporary theoretical approaches to studying the complex interplay of race, power, and identity.

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cover of Re-Forming the State: The Politics of Privatization in Latin America and Europe

Re-Forming the State

The Politics of Privatization in Latin America and Europe

Hector E. Schamis

University of Michigan Press, 2002

With evidence drawn from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Great Britain, and Hungary, Re-forming the State examines the processes leading to, and the political effects of, market reform experiments and focuses specifically on the patterns of collective action and coalition building that drive privatization. The author's argument calls into question established approaches in the discipline of economics and in the fields of comparative and international political economy.
The experience of privatization shows that the public and the private are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive spheres, and that power relations between them are not necessarily zero-sum. To stress the point, the author borrows from the literature on state formation, which has extensively examined the historical processes of key private groups. The evidence presented shows why and how, by restructuring coalitional and institutional arenas, the state uses marketization to generate political order and to distribute political power. Thus, the author specifies the conditions under which political change is conceived in terms of and channeled through economic policy; in other words, how the state is "re-formed" through privatization. Re-forming the State thus highlights how privatization is simultaneously a movement from public to private, but also a movement from non-state to state, as the reduction of state assets leads to institutional changes that increase state capacities for defining and enforcing property rights, extracting revenue, and centralizing administrative and political resources.
Hector E. Schamis is Assistant Professor of Government, Cornell University.
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cover of Re-living the American Frontier: Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900

Re-living the American Frontier

Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900

Nancy Reagin

University of Iowa Press, 2021

The historic and mythic elements of the American Old West—covered wagon trains, herds of buffalo, teepee villages, Indigenous warriors on horseback, cowboys on open ranges, and white settlers “taming” a wilderness with their plows and log cabins—have exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years and became the foundation for fan communities who have endured for generations. This book examines some of those communities, particularly German fans inspired by the authors of Westerns such as Karl May, and American enthusiasts of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series.

But the Old West (like all visions of the past) proved to be shifting cultural terrain. In both Germany and the U. S., Western narratives of white settlement were once seen as “apolitical” and were widely accepted by white people. But during the Nazi period in Germany and in East Germany after 1945, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed. Then, during the late twentieth century, understandings of the West changed in the U. S. as well, while the violence of white settler colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in the culture wars between right and left. Reagin shows that the past that fans seek to recreate is shaped by the changing present, as each new generation adapts and relives their own West.
 
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cover of Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later Life

Reclaimed Powers

Men and Women in Later Life

David Gutmann

Northwestern University Press, 1994

A unique feature of human development is that mothers and fathers are bound to a long period of childrearing, during which the continuity of our species depends on the fulfillment of distinct parental roles and on the suppression of psychological potentials that conflict with those roles. But once the "parental emergency" is over, David Gutmann argues, men and women can assert those parts of themselves curbed by the restrictions of raising children. It is this shift in roles--a product of evolution found throughout our species--that led David Gutmann to propose a new psychology of aging, based not on the prospect of loss but on the promise of important new pleasures and capacities.
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cover of Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations

Regulating Menstruation

Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations

Edited by Etienne van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Menstruation, seen alternately as something negative—a "curse" or a failed conception—or as a positive part of the reproductive process to be celebrated as evidence of fertility, has long been a universal concern. How women interpret and react to menstruation and its absence reflects their individual needs both historically as well as in the contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political context in which they live. This unique volume considers what is known of women's options and practices used to regulate menstruation—practices used to control the periodicity, quantity, color, and even consistency of menses—in different places and times, while revealing the ambiguity that those practices present.

Originating from an Internet conference held in February 1998, this volume contains fourteen papers that have been revised and updated to cover everything from the impact of the birth control pill to contemporary views on reproduction to the pharmacological properties of various herbal substances, reflecting the historical, contemporary, and anthropological perspectives of this timely and complex issue.

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cover of Reproductive Rights in a Global Context: South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan

Reproductive Rights in a Global Context

South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan

Lara M. Knudsen

Vanderbilt University Press, 2006

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2006

Traveling alone when she was between 17 and 22, with no institutional affiliation and no financial assistance, the author visited five developing countries and two developed ones on five continents. Her goal was to extend her own experience in an abortion clinic in Portland, Oregon. Lara Knudsen interviewed over 90 women's rights activists, health professionals, NGO workers, and government officials, gaining a sense of both official policies and the actual delivery of services in local clinics. The book places the experiences of women within the global context of how international population control agendas have influenced women's reproductive rights in the past, and how the changing international discourse on reproductive health continues to influence those rights today.
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cover of Risk Revisited

Risk Revisited

Pat Caplan

Pluto Press, 2000

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cover of Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience

Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience

Lauren Fordyce

Vanderbilt University Press, 2012

As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . . Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience sheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."
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