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4413 books match the query 'Anthropology' and 221 start with r

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Return to Casablanca

Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist

André Levy

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In this book, Israeli anthropologist André Levy returns to his birthplace in Casablanca to provide a deeply nuanced and compelling study of the relationships between Moroccan Jews and Muslims there. Ranging over a century of history—from the Jewish Enlightenment and the impending colonialism of the late nineteenth century to today’s modern Arab state—Levy paints a rich portrait of two communities pressed together, of the tremendous mobility that has characterized the past century, and of the paradoxes that complicate the cultural identities of the present.

Levy visits a host of sites and historical figures to assemble a compelling history of social change, while seamlessly interweaving his study with personal accounts of his returns to his homeland. Central to this story is the massive migration of Jews out of Morocco. Levy traces the institutional and social changes such migrations cause for those who choose to stay, introducing the concept of “contraction” to depict the way Jews deal with the ramifications of their demographic dwindling. Turning his attention outward from Morocco, he goes on to explore the greater complexities of the Jewish diaspora and the essential paradox at the heart of his adventure—leaving Israel to return home.

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Return to Ixil

Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town

Mark Z. Christensen

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Return to Ixil is an examination of over 100 colonial-era Maya wills from the Yucatec town of Ixil, presented together and studied fully for the first time. These testaments make up the most significant corpus of Maya-language documents from the colonial period. Offering an unprecedented picture of material and spiritual life in Ixil from 1738 to 1779, they are rare and rich sources for the study of Maya culture and history.

Supplemented with additional archival research, the wills provide new and detailed descriptions of various aspects of life in eighteenth-century Ixil. In each chapter, authors Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall examine a different dimension of Ixil’s colonial history, including the role of notaries, Maya participation in a coastal militia, economy and modes of production, religious life and records, and the structures and patterns of familial relationships. These details offer insight into the complex network of societies in colonial Yucatan, colonial Mesoamerica, and colonial Latin America.

Including an appendix presenting the original Maya texts as well as translations by Christensen and Restall, Return to Ixil not only analyzes the largest body of substantive wills in any Mayan language known today but also provides a rare closeup view of the inner workings of a colonial Maya town and the communal and familial affairs that made up a large part of the Maya colonial experience. It will be of great interest to Mayanists as well as to students and scholars of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and social history.

The publication of this book is supported in part byBrigham Young University and Penn State University.

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Return

Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia

Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota, eds.

Duke University Press, 2013

Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the changing relations between nation-states and transnational mobility. Taking into account illegally trafficked migrants, deportees, temporary laborers on short-term contracts, and highly skilled émigrés, the contributors argue that the figure of the returnee energizes and redefines nationalism in an era of increasingly fluid and indeterminate national sovereignty. They acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and instability of reverse migration, while emphasizing its discursive, policy, and political significance at a moment when the tensions between state power and transnational subjects are particularly visible. Taken together, the essays foreground Asia as a useful site for rethinking the intersections of migration, sovereignty, and nationalism.

Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh

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Revelations of Humanity

Anthropological Dimensions of Theological Controversies

Richard Schenk, OP

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Revelations of Humanity brings together essays into the history and actuality of how our searches for God and for our own humanity are interwoven. They argue that the revelation of God is possible only when accompanied by a revelation of what it means to be a human being. Revelation implies that the truth is not fully evident in either case. This quest is aided in many of the essays by a recollection of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. As opposed to simple memory, recollection implies that memory has been lost or become clouded, here by the misrepresentation of Thomas’ view of humanity’s relation to God as harmonistic, at best semi-Pelagian, often even naturalistic. This difficult recovery is made possible by historical research that alone can escape the easy systematic alienation that supporters and critics of Thomas have often brought to their interpretation of his works. Thomas’s sense of a real but finite capacity of human beings for God, his grace and revelation, anticipates in more ways than is commonly known much of contemporary suspicion about human capacities, but in ways that are open to God. That programmatic insight into the historical Thomas, keenly aware of human entanglements, limits and hopes, offers on many contemporary issues a ressourcement of systematic thought. Revelations of Humanity revolves around three clusters of issues. The first asks about the reality and limits of the human capacity for truth: in metaphysical, moral and political matters and in relation to the disputed issues of analogous reason and faith. The second cluster is structured around the four involvements that the Second Vatican Council identified as the human face of genuine Christian existence: participation in the legitimate joys, hopes, sorrows and fears of the contemporary world. These are refracted in the broken light of the human proprium of risibility, the abiding uncertainty addressed by hope, the disputed question of a suffering God and the recollection of Christ’s anxiety in the face of death. The final cluster brings together anthropological dimensions of current ecumenical and interreligious disputes: the need to complement affirmation with admonition in ecumenical conversation, exemplified by the ambivalence towards sacrifice in a genuinely Catholic theology and the need to avoid the excesses of univocity, equivocity or an all too facile analogy in the determination of interreligious relationalities.

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Reversed Gaze

An African Ethnography of American Anthropology

Mwenda Ntarangwi

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Deftly illustrating how life circumstances can influence ethnographic fieldwork, Mwenda Ntarangwi focuses on his experiences as a Kenyan anthropology student and professional anthropologist practicing in the United States and Africa. Whereas Western anthropologists often study non-Western cultures, Mwenda Ntarangwi reverses these common roles and studies the Western culture of anthropology from an outsider's viewpoint while considering larger debates about race, class, power, and the representation of the "other." Tracing his own immersion into American anthropology, Ntarangwi identifies textbooks, ethnographies, coursework, professional meetings, and feedback from colleagues and mentors that were key to his development.

Reversed Gaze enters into a growing anthropological conversation on representation and self-reflexivity that ethnographers have come to regard as standard anthropological practice, opening up new dialogues in the field by allowing anthropologists to see the role played by subjective positions in shaping knowledge production and consumption. Recognizing the cultural and racial biases that shape anthropological study, this book reveals the potential for diverse participation and more democratic decision making in the identity and process of the profession.

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Reversing the Gaze

What If the Other Were You?

Geneviève Makaping

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Tired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other. Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses.

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Revisioning Italy

National Identity and Global Culture

Beverly Allen

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Explores Italian national identity.

More than any other nation, Italy—from its imperial past to its subordinate present, from its colonial forays to its splendid isolation—embodies the myriad and contradictory historical forms of nationhood. This volume covers a range of subjects drawn from Italy and abroad to study the historical and contemporary formations of Italian national identity. In doing so, the work illuminates Italy past and present as well as the local and global dimensions of national identity in general.

Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, these essays reveal how cultural identity is constructed and manipulated-an issue made urgent by the influx of African, Indochinese, and Eastern European immigrants into Italy today. Exile, nationalism, and imagined communities are the topics of several essays, including Antonio Negri’s reflection on his own experience of political militancy and exile. Others focus on Italy’s colonial “unconscious,” Mussolini’s adventures in North Africa, and racism from the late nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing Italy’s European and Mediterranean identities, its highly regional character, its north-south economic imbalance, and its ethnic complexity, this truly interdisciplinary volume resists the hierarchizing and monumentalizing of traditional Italian studies in the United States. It will inform and redirect our understanding of what constitutes “Italy.”Contributors: Mohamed Aden; John Agnew, Syracuse U; Ayele Bekerie, Cornell U; Elaine K. Chang, Rutgers U; Antonio Marazzi, U of Padua, Italy; Francesca Miller, U of California, Davis; Antonio Negri, U of Paris VIII, France; Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College; Karen Pinkus, Northwestern U; Paul Robinson, Stanford U; Pasquale Verdicchio, U of California, San Diego; Marguerite R. Waller, U of California, Riverside; and David Ward, Wellesley College.

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Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age

Koenig, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2008

With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions of race and identity.

Essays explore a range of topics that include drug development and the production of race-based therapeutics, the ways in which genetics could contribute to future health disparities, the social implications of ancestry mapping, and the impact of emerging race and genetics research on public policy and the media.

As genetic research expands its reach, this volume takes an important step toward creating a useful interdisciplinary dialogue about its implications.

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Revitalization Lexicography

The Making of the New Tunica Dictionary

Patricia M. Anderson

University of Arizona Press, 2020

In a linguistic climate that is hyperaware of so-called language death, dictionaries have been touted as stalwarts for language preservation. When wielded by communities undertaking language revitalization, dictionaries can be designed to facilitate reversing language shift and fostering linguistic innovation. Indeed, dictionaries’ reputation as multifunctional reference materials make them adaptable to a wide variety of community needs.

Revitalization Lexicography provides a detailed account of creating a dictionary meant to move a once-sleeping language into a language of active daily use. This unique look under the hood of lexicography in a small community highlights the ways in which the dictionary was intentionally leveraged to shape the Tunica language as it inevitably changes throughout revitalization. Tunica, one of the heritage languages of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Marksville, Louisiana, has been undergoing active revitalization since 2010. The current generation of speakers began learning Tunica, a once-sleeping language, through written documentation. Now enough Tunica speakers to confer amongst themselves when questionable language use arises.

Marrying both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary, this book discusses complex lexicographic tasks in a manner accessible to both academic and community readers. This work is firmly backdropped in a fieldwork approach that centers the community as owners of all aspects of their revitalization project. This book provides concrete and practical considerations for anyone attempting to create a dictionary. Contrasting examples from Tunica and English dictionaries, this book challenges readers to rethink their relationship to dictionaries in general. A must-read for anyone who has ever touched a dictionary.

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Revolt of the Saints

Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy

John F. Collins

Duke University Press, 2015

In 1985 the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador, Brazil was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over the next decades, over 4,000 residents who failed to meet the state's definition of "proper Afro-Brazilianness" were expelled to make way for hotels, boutiques, NGOs, and other attractions. In Revolt of the Saints, John F. Collins explores the contested removal of the inhabitants of Brazil’s first capital and best-known site for Afro-Brazilian history, arguing that the neighborhood’s most recent reconstruction, begun in 1992 and supposedly intended to celebrate the Pelourinho's working-class citizens and their culture, revolves around gendered and racialized forms of making Brazil modern. He situates this focus on national origins and the commodification of residents' most intimate practices within a longer history of government and elite attempts to "improve" the citizenry’s racial stock even as these efforts take new form today. In this novel analysis of the overlaps of race, space, and history, Collins thus draws on state-citizen negotiations of everyday life to detail how residents’ responses to the attempt to market Afro-Brazilian culture and reimagine the nation’s foundations both illuminate and contribute to recent shifts in Brazil’s racial politics.

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Revolution Beyond the Event

The Afterlives of Radical Politics

Edited by Charlotte Al-Khalili, Narges Ansari, Myriam Lamrani, and Kaya Uzel

University College London, 2023

A critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives.

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists and emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace, and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the modern idea of revolution and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.

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Revolution and Disenchantment

Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation

Fadi A. Bardawil

Duke University Press, 2020

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

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Revolutionary Medicine

Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba

P. Sean Brotherton

Duke University Press, 2012

Revolutionary Medicine is a richly textured examination of the ways that Cuba's public health care system has changed during the past two decades and of the meaning of those changes for ordinary Cubans. Until the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, socialist Cuba encouraged citizens to view access to health care as a human right and the state's responsibility to provide it as a moral imperative. Since the loss of Soviet subsidies and the tightening of the U.S. economic embargo, Cuba's government has found it hard to provide the high-quality universal medical care that was so central to the revolutionary socialist project. In Revolutionary Medicine, P. Sean Brotherton deftly integrates theory and history with ethnographic research in Havana, including interviews with family physicians, public health officials, research scientists, and citizens seeking medical care. He describes how the deterioration of health and social welfare programs has led Cubans to seek health care through informal arrangements, as well as state-sponsored programs. Their creative, resourceful pursuit of health and well-being provides insight into how they navigate, adapt to, and pragmatically cope with the rapid social, economic, and political changes in post-Soviet Cuba.

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Revolutionizing Romance

Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba

Fernandez, Nadine T

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Scholars have long heralded mestizaje, or race mixing, as the essence of the Cuban nation. Revolutionizing Romance is an account of the continuing significance of race in Cuba as it is experienced in interracial relationships. This ethnography tracks young couples as they move in a world fraught with shifting connections of class, race, and culture that are reflected in space, racialized language, and media representations of blackness, whiteness, and mixedness. As one of the few scholars to conduct long-term anthropological fieldwork in the island nation, Nadine T. Fernandez offers a rare insider's view of the country's transformations during the post-Soviet era. Following a comprehensive history of racial formations up through Castro's rule, the book then delves into more intimate and contemporary spaces. Language, space and place, foreign tourism, and the realm of the family each reveal, through the author's deft analysis, the paradox of living a racialized life in a nation that celebrates a policy of colorblind equality.

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Rewriting Maya Religion

Domingo de Vico, K’iche’ Maya Intellectuals, and the Theologia Indorum

Garry G. Sparks

University Press of Colorado, 2019

In Rewriting Maya Religion Garry Sparks examines the earliest religious documents composed by missionaries and native authors in the Americas, including a reconstruction of the first original, explicit Christian theology written in the Americas—the nearly 900-page Theologia Indorum (Theology for [or of] the Indians), initially written in Mayan languages by Friar Domingo de Vico by 1554. Sparks traces how the first Dominican missionaries to the Maya repurposed native religious ideas, myths, and rhetoric in their efforts to translate a Christianity and how, in this wake, K’iche’ Maya elites began to write their own religious texts, like the Popol Vuh. This ethnohistory of religion critically reexamines the role and value of indigenous authority during the early decades of first contact between a Native American people and Christian missionaries.

Centered on the specific work of Dominicans among the Highland Maya of Guatemala in the decades prior to the arrival of the Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth century, the book focuses on the various understandings of religious analyses—Hispano-Catholic and Maya—and their strategic exchanges, reconfigurations, and resistance through competing efforts of religious translation. Sparks historically contextualizes Vico’s theological treatise within both the wider set of early literature in K’iche’an languages and the intellectual shifts between late medieval thought and early modernity, especially the competing theories of language, ethnography, and semiotics in the humanism of Spain and Mesoamerica at the time.

Thorough and original, Rewriting Maya Religion serves as an ethnohistorical frame for continued studies on Highland Maya religious symbols, discourse, practices, and logic dating back to the earliest documented evidence. It will be of great significance to scholars of religion, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American history.

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Rhetoric and the Republic

Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America

Mark Garrett Longaker

University of Alabama Press, 2007

Casts a revealing light on modern cultural conflicts through the lens of rhetorical education.

Contemporary efforts to revitalize the civic mission of higher education in America have revived an age-old republican tradition of teaching students to be responsible citizens, particularly through the study of rhetoric, composition, and oratory. This book examines the political, cultural, economic, and religious agendas that drove the various—and often conflicting—curricula and contrasting visions of what good citizenship entails. Mark Garrett Longaker argues that higher education more than 200 years ago allowed actors with differing political and economic interests to wrestle over the fate of American citizenship. Then, as today, there was widespread agreement that civic training was essential in higher education, but there were also sharp differences in the various visions of what proper republic citizenship entailed and how to prepare for it.

Longaker studies in detail the specific trends in rhetorical education offered at various early institutions—such as Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary—with analyses of student lecture notes, classroom activities, disputation exercises, reading lists, lecture outlines, and literary society records. These documents reveal an extraordinary range of economic and philosophical interests and allegiances—agrarian, commercial, spiritual, communal, and belletristic—specific to each institution. The findings challenge and complicate a widely held belief that early-American civic education occurred in a halcyon era of united democratic republicanism. Recognition that there are multiple ways to practice democratic citizenship and to enact democratic discourse, historically as well as today, best serves the goal of civic education, Longaker argues.

Rhetoric and the Republic illuminates an important historical moment in the history of American education and dramatically highlights rhetorical education as a key site in the construction of democracy.

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Rhythms of Care

Autistic Embodiment and Empathy in Equine Therapy

Roslyn Malcolm

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A thoughtful exploration of autism, offering a new understanding of social relations through a sensory-perceptual approach

Sensitive and flighty, horses require carefully designed environments to help them feel calm and soothed—precisely the sort of places that are understood to help some autistic youth to flourish. In Rhythms of Care, Roslyn Malcolm changes the conversation around autism, detailing shifting understandings of the condition from neurological misfiring to a whole-body condition of sensory-perceptual difference.

Malcolm chronicles the experiences of several autistic youth and their families at two UK equestrian riding centers, developing new language to elaborate on an advancing sense of autistic embodiment and sociality emerging through equine-assisted therapy. Her inquiry turns away from a focus on autistic brains and toward cultivating ecologies where autistic people's ways of being and embodiments can be accepted and supported.

Tracing the role of sensory and endocrinological knowledge in our formulations of bodies, empathy, and personhood, Rhythms of Care explores more-than-human sociality, multispecies distributions of care, and the anthropology of the body. In our chronically stressful and overstimulating era of late capitalism and inequality, Malcolm envisions a sensory environment for all beings.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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Rhythms of the Pachakuti

Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar

Duke University Press, 2014

In the indigenous Andean language of Aymara, pachakuti refers to the subversion and transformation of social relations. Between 2000 and 2005, Bolivia was radically transformed by a series of popular indigenous uprisings against the country's neoliberal and antidemocratic policies. In Rhythms of the Pachakuti, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar documents these mass collective actions, tracing the internal dynamics of such disruptions to consider how motivation and execution incite political change.

"In Rhythms of the Pachakuti we can sense the reverberations of an extraordinary historical process that took place in Bolivia at the start of the twenty-first century. The book is the product of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's political engagement in that historical process. . . . Though of Mexican nationality, [she] was intimately involved in Bolivian politics for many years and acquired a quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual. . . . [Her account is] . . . itself a revolutionary document. . . . Rhythms of the Pachakuti deserves to stand as a key text in the international literature of radicalism and emancipatory politics in the new century."—Sinclair Thomson, from the foreword

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Rio del Norte

People of Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to Pueblo Revolt

Carroll L. Riley

University of Utah Press, 1995

Rio del Norte chronicles the upper Rio Grande region and its divers peoples across twelve thousand years of continuous history. Based on the most up-to-date historical and archaeological research, Rio del Norte is a tour de force, highlighting the unbroken history of the upper Rio Grande.

Beginning with the mammoth hunters of eleven millennia ago, Carroll Riley adeptly eaves the threads of twelve thousand years of continuous history through the introduction of agriculture, the rise of the Basketmaker-Pueblo (Anasazi) people, and the extraordinary "quickening" that occurred along the Rio Grande and its tributaries as the Anasazi era ended.

At that time large towns appeared, some holding several thousand people who practiced irrigation-based agriculture, maintained complex social and political organizations, and had a rich artistry. This "golden age" was continuing when Spaniards contacted, then colonized and missionized the region. In 1680 the Pueblos joined in a powerful record and ousted the invaders. Although the Spanish returned, the Pueblos have maintained important parts of their cultural heritage to the present.

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Ripples of the Universe

Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona

Susannah Crockford

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class.

Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both “raise their vibration” and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.

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Rising Anthills

African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000

Elisabeth Bekers

University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights.
Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a gradual evolution—from the 1960s, when writers mindful of its communal significance carefully “wrote around” the physical operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak out against the practice and their societies’ gender politics, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights.

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Risky Rivers

The Economics and Politics of Floodplain Farming in Amazonia

Michael Chibnik

University of Arizona Press, 1994

While anthropologists and ecologists have carefully described the activities of the slash-and-burn cultivators, ranchers, and miners of tropical South America, they have largely overlooked the economic strategies and political struggles of riverine people who survive by flood-recession agriculture and fishing. These ribere¤os, who constitute the majority of the inhabitants of the Amazonian floodplains of Peru, have developed ecologically sustainable resource management practices that enable them to cope with periodic inundations of their fields by "risky rivers."

They have, however, suffered greatly from unpredictable crop prices and erratic state agricultural policies. Michael Chibnik here examines the household economies, cultural ecology, grassroots political organizations of ribere¤os living in three floodplain villages near Iquitos, Peru. He describes the villagers' remarkable history, their participation in misconceived development programs, and their longstanding conflicts with regional elites. Chibnik discusses the political ecology of the region in the context of arguments about appropriate development policies in tropical lowlands. Although ribere¤os practice intensive agriculture with low environmental impact, they have not been able to improve their economic circumstances in recent years. Chibnik's study is a significant and timely contribution to current debates about the possibility of sustainable, equitable development in Amazonia.

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Rites of Conquest

The History and Culture of Michigan's Native Americans

Charles E. Cleland

University of Michigan Press, 1992

For many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Michigan's native peoples, the Anishnabeg, thrived in the forests and along the shores of the Great Lakes. Theirs were cultures in delicate social balance and in economic harmony with the natural order. Rites of Conquest details the struggles of Native Americans Michigan—the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, and their neighbors—to maintain unique traditions in the wake of contact with Euro-Americans. The French quest for furs, the colonial aggression of the British, and the invasion of native homelands by American settlers is the backdrop for this fascinating saga of their resistance and accommodation to the new social order. Minavavana's victory at Fort Michilimackinac, Pontiac's attempts to expel the British, Pokagon's struggle to maintain a Michigan homeland, and Big Abe Le Blanc's fight for fishing rights are a few of the many episodes recounted in the pages of this book.

Beyond wars and warriors, Rites of Conquest is also about diplomacy and negotiation, mythology and magic, birth and death, and the joys and trials of daily life in the native villages of the Great Lakes region. Today, Michigan's Native American citizens struggle to solve problems that are a legacy of their past, while they attempt to maintain a distinctive place within modern society. In facing this challenge they often turn to the values and traditions that set them apart as the most enduring peoples of the Great Lakes region.

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Ritual Encounters

Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community

Michelle Wibbelsman

University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book examines ritual practices and public festivals in the Otavalo and Cotacachi areas of northern Andean Ecuador's Imbabura province. Otavaleños are a unique group in that they maintain their traditional identity but also cultivate a cosmopolitanism through frequent international travel. Ritual Encountersexplores the moral, mythic, and modern crossroads at which Otavaleños stand, and how, at this junction, they come to define themselves as millennial people.

Michelle Wibbelsman shows that Otavaleños are deeply engaged in transnational mobility and in the cultural transformations that have resulted from Otavalan participation in global markets, international consumer trends, and technological developments. Rituals have persisted among this ethnic community as important processes for symbolically capturing and critically assessing cultural changes in the face of modern influences. As religious expression, political commentary, transcendental communication, moral judgment, and transformative experience, Otavalan rituals constitute enduring practices that affirm ethnic identities, challenge dominant narratives, and take issue with power inequalities behind hegemony. Ritual Encounters thus offers an appreciation of the modern and mythic community as a single and emergent condition.

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Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas

By Victoria Reifler Bricker

University of Texas Press, 1973

Zinacantan, Chamula, and Chenalhó are neighboring Mayan communities situated in highland Chiapas, Mexico, near the city of San Cristóbal Las Casas. The inhabitants of the three communities speak dialects of the Tzotzil language. Five religious fiestas, celebrated by these communities in honor of their saints, provide the data for Victoria Bricker's comparative study of ritual humor.

In Chenalhó and Chamula performances of ritual humor are concentrated in the five-day period of a single fiesta, while in Zanacantan similar performances are distributed over threee fiestas. In these fiesta settings, performers in distinctive costumes make obscene and sacreligious remarks in the context of religious ritual. These performances are defined as ritual humor because they occur only in ritual settings.

Bricker's study constitutes a controlled cross-cultural comparison of ceremonial or ritual humor in its social and cultural setting. Much new information is provided in verbatim texts, recorded during actual fiesta performances. The study reveals that, although the three communities share a common pool of ritual symbols, they elaborate them differently in ritual humor. The study analyzes the symbolic expression of values, social organization, and interethnic relations.

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Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women

Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick

Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003.

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues.

Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses.

For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.

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Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes

Rachel Corr

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Not every world culture that has battled colonization has suffered or died. In the Ecuadorian Andean parish of Salasaca, the indigenous culture has stayed true to itself and its surroundings for centuries while adapting to each new situation. Today, indigenous Salascans continue to devote a large part of their lives to their distinctive practices—both community rituals and individual behaviors—while living side by side with white-mestizo culture.

In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley.

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsiders—conquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insider’s perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this people’s great ability to adapt.

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Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency

Making Religion in Contemporary West Africa

Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon

HAU, 2026

An English translation of a French study of the rituals of the Mande people in West Africa.

Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency shows through rich ethnographic analysis how Mande people in West Africa resort to multiple ritual practices to address an “episteme of doubt.” In the context of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, climate disruptions, financial crises, and illness, members of “hunter societies," experts who handle certain agentive artifacts, and adepts in a spiritual possession cult deal with a complex past and uncertain future through creative embodied engagement. Formed within and partially against a predominantly Islamic context and the spread of charismatic Christianities, such embodied ways of acting enable these religious specialists to become “virtuous subjects” to change their relations to the world and to themselves. This is an English translation of Corps rituels. La fabrique du religieux en pays mandingue (Mali, Guinée, Côte d'Ivoire).

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Rituals Of Mediation

International Politics And Social Meaning

Francois Debrix

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today

In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations’s—and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation—understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization—the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.

Contributors: Robin Brown, U of Leeds; David Campbell, U of Newcastle upon Tyne; Michael Dillon, U of Lancaster; Debbie Lisle, Queen’s U, Belfast; Moya Lloyd, Queen’s U, Belfast; Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State U; Patricia L. Price, Florida International U; Jayne Rodgers, U of Leeds; Marysia Zalewski, Queen’s U, Belfast.

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Rituals and Sisterhoods

Single Women's Households in Mexico, 1560–1750

Amos Megged

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Rituals and Sisterhoods reveals the previously under-studied world of plebeian single women and single-female-headed households in colonial Mexican urban centers. Focusing on the lower echelons of society, Amos Megged considers why some commoner women remained single and established their own female-headed households, examining their unique discourses and self-representations from various angles.

Megged analyzes these women’s life stories recorded during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as wills and bequests, petitions, parish records, and private letters that describe—in their own words—how they exercised agency in male-dominated and religious spaces. Translations of select documents and accompanying analysis illustrate the conditions in which women dissolved their marriages, remained in long-lasting extramarital cohabitations, and formed female-led households and “sisterhoods” of their own. Megged provides evidence that single women in colonial Mexico played a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than has been previously thought, creating spaces for themselves in which they could initiate and maintain autonomy and values distinct from those of elite society.

The institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico had wide-ranging repercussions and effects on general societal values. Rituals and Sisterhoods details the particular relevance of these changes to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and views of honor and shame in colonial society. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of colonial Latin American history, the history of Early Modern Spain and Europe, and gender and women’s studies.

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Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire

Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa

Carol Ann Muller

University of Chicago Press, 1999

With close to one million members, the Church of the Nazarites (ibandla lamaNazaretha) is one of the most popular indigenous religious communities in South Africa. Founded in 1910 by Isaiah Shembe, it offers South Africans—particularly disadvantaged black women and girls—a way to remake and reconnect to ancient sacred traditions disrupted by colonialism and apartheid. Ethnomusicologist Carol Muller explores the everyday lives of Nazarite women through their religious songs and dances, dream narratives, and fertility rituals, which come to life both musically and visually on CD-ROM.

Against the backdrop of South Africa's turbulent history, Muller shows how Shembe's ideas of female ritual purity developed as a response to a regime and culture that pushed all things associated with women, cultural expression, and Africanness to the margins.

Carol Muller breaks new ground in the study of this changing region and along the way includes fascinating details of her own poignant journey, as a young, white South African woman, to the "other" side of a divided society.

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Rituals of Respect

The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes

By Inge Bolin

University of Texas Press, 1998

"In the remoteness of their mountain retreat, the herders of Chillihuani, Peru, recognize that respect for others is the central and most significant element of all thought and action," observes Inge Bolin. "Without respect, no society, no civilization, can flourish for long. Without respect, humanity is doomed and so is the earth, sustainer of all life."

In this beautifully written ethnography, Bolin describes the rituals of respect that maintain harmonious relations among people, the natural world, and the realm of the gods in an isolated Andean community of llama and alpaca herders that reaches up to 16,500 feet. Bolin was the first foreigner to visit Chillihuani, and she was permitted to participate in private family rituals, as well as public ceremonies. In turn, she allows the villagers to explain the meaning of their rituals in their own words.

From these first-hand experiences, Bolin offers an intimate portrait of an annual ritual cycle that dates back to Inca and pre-Inca times, including the ancient Pukllay; weddings; the Fiesta de Santiago, with its horse races on the top of the world; and Peru's Independence Day, when the Rituals of Respect for elders and young people alike are carried out within male and female hierarchies reminiscent of Inca times.

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River Dialogues

Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga

Georgina Drew

University of Arizona Press, 2017

India’s sacred Ganga River is arguably one of the most iconic sites for worship, with a continuity of rituals for the living and the dead that span over two millennia. Along the river, from high in the Himalaya to the vast plains below, people gather daily to worship the Ganga through prayer and song. But large government-sponsored dams threaten to upend these practices.

In River Dialogues, Georgina Drew offers a detailed ethnographic engagement with the social movements contesting hydroelectric development on the Ganga. The book examines the complexity of the cultural politics that, on the one hand, succeeded in influencing an unprecedented reversal of government plans for three contested hydroelectric projects, and how, on the other hand, this decision sparked ripples of discontent after being paired with the declaration of a conservation zone where the projects were situated.

The book follows the work of women who were initially involved in efforts to stop the disputed projects. After looking to their discourses and actions, Drew argues for the use of a political ecology analysis that incorporates the everyday practice and everyday religious connections that animated the cultural politics of development. Drew offers a nuanced understanding of the struggles that communities enact to assert their ways of knowing and caring for resources that serves as an example for others critically engaging with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship.

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River Life and the Upspring of Nature

Naveeda Khan

Duke University Press, 2023

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Nature is a primary force at play within this existence as chauras live itinerantly and in flux with the ever-changing river flows; where land is here today and gone tomorrow, the quality of life itself is intertwined with this mutability. Given this centrality of nature to chaura life, Khan contends that we must think of nature not simply as the physical landscape and the plants and animals that live within it but as that which exists within the social and at the level of cognition, the unconscious, intuition, memory, embodiment, and symbolization. By showing how the alluvial flood plains configure chaura life, Khan shows how nature can both give rise to and inhabit social, political, and spiritual forms of life.

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River Life and the Upspring of Nature

Naveeda Khan

Duke University Press, 2023

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River of Tears

Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil

Alexander Sebastian Dent

Duke University Press, 2009

River of Tears is the first ethnography of Brazilian country music, one of the most popular genres in Brazil yet least-known outside it. Beginning in the mid-1980s, commercial musical duos practicing música sertaneja reached beyond their home in Brazil’s central-southern region to become national bestsellers. Rodeo events revolving around country music came to rival soccer matches in attendance. A revival of folkloric rural music called música caipira, heralded as música sertaneja’s ancestor, also took shape. And all the while, large numbers of Brazilians in the central-south were moving to cities, using music to support the claim that their Brazil was first and foremost a rural nation.

Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.

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Riverine Citizenship

A Bosnian City in Love with the River

Azra Hromadžic

Central European University Press, 2024

Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans, and it has given rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River, which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihać. This prospect alarmed the city’s residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest, and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.

The book is based on interviews with participants, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic research. Azra Hromadžić focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy, on the one hand, and citizens’ historically shaped, deeply-felt, love for the river, on the other. She shows how the language and promises of green transition can mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change — whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism — and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.

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Rock Climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge

An Oral History of Community, Resources, and Tourism

James N. Maples

West Virginia University Press, 2021

Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge documents, for the first time, fifty years of oral history from this famous climbing community. Through extensive interviews, Maples reconstructs the growth of rock climbing in the region—including a twice-failed dam project, mysterious first routes, unauthorized sport-route growth on public lands, and a controversial archaeological dig. The book details five decades of collaborations to secure ongoing access to some of the world’s most beautiful and technically demanding routes and the challenges along the way.

More than a recounting of the past, however, Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge uses the region’s extraordinary history to argue that climbing has the potential to be a valuable source of sustainable economic activity in rural areas throughout Appalachia today and in the years to come. The book concludes by offering policy recommendations and lessons learned about building beneficial partnerships among climbers, local communities, and public land managers to encourage community development and ecotourism alongside preservation.

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Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams

Explorations in the Huichol Universe

Furst, Peter T

University of Utah Press, 2006

The Huichol people live in west Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. The most authentically 'traditional' of all Mexican Indians, they have recently become famous for their vivid yarn paintings, their sacramental use of hallucinogenic cactus, and the well-documented peyote pilgrimages that take them three hundred miles east from their present homeland into the north-central desert.

In the mid-1960s, Peter T. Furst began a lifelong encounter with their intellectual culture, facilitated by a growing relationship of mutual trust with Ramón Medina, an aspiring Huichol shaman, storyteller, and artist, and his wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos. Ramón, who became a full-fledged shaman with his fifth peyote pilgrimage, also had a Huichol name: 'Uru Temay, Young Arrow Person.' Over the years Furst published a number of articles on various facets of Huichol life, many of them centered on what he learned and observed during his growing relationship with Ramón and his people.

Bound together by personal reminiscences and background explanations, Furst here brings many of those articles together and updates them. It includes transcriptions of myths that function as charters for 'being Huichols,' descriptions of deities, rituals, beliefs, as well as discussion of the place of hallucinogens in Huichol culture. Furst skillfully weaves current reflections with memories and older material in a manner that makes for a highly readable, contemporary presentation.

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Rock | Water | Life

Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa

Lesley Green

Duke University Press, 2020

In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

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Rockin' Out Of The Box

Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock

Schippers, Mimi

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives?

In Rockin’ Out of the Box, Mimi Schippers, employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. The author focuses on this sizable section of rock music both because it is widely inclusive of men and women and because it explicitly adopted feminism as its point of departure from mainstream music. Schippers uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain her observations that gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process, she demonstrates, operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles.

Schippers, who spent more than two years frequenting alternative hard rock clubs and concerts in Chicago, conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, this book also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people.

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