Results by title

4413 books match the query 'Anthropology' and 157 start with w

cover of What Mean These Bones?: Studies in Southeastern Bioarchaeology

What Mean These Bones?

Studies in Southeastern Bioarchaeology

Edited by Mary Lucas Powell, Patricia S. Bridges, and Ann Marie Wagner Mires

University of Alabama Press, 1991

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Until recently, archaeological projects that included analysis of human remains had often lacked active collaboration between archaeologists and physical anthropologists from the planning stages onward. During the 1980s, a conjunctive approach developed; known as "bioarchaeology," it draws on the methodological and theoretical strengths of the two subdisciplines to bridge a perceived communications gap and promote a more comprehensive understanding of prehistoric and historic cultures.
 

This volume addresses questions of human adaptation in a variety of cultural contexts, with a breadth not found in studies utilizing solely biological or artifactual data. These nine case studies from eight Southeastern states cover more than 4,000 years of human habitation, from Archaic hunter-gatherers in Louisiana and Alabama to Colonial planters and slaves in South Carolina. Several studies focus upon variations in health between or within late prehistoric agricultural societies. For example, the discovery that reliance upon maize as a dietary staple did not result invariably in poor health, as claimed by earlier studies, either for entire populations or, in ranked societies, for the non-elite majority, has fostered a new appreciation for the managerial wisdom of the Mississippian peoples, as well as for their agricultural skills.


 

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cover of What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn

What the Signs Say

Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn

Shonna Trinch

Vanderbilt University Press, 2020

Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive.

Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters.

This book is the recipient of the 2021 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

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cover of What's Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic

What's Love Got to Do with It?

Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic

Denise Brennan

Duke University Press, 2004

In locations around the world, sex tourism is a booming business. What's Love Got to Do with It? is an in-depth examination of the motivations of workers, clients, and others connected to the sex tourism business in Sosúa, a town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Denise Brennan considers why Dominican and Haitian women move to Sosúa to pursue sex work and describes how sex tourists, primarily Europeans, come to Sosúa to buy sex cheaply and live out racialized fantasies. For the sex workers, Brennan explains, the sex trade is more than a means of survival—it is an advancement strategy that hinges on their successful “performance” of love. Many of these women seek to turn a commercialized sexual transaction into a long-term relationship that could lead to marriage, migration, and a way out of poverty.

Illuminating the complex world of Sosúa’s sex business in rich detail, Brennan draws on extensive interviews not only with sex workers and clients, but also with others who facilitate and benefit from the sex trade. She weaves these voices into an analysis of Dominican economic and migration histories to consider the opportunities—or lack thereof—available to poor Dominican women. She shows how these women, local actors caught in a web of global economic relations, try to take advantage of the foreign men who are in Sosúa to take advantage of them. Through her detailed study of the lives and working conditions of the women in Sosúa’s sex trade, Brennan raises important questions about women’s power, control, and opportunities in a globalized economy.

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cover of When Culture and Biology Collide: Why We are Stressed, Depressed, and Self-Obsessed

When Culture and Biology Collide

Why We are Stressed, Depressed, and Self-Obsessed

E. O. Smith

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Why do we do things that we know are bad for us? Why do we line up to buy greasy fast food that is terrible for our bodies? Why do we take the potentially lethal risk of cosmetic surgery to have a smaller nose, bigger lips, or a less wrinkled face? Why do we risk life and limb in a fit of road rage to seek revenge against someone who merely cut us off in traffic? If these life choices are simply responses to cultural norms and pressures, then why did these particularly self-destructive patterns evolve in place of more sensible ones?

In When Culture and Biology Collide, E. O. Smith explores various aspects of behavior that are endemic to contemporary Western society, and proposes new ways of understanding and addressing these problems. Our physiology and behavior are the products of thousands of generations of evolutionary history. Every day we play out behaviors that have been part of the human experience for a very long time, yet these behaviors are played out in an arena that is far different from that in which they evolved. Smith argues that this discordance between behavior and environment sets up conditions in which there can be real conflict between our evolved psychological predispositions and the dictates of culture.

Topics such as drug abuse, depression, beauty and self-image, obesity and dieting, stress and violence, ethnic diversity, and welfare are all used as sample case studies. As with all of his case studies, Smith emphasizes the importance of not using an evolutionary explanation as an excuse for a particular pattern of behavior. Instead, he seeks to offer a perspective that will help us see ourselves more clearly and that may be useful in developing intelligent solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Smith provides ways of developing strategies for minimizing our self-destructive tendencies.

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cover of When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

When Death Falls Apart

Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

Hannah Gould

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Through an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials.
 
Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones—the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, Buddhist altars installed inside the home. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing.

In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral-goods showrooms, neglected cemeteries, and cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Hannah Gould analyzes the lifecycle of butsudan, illuminating how they are made, circulate through religious and funerary economies, mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, and—as the population ages, families disperse, and fewer homes have space for large lacquer cabinets—eventually fall into disuse. What happens, she asks, when a funerary technology becomes obsolete? And what will take its place? Gould examines new products better suited to urban apartments: miniature urns and sleek altars inspired by Scandinavian design, even reliquary jewelry. She visits an automated columbarium and considers new ritual practices that embrace impermanence. At an industry expo, she takes on the role of “demonstration corpse.” Throughout, Gould invites us to rethink memorialization and describes a distinct form of Japanese necrosociality, one based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.
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cover of When Death Is on the Horizon: Temporality, Finitude, and Care Toward Life’s End

When Death Is on the Horizon

Temporality, Finitude, and Care Toward Life’s End

Annemarie Samuels

Rutgers University Press, 2026

The urge to engage with finitude is increasingly central in our present apocalyptic time of political and ecological turmoil. Aging populations and the rapid development of advanced, but expensive, technologies to ever further postpone death pose significant healthcare challenges for societies around the world. In these times, how do people care when the end of life is near? How do they orient toward death? Do they see death as an absolute end, and if not, what sort of horizon does death present? Questioning taken for granted assumptions about end-of-life care, When Death Is on the Horizon analyzes how people approach death in a wide variety of geographical locations and social contexts. Through in-depth ethnographic case studies, it shows how people orient toward, beyond, and away from death, and how they do so within a world marked by historic and ongoing socio-political and structural inequalities.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

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cover of When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories

When Forests Run Amok

War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories

Daniel Ruiz-Serna

Duke University Press, 2023

Daniel Ruiz-Serna examines how the devastation caused by war impacts nonhuman inhabitants in the forests and rivers in the traditional lands of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.
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cover of When Our Words Return: Writing, Hearing, and Remembering Oral Traditions from Alasak and the Yukon

When Our Words Return

Writing, Hearing, and Remembering Oral Traditions from Alasak and the Yukon

edited by Phyllis Morrow & William Schneider

Utah State University Press, 1995

The title to this interdisciplinary collection draws on the Yupik Eskimo belief that seals, fish, and other game are precious gifts that, when treated with respect and care, will return to be hunted again. Just so, if oral traditions are told faithfully and respectfully, they will return to benefit future generations. The contributors to this volume are concerned with the interpretation and representation of oral narrative and how it is shaped by its audience and the time, place, and cultural context of the narration. Thus, oral traditions are understood as a series of dialogues between tradition bearers and their listeners, including those who record, write, and interpret.

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cover of When Protest Becomes Crime: Politics and Law in Liberal Democracies

When Protest Becomes Crime

Politics and Law in Liberal Democracies

Carolijn Terwindt

Pluto Press, 2019

How does protest become criminalised? Applying an anthropological perspective to political and legal conflicts, Carolijn Terwindt urges us to critically question the underlying interests and logic of prosecuting protesters. The book draws upon ethnographic research in Chile, Spain, and the United States to trace prosecutorial narratives in three protracted contentious episodes in liberal democracies. Terwindt examines the conflict between Chilean landowners and the indigenous Mapuche people, the Spanish state and the Basque independence movement, and the United States' criminalisation of 'eco-terrorists.' Exploring how patterns and mechanisms of prosecutorial narrative emerge through distinct political, social and democratic contexts, Terwindt shines a light on how prosecutorial narratives in each episode changed significantly over time. Challenging the law and justice system and warning against relying on criminal law to deal with socio-political conflicts, Terwindt's observations have implications for a wide range of actors and constituencies, including social movement activists, scholars, and prosecutors.
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cover of When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier's Story

When Rains Became Floods

A Child Soldier's Story

Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez

Duke University Press, 2015

When Rains Became Floods is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love.
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cover of When Women Have Wings: Feminism and Development in Medellin, Colombia

When Women Have Wings

Feminism and Development in Medellin, Colombia

Donna F. Murdock

University of Michigan Press, 2008

In When Women Have Wings, Donna F. Murdock provides an insightful and detailed look at the tensions, contradictions, and positive moments apparent in a women's development project in Medellín, Colombia. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic field research in a working-class women's community center run by a local feminist NGO, this in-depth account illuminates both working- and middle-class women's perspectives on the professionalization of feminist NGOs and provides an unusual ethnographic lens on the process as it unfolds. Using detailed descriptions of the encounters between working- and middle-class women to highlight how the women's center attempts to negotiate the pressures of feminism and professionalization, Murdock depicts the frailty and complexity of cross-class organizing and the ways that this process may be threatened by professionalized NGO styles. Poignant accounts of women's attempts to navigate these challenges amid poverty and civil war show how changing political and economic demands may ultimately compromise feminist NGOs' long-held commitments to sustainable development practice focused on grassroots empowerment. With its clear and vivid style, When Women Have Wings fills a gap for scholars of feminist development, professionalized feminist NGOs, grassroots democracy, and Latin American women's movements and will contribute much-needed insight into the everyday workings of the problems of professionalization and democratic development. "By offering a fine-grained, engaging and provocative account of the workings of feminist nongovernmental organizations and their working-class women constituencies, When Women Have Wings fills a gaping lacuna in the now expansive literature on women's movements in the Global South." -- Sonia E. Alvarez, Department of Political Sciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst "Donna Murdock's in-depth ethnographic account will be an important contribution to the literature on women's movements, Latin American feminisms, and gender identity politics in the context of neoliberalism and political violence." -- Amy Lind, Department of Women's Studies, University of Cincinnati "This remarkable book, full of ethnographic detail and lucid analysis, tells a compelling story of feminist struggles with neoliberalism in Latin America. Murdock takes us into the lives and struggles of working-class women and their feminist allies, illustrating how class divides are painfully exacerbated by shrinking state budgets, rising requirements for citizenship, and the professionalization of social movements. She nonetheless leaves us with the 'fragile wings of hope,' grounded in women's ongoing efforts to confront violence and make their voices heard in the face of difficult odds. This is important reading for feminists, scholars of development, and those concerned with global justice." -- Millie Thayer, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
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cover of When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa

When the Bones Speak

The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa

Christopher T. Nelson

Duke University Press, 2025

Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices—living and dead, visible and immaterial—that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a “not yet” that has always remained just beyond reach.
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cover of When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality, and Numic Ritual

When the Earth Was New

Memory, Materiality, and Numic Ritual

Alex K. Ruuska

University of Utah Press, 2025

Explores the value of oral traditions and challenges entrenched beliefs about ethnogenesis in the Great Basin

In When the Earth Was New, Alex K. Ruuska explores riveting multigenerational memories of Numic-speaking communities that extend back, potentially, to the late Pleistocene. These diverse oral traditions describe geological, climatic, and ecological events that occurred over thousands of years and were passed down across many generations. Through the examination of place-based memories and the architecture of Numic knowledge, Ruuska demonstrates convergences of oral traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and geology.

When the Earth Was New critically compares and considers multiple forms of knowledge that contribute to overlapping as well as disparate understandings of both recent and distant pasts in the regions of California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. It works at balancing key themes in these regions’ histories within a more holistic framework, exploring ancient and modern strands of knowledge with the assistance of twenty-four Tribes and Consolidated Organizations.
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cover of When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community

When the Hills Are Gone

Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community

Thomas W. Pearson

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Fracking is one of the most controversial methods of fossil fuel extraction in the United States, but a great deal about it remains out of the public eye. In Wisconsin it has ignited an unprecedented explosion in the state’s sand mining operations, an essential ingredient in hydraulic fracturing that has shaken local communities to the core.

In When the Hills Are Gone, Thomas W. Pearson reveals the jolting impact of sand mining on Wisconsin’s environment and politics. A source of extraordinary wealth for a lucky few, and the cause of despoiled land for many others, sand mining has raised alarm over air quality, water purity, noise, blasting, depressed tourism, and damage to the local way of life. It has also spurred a backlash in a grassroots effort that has grown into a mature political movement battling a powerful mining industry.

When the Hills Are Gone tells the story of Wisconsin’s sand mining wars. Providing on-the-ground accounts from both the mining industry and the concerned citizens who fought back, Pearson blends social theory, ethnography, stirring journalism, and his own passionate point of view to offer an essential chapter of Wisconsin’s history and an important episode in the national environmental movement. Digging deep into the struggles over place, community, and local democracy that are occurring across the United States, When the Hills Are Gone gives vital insight into America’s environmental battles along the unexpected frontlines of energy development.

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cover of When the Light Is Fire: Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya

When the Light Is Fire

Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya

Heather D. Switzer

University of Illinois Press, 2018

A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya's Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression.

Heather D. Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.

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cover of Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?: The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti’ Indigeneity

Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?

The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti’ Indigeneity

by Brent E. Metz

University Press of Colorado, 2022

Copublished with the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University of Albany

In Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? Brent E. Metz explores the complicated issue of who is Indigenous by focusing on the sociohistorical transformations over the past two millennia of the population currently known as the Ch’orti’ Maya. Epigraphers agree that the language of elite writers in Classic Maya civilization was Proto-Ch’olan, the precursor of the Maya languages Ch’orti’, Ch’olti’, Ch’ol, and Chontal. When the Spanish invaded in the early 1500s, the eastern half of this area was dominated by people speaking various dialects of Ch’olti’ and closely related Apay (Ch’orti’), but by the end of the colonial period (1524–1821) only a few pockets of Ch’orti’ speakers remained.
 
From 2003 to 2018 Metz partnered with Indigenous leaders to conduct a historical and ethnographic survey of Ch’orti’ Maya identity in what was once the eastern side of the Classic period lowland Maya region and colonial period Ch’orti’-speaking region of eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador. Today only 15,000 Ch’orti’ speakers remain, concentrated in two municipalities in eastern Guatemala, but since the 1990s nearly 100,000 impoverished farmers have identified as Ch’orti’ in thirteen Guatemalan and Honduran municipalities, with signs of Indigenous revitalization in several Salvadoran municipalities as well. Indigenous movements have raised the ethnic consciousness of many non-Ch’orti’-speaking semi-subsistence farmers, or campesinos. The region’s inhabitants employ diverse measures to assess identity, referencing language, history, traditions, rurality, “blood,” lineage, discrimination, and more.
 
Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? approaches Indigenous identity as being grounded in historical processes, contemporary politics, and distinctive senses of place. The book is an engaged, activist ethnography not on but, rather, in collaboration with a marginalized population that will be of interest to scholars of the eastern lowland Maya region, indigeneity generally, and ethnographic experimentation.

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cover of Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

Where Rivers Meet the Sea

The Political Ecology of Water

Stephanie Kane

Temple University Press, 2012

Where fresh water appears to be abundant and generally accessible, chronic pollution may be relatively ignored as a public issue. Yet there are those whose lives, livelihoods, and traditions are touched directly by the destructive albeit essential relationship between humans and water. 

In her passionate and persuasively argued Where Rivers Meet the Sea, Stephanie Kane compares two cities and nations—Salvador, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina—as she tells the stories of those who organize in the streets, petition the courts, and challenge their governments to implement and enforce existing laws designed to protect springs, lakes, harbors, and rivers.

Illuminating the complex and distinctive cultural forces in the South Atlantic that shape conflicts and collaborations pertaining to particular waterfront settings, Kane shows the dilemmas, inventiveness, and persistence that provide the foundation for environmental and social justice movements writ large.

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cover of Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta

Where the River Ends

Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta

Shaylih Muehlmann

Duke University Press, 2013

Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is increasingly directed to the manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Since 1993, the Mexican government has denied the Cucapá people fishing rights on environmental grounds. While the Cucapá have continued to fish in the Gulf of California, federal inspectors and the Mexican military are pressuring them to stop. The government maintains that the Cucapá are not sufficiently "indigenous" to warrant preferred fishing rights. Like many indigenous people in Mexico, most Cucapá people no longer speak their indigenous language; they are highly integrated into nonindigenous social networks. Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed.
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cover of Where the Wind Blows Us: Practicing Critical Community Archaeology in the Canadian North

Where the Wind Blows Us

Practicing Critical Community Archaeology in the Canadian North

Natasha Lyons

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Where the Wind Blows Us unites critical practice with a community-based approach to archaeology. Author Natasha Lyons describes an inclusive archaeology that rests on a flexible but rigorous approach to research design and demonstrates a responsible, ethical practice. She traces the rise and application of community archaeologies, develops a wide-ranging set of methods for community practice, and maps out a “localized critical theory” that is suited to the needs of local and descendant communities as they pursue self-defined heritage goals. Localized critical theory aims to decenter the focus on global processes of capitalism in favor of the local processes of community dynamics. Where the Wind Blows Us emphasizes the role of individuals and the relationships they share with communities of the past and present.
 
Lyons offers an extended case study of her work with the Inuvialuit community of the Canadian Western Arctic. She documents the development of this longstanding research relationship and presents both the theoretical and practical products of the work to date. Integrating knowledge drawn from archaeology, ethnography, oral history, and community interviews, Lyons utilizes a multivocal approach that actively listens to Inuvialuit speak about their rich and textured history.
 
The overall significance of this volume lies in outlining a method of practicing archaeology that embraces local ways of knowing with a critically constructed and evolving methodology that is responsive to community needs. It will serve as a handbook to mine for elements of critical practice, a model of community-based archaeology, and a useful set of concepts and examples for classroom study.
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cover of White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

White By Definition

Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Dominguez, Virginia

Rutgers University Press, 1993

"A profound study of the nebulous Creoles. . . . Domínguez's use of original sources . . . is scholarship at its best. . . . Her study is fascinating, thought-provoking, controversial, and without a doubt, one of the most objective analyses of Creole Louisiana. Her emphasis on social stratification and her excellent integration of ethnic and racial classification of Creoles with legal and social dynamics and individual choice of ethnic identity elucidates strikingly the continuing controversy of who and what is a Louisiana Creole."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"Domínguez's most important contribution lies in her conceptualization of the problem of identity. She treats ethnic identity as something that can change over time, warning us against imposing current meanings on the past and requiring us to consider evidence of how terms were actually used in the past. . . . It is hard to imagine a frame of reference more ideally suited to historical analysis."--Louisiana History

"A valuable interdisciplinary examination of the processes of racial definition in Louisiana's history. Her study combines the anthropologist's sensitivity to language and self definition within a community with a skillful exploitation of historical sources."--Law and Society

"I highly recommend this book to all persons interested in social stratification."--Alvin L. Bertrand, Contemporary Sociology

"A vivid and insightful reading of the historical circumstances that have shaped definitions of Creoles within Louisiana law and society."--Journal of Southern History

"A profound study of the nebulous Creoles. . . . Domínguez's use of original sources . . . is scholarship at its best. . . . Her study is fascinating, thought-provoking, controversial, and without a doubt, one of the most objective analyses of Creole Louisiana. Her emphasis on social stratification and her excellent integration of ethnic and racial classification of Creoles with legal and social dynamics and individual choice of ethnic identity elucidates strikingly the continuing controversy of who and what is a Louisiana Creole."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"Domínguez's most important contribution lies in her conceptualization of the problem of identity. She treats ethnic identity as something that can change over time, warning us against imposing current meanings on the past and requiring us to consider evidence of how terms were actually used in the past. . . . It is hard to imagine a frame of reference more ideally suited to historical analysis."--Louisiana History

"A valuable interdisciplinary examination of the processes of racial definition in Louisiana's history. Her study combines the anthropologist's sensitivity to language and self definition within a community with a skillful exploitation of historical sources."--Law and Society

"I highly recommend this book to all persons interested in social stratification."--Alvin L. Bertrand, Contemporary Sociology

"A vivid and insightful reading of the historical circumstances that have shaped definitions of Creoles within Louisiana law and society."--Journal of Southern History


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cover of White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

White By Definition

Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Virginia Domínguez

Rutgers University Press, 1986

"An unusual and powerful study."--Eric R. Wolf, Herbert H. Lehman College, CUNY

"A profound study of the nebulous Creoles. . . . Domínguez's use of original sources . . . is scholarship at its best. . . . Her study is fascinating, thought-provoking, controversial, and without a doubt, one of the most objective analyses of Creole Louisiana. Her emphasis on social stratification and her excellent integration of ethnic and racial classification of Creoles with legal and social dynamics and individual choice of ethnic identity elucidates strikingly the continuing controversy of who and what is a Louisiana Creole."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"Domínguez's most important contribution lies in her conceptualization of the problem of identity. She treats ethnic identity as something that can change over time, warning us against imposing current meanings on the past and requiring us to consider evidence of how terms were actually used in the past. . . . It is hard to imagine a frame of reference more ideally suited to historical analysis."--Louisiana History

"A valuable interdisciplinary examination of the processes of racial definition in Louisiana's history. Her study combines the anthropologist's sensitivity to language and self definition within a community with a skillful exploitation of historical sources."--Law and Society

"I highly recommend this book to all persons interested in social stratification."--Alvin L. Bertrand, Contemporary Sociology

"A vivid and insightful reading of the historical circumstances that have shaped definitions of Creoles within Louisiana law and society."--Journal of Southern History

"A provocative, often brilliant book. It offers fresh perspectives on fundamental questions and deserves a wide readership among American social historians."--Journal of American History

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cover of White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

White Innocence

Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

Gloria Wekker

Duke University Press, 2016

In White Innocence Gloria Wekker explores a central paradox of Dutch culture: the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia. Accessing a cultural archive built over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker fundamentally challenges Dutch racial exceptionalism by undermining the dominant narrative of the Netherlands as a "gentle" and "ethical" nation. Wekker analyzes the Dutch media's portrayal of black women and men, the failure to grasp race in the Dutch academy, contemporary conservative politics (including gay politicians espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric), and the controversy surrounding the folkloric character Black Pete, showing how the denial of racism and the expression of innocence safeguards white privilege. Wekker uncovers the postcolonial legacy of race and its role in shaping the white Dutch self, presenting the contested, persistent legacy of racism in the country.
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cover of White Southerners

White Southerners

Lewis M. Killian

University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

Originally published in 1970 as part of the series Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective, White Southerners is widely regarded as a classic in the sociology and history of the American South. In it, Lewis M. Killian, himself a white Southerner and a distinguished sociologist of race relations, advances the provocative and influential argument that white Southerners can be understood as a distinct American ethnic group, shaped by a shared regional identity, history, and culture that sets them apart from other white Americans. Drawing on decades of research into race relations and Southern society, Killian examines the formation and persistence of Southern white identity, its relationship to the broader struggles over race and civil rights, and the tensions between regional loyalty and national belonging. This revised edition includes a new preface and a substantial new concluding chapter that extends the analysis through the period from 1970 to 1984, bringing the study up to date with the transformed landscape of the post-civil rights South. Essential reading for students and scholars of American race relations, regional identity, and the sociology of ethnicity, White Southerners remains a foundational text in Southern studies.

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cover of Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide

Who Counts?

The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide

Diane M. Nelson

Duke University Press, 2015

In Who Counts? Diane M. Nelson explores the social life of numbers, teasing out the myriad roles math plays in Guatemalan state violence, economic exploitation, and disenfranchisement, as well as in Mayan revitalization and grassroots environmental struggles. In the aftermath of thirty-six years of civil war, to count—both numerically and in the sense of having value—is a contested and qualitative practice of complex calculations encompassing war losses, migration, debt, and competing understandings of progress. Nelson makes broad connections among seemingly divergent phenomena, such as debates over reparations for genocide victims, Ponzi schemes, and antimining movements. Challenging the presumed objectivity of Western mathematics, Nelson shows how it flattens social complexity and becomes a raced, classed, and gendered skill that colonial powers considered beyond the grasp of indigenous peoples. Yet the Classic Maya are famous for the precision of their mathematics, including conceptualizing zero long before Europeans. Nelson shows how Guatemala's indigenous population is increasingly returning to Mayan numeracy to critique systemic inequalities with the goal of being counted—in every sense of the word. 
 
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cover of Who Defines Indigenous?: Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico

Who Defines Indigenous?

Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico

Martinez Novo, Carmen

Rutgers University Press, 2006

For years, conventional scholarship has argued that minority groups are better served when the majority groups that absorb them are willing to recognize and allow for the preservation of indigenous identities. But is the reinforcement of ethnic identity among migrant groups always a process of self-liberation? In this surprising study, Carmen Martínez Novo draws on her ethnographic research of the Mixtec Indians’ migration from the southwest of Mexico to Baja California to show that sometimes the push for indigenous labels is more a process of external oppression than it is of minority empowerment.

            In Baja California, many Mixtec Indians have not made efforts to align themselves as a coherent demographic. Instead, Martínez Novo finds that the push for indigenous identity in this region has come from local government agencies, economic elites, intellectuals, and other external agents. Their concern has not only been over the loss of rich culture. Rather, the pressure to maintain an indigenous identity has stemmed from the desire to secure a reproducible abundance of cheap “Indian” labor. Meanwhile, many Mixtecs reject their ethnic label precisely because being “Indian” means being a commercial agriculture low-wage worker or an urban informal street vendor—an identity that interferes with their goals of social mobility and economic integration.

            Bringing a critical new perspective to the complex intersection among government and scholarly agendas, economic development, global identity politics, and the aspirations of local migrants, this provocative book is essential reading for scholars working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

[more]
cover of Who Killed Jules Crevaux?: Murder in the Bolivian Chaco

Who Killed Jules Crevaux?

Murder in the Bolivian Chaco

Isabelle Combès

HAU, 2023

The first book to explore the deaths of explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew from an Indigenous perspective.

In 1882, the celebrated French explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew were killed by Indigenous people in the Bolivian Chaco, a fiercely contested region on the border between Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. The event sparked an international uproar. The scene of the crime was embroiled in clashes among various Indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, and missionaries. Official investigators sent from France and competing newspapers ended up mired in a morass of equivocal, ambiguous, false, and contradictory information.

To make sense of this event, Isabelle Combès is the first researcher to consult the local archives and to include the perspective of Indigenous peoples. In search of who killed Crevaux and why, Combès unearths the power struggles and social imaginaries behind the incident and its aftermath. Readers will find not only an engrossing story in these pages but also an exemplar of historical inquiry that questions the very nature of truth-telling.
 
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cover of Whoosh Goes the Market: Algorithms, Automation, and Alienation

Whoosh Goes the Market

Algorithms, Automation, and Alienation

Daniel Scott Souleles

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A vivid, fast-paced inside look at financial markets, the people who work on them, and how technology is changing their world (and ours).
 
Markets are messy, and no one knows this better than traders who work tirelessly to predict what they will do next. In Whoosh Goes the Market, Daniel Scott Souleles takes us into the day-to-day experiences of a team at a large trading firm, revealing what it’s actually like to make and lose money on contemporary capital markets.
 
The traders Souleles shadows have mostly moved out of the pits and now work with automated, glitch-prone computer systems. They remember the days of trading manually, and they are suspicious of algorithmically driven machine-learning systems. Openly musing about their own potential extinction, they spend their time expressing fear and frustration in profanity-laced language. With Souleles as our guide, we learn about everything from betting strategies to inflated valuations, trading swings, and market manipulation. This crash course in contemporary finance vividly reveals the existential anxiety at the evolving front lines of American capitalism.
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cover of Whose Dog Are You?: The Technology of Dog Breeds and The Aesthetics of Modern Human-Canine Relations

Whose Dog Are You?

The Technology of Dog Breeds and The Aesthetics of Modern Human-Canine Relations

Martin Wallen

Michigan State University Press, 2017

The intriguing question in the title comes from an inscription on the collar of a dog Alexander Pope gave to the Prince of Wales. When Pope wrote the famous couplet “I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew, / Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are You?” the question was received as an expression of loyalty. That was an era before there were dog breeds and, not coincidentally, before people were generally believed to develop affectionate bonds with dogs. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the development of dog breeds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the Foxhound—the first modern breed—it examines the aesthetic, political, and technological forces that generate modern human-canine relations. These forces have colluded over the past two hundred years to impose narrow descriptions of human-canine relations and to shape the dogs physically into acceptable and recognizable breeds. The largest question in animal studies today—how alterity affects human-animal relations—cannot fully be considered until the two approaches to this question are understood as complements of one another: one beginning from aesthetics, the other from technology. Most of all, the book asks if we can engage with dogs in ways that allow them to remain dogs.
 
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cover of Whose Fair?: Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition

Whose Fair?

Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition

James Gilbert

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a major event in early-twentieth-century America. Attracting millions of tourists, it exemplified the Victorian predilection for public spectacle. The Fair has long served as a touchstone for historians interested in American culture prior to World War I and has endured in the memories of generations of St. Louis residents and visitors. In Whose Fair? James Gilbert asks: what can we learn about the lived experience of fairgoers when we compare historical accounts, individual and collective memories, and artifacts from the event?

Exploring these differing, at times competing, versions of history and memory prompts Gilbert to dig through a rich trove of archival material. He examines the papers of David Francis, the Fair’s president and subsequent chief archivist; guidebooks and other official publications; the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis; diaries, oral histories, and other personal accounts; and a collection of striking photographs. From this dazzling array of sources, Gilbert paints a lively picture of how fairgoers spent their time, while also probing the ways history and memory can complement each other.

[more]
cover of Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre

Whose Lives Are They Anyway?

The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre

Bingham, Dennis

Rutgers University Press, 2010

The biopic presents a profound paradox—its own conventions and historical stages of development, disintegration, investigation, parody, and revival have not gained respect in the world of film studies. That is, until now.

Whose Lives Are They Anyway? boldly proves a critical point: The biopic is a genuine, dynamic genre and an important one—it narrates, exhibits, and celebrates a subject's life and demonstrates, investigates, or questions his or her importance in the world; it illuminates the finer points of a personality; and, ultimately, it provides a medium for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be that person, or a certain type of person.

Through detailed analyses and critiques of nearly twenty biopics, Dennis Bingham explores what is at their core—the urge to dramatize real life and find a version of the truth within it. The genre's charge, which dates back to the salad days of the Hollywood studio era, is to introduce the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology and, above all, to show that he or she belongs there. It means to discover what we learn about our culture from the heroes who rise and the leaders who emerge from cinematic representations.

Bingham also zooms in on distinctions between cinematic portrayals of men and women. Films about men have evolved from celebratory warts-and-all to investigatory to postmodern and parodic. At the same time, women in biopics have been burdened by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure from which they are only now being liberated.

To explore the evolution and lifecycle changes of the biopic and develop an appreciation for subgenres contained within it, there is no better source than Whose Lives Are They Anyway?

[more]
cover of Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor

Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent

A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor

Allison Mickel

University Press of Colorado, 2020

For more than 200 years, archaeological sites in the Middle East have been dug, sifted, sorted, and saved by local community members who, in turn, developed immense expertise in excavation and interpretation and had unparalleled insight into the research process and findings—but who have almost never participated in strategies for recording the excavation procedures or results. Their particular perspectives have therefore been missing from the archaeological record, creating an immense gap in knowledge about the ancient past and about how archaeological knowledge is created.
 
Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent is based on six years of in-depth ethnographic work with current and former site workers at two major Middle Eastern archaeological sites—Petra, Jordan, and Çatalhöyük, Turkey—combined with thorough archival research. Author Allison Mickel describes the nature of the knowledge that locally hired archaeological laborers exclusively possess about artifacts, excavation methods, and archaeological interpretation, showing that archaeological workers are experts about a wide range of topics in archaeology. At the same time, Mickel reveals a financial incentive for site workers to pretend to be less knowledgeable than they actually are, as they risk losing their jobs or demotion if they reveal their expertise.
 
Despite a recent proliferation of critical research examining the history and politics of archaeology, the topic of archaeological labor has not yet been substantially examined. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent employs a range of advanced qualitative, quantitative, and visual approaches and offers recommendations for archaeologists to include more diverse expert perspectives and produce more nuanced knowledge about the past. It will appeal to archaeologists, science studies scholars, and anyone interested in challenging the concept of “unskilled” labor.
[more]
cover of Why We Play: An Anthropological Study

Why We Play

An Anthropological Study

Roberte Hamayon

HAU, 2015

Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its possibilities in an imagined environment or construct. But as Roberte Hamayon shows in this book, play has implications that go even further than that. Exploring play’s many dimensions, she offers an insightful look at why play has become so ubiquitous across human cultures.
           
Hamayon begins by zeroing in on Mongolia and Siberia, where communities host national holiday games similar to the Olympics. Within these events Hamayon explores the performance of ethical values and local identity, and then she draws her analysis into larger ideas examinations of the spectrum of play activities as they can exist in any culture. She explores facets of play such as learning, interaction, emotion, strategy, luck, and belief, and she emphasizes the crucial ambiguity between fiction and reality that is at the heart of play as a phenomenon. Revealing how consistent and coherent play is, she ultimately shows it as a unique modality of action that serves an invaluable role in the human experience. 
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cover of Why Would Anyone Wear That?: Fascinating Fashion Facts

Why Would Anyone Wear That?

Fascinating Fashion Facts

Celia E. Stall-Meadows

Intellect Books, 2013

Bustles. Tight-laced Corsets. Caged crinolines that encased the hapless wearer in hoops of steel. Why would anyone want to wear such things? Yet, you can be certain that no lady of the Victorian upper class would choose to leave home without them—and she’d complete her look with a feather- and flower-festooned bonnet as befit the latest fashion.

With a blend of wisdom and wit, Why Would Anyone Wear That? explores extreme fashions from around the world. The Victorian era was by no means alone in strange sartorial choices. Throughout history, men and women have turned to clothing and accessories to adorn and accentuate parts of the body. Some of the fashions, like bloomers, were surprisingly functional. Others, like powdered wigs and hobble skirts, were inconvenient and uncomfortable. And a few particularly painful practices could even permanently disfigure the wearer, like brass coils worn in Burma to lengthen the neck and the custom of binding of women’s feet to fit tiny lotus slippers in Song dynasty China. Presenting dozens of the most peculiar fashions, including shoes, hats, jewelry, undergarments, and outerwear, the book provides insightful commentary, placing the garments and accessories in the proper historical, social, and cultural context.

If you’ve ever wondered why the codpiece was created or the leisure suit went out of style, this book will answer that question and many more. Fully illustrated and packed with fun facts, Why Would Anyone Wear That? introduces readers to the fascinating stories behind some of the world’s weirdest fashions.
[more]
cover of Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”

Wild Thought

A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”

Claude Lévi-Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 2021

As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection.

Controversially titled The Savage Mind when it was first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss’s work among Anglophone readers. Wild Thought rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of intellectual life in the twentieth century, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical or anthropological library.
[more]
cover of Wild and Wonderful: An Ethnography of English Naturalists

Wild and Wonderful

An Ethnography of English Naturalists

Vanessa Manceron

HAU, 2025

Examining social constructions and perceptions of nature.

In Wild and Wonderful, social anthropologist Vanessa Manceron investigates an understudied but indispensable scientific practice: getting to know and recognize the living worlds around us. Her research takes her to England, where a longstanding naturalist tradition brings together professionals, academics, and amateurs to study the world around them. Observing the natural world here is regarded not as a simple hobby, but as a necessary activity. This is participatory science, an itinerant brand of scholarship that immerses itself in a specific and delimited territory, meticulously documenting the species living there and how they develop and expand their domain or regress and disappear. Manceron leads us through woods and fields, showing us another way of looking, of paying attention to minute differences, sounds, and variations of color. Her book is both a contribution to the anthropology of science and an opportunity to take a fresh look at our relationship with nature, affording us a glimpse of another way of living and living with.
[more]
cover of Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe

Duke University Press, 2019

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared field sites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.

In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the Isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of Anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.

In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
[more]
cover of Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology

Winds from the North

Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology

Scott G. Ortman

University of Utah Press, 2012

Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize

The “abandonment” of Mesa Verde and the formation of the Rio Grande Pueblos represent two classic events in North American prehistory. Yet, despite a century of research, no consensus has been reached on precisely how, or even if, these two events were related. In this landmark study, Scott Ortman proposes a novel and compelling solution to this problem through an investigation of the genetic, linguistic, and cultural heritage of the Tewa Pueblo people of New Mexico.

Integrating data and methods from human biology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology, Ortman shows that a striking social transformation took place as Mesa Verde people moved to the Rio Grande, such that the resulting ancestral Tewa culture was a unique hybrid of ideas and practices from various sources. While addressing several long-standing questions in American archaeology, Winds from the North also serves as a methodological guidebook, including new approaches to integrating archaeology and language based on cognitive science research. As such, it will be of interest to researchers throughout the social and human sciences.

[more]
cover of Winners and Losers: Social and Political Polarities in America

Winners and Losers

Social and Political Polarities in America

Irving Louis Horowitz

Duke University Press, 1984

Leading sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz examines the response social science has made to contemporary subjects and issues: the so-called "new class" of the intelligentsia, the ecology movement, social planning, alienation, privatization, anomie, the threat of nuclear war. Horowitz evaluates as a social scientist the question of values—those disclosed through analysis, and those threatened by it—and discusses the overall political and moral impact of knowledge and methodology in social science.
[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 11

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 11

Edited by Ian M. G. Quimby

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 3

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 3

Edited by Milo M. Naeve

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 4

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 4

Edited by Richard K. Doud

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 6

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 6

Edited by Ian M. G. Quimby

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 7

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 7

Edited by Ian M. G. Quimby

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 8

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 8

Edited by Ian M. G. Quimby

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 9

Winterthur Portfolio, Volume 9

Edited by Ian M. G. Quimby

University of Chicago Press, 1978

[more]
cover of Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges

Witchcraft Dialogues

Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges

George Clement Bond

Ohio University Press, 2001

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the occult. It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of witchcraft and sorcery and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of witchcraft as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that witchcraft encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on witchcraft is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains.

The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring witchcraft as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the occult and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.
[more]
cover of Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By Raquel Romberg

University of Texas Press, 2003

Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

[more]
cover of Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison

Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust

Africa in Comparison

Peter Geschiere

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere masterfully sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh—if troubling—new way to think about intimacy itself.   
 
Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear “witchcraft of the house” above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family—and witchcraft’s transgression of them—throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships. Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science.

One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces throughout the world it so greatly affects.  
[more]
cover of Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Richard Weisman

University of Massachusetts Press, 1984

The Salem witchcraft persecutions are one of the most well-known events in history, but there is more to the story. In this book, Weisman explores the social, political, and religious implications of witchcraft. He ventures outside of the usual studies of the Salem trials to provide a comprehensive understanding of 17th-century Massachusetts witchcraft as a whole. In the first section, an attempt is made to explicate the logic and meaning of the two major interpretive frameworks of witchcraft in terms of which the category was understood by inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay. The second and third sections of this study deal with the sources of support and resistance to collective actions against witchcraft prior to the Salem trials and during the Salem trials respectively.
[more]
cover of Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld

Witchcraft, Power and Politics

Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld

Isak Niehaus, Eliazaar Mohlala, and Kally Shokaneo

Pluto Press, 2001

[more]