Results by title

28 books match the query 'Acculturation'

cover of Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity

The Nisei Generation in Hawaii

Eileen H. Tamura

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Wartime hysteria over "foreign" ways fueled a movement for Americanization that swept the United States during and after World War I. Eileen H. Tamura examines the forms that hysteria took in Hawai'i, where the Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) were targets of widespread discrimination.

Tamura analyzes Hawaii's organized effort to force the Nisei to adopt "American" ways, discussing it within the larger phenomenon of Nisei acculturation. While racism was prevalent in "paradise," the Nisei and their parents also performed as active agents in their own lives, with the older generation attempting to maintain Japanese cultural ways and the younger wishing to become "true Americans." Caucasian "Americanizers," often associated with powerful agricultural interests, wanted labor to remain cheap and manageable; they lobbied for racist laws and territorial policies, portending the treatment of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. mainland during World War II.

Tamura offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts as well as statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.

[more]
cover of An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant

An American in the Making

The Life Story of an Immigrant

Kellman, Steven G

Rutgers University Press, 2009

At the turn of the twentieth century, M. E. Ravage set off in steerage for America, one of almost two million Jews who, like millions of others from eastern and southern Europe, were lured by tales of worldly success. Seventeen years after arriving on Ellis Island, Ravage had mastered a new language, found success in college, and engagingly penned in English this vivid account of the ordeals and pleasures of departure and assimilation.

Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and introduction that place the memoir within historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of "America" and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.

[more]
cover of Another's Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies

Another's Country

Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies

Edited by J.W. Joseph and Martha Zierden

University of Alabama Press, 2001

An engaging look at the rise and fall of cultural diversity in the colonial South and its role in shaping a distinct southern identity
 
The 18th-century South was a true melting pot, bringing together colonists from England, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and other locations, in addition to African slaves—all of whom shared in the experiences of adapting to a new environment and interacting with American Indians. The shared process of immigration, adaptation, and creolization resulted in a rich and diverse historic mosaic of cultures.
 
The cultural encounters of these groups of settlers would ultimately define the meaning of life in the nineteenth-century South. The much-studied plantation society of that era and the Confederacy that sprang from it have become the enduring identities of the South. A full understanding of southern history is not possible, however, without first understanding the intermingling and interactions of the region’s eighteenth-century settlers. In the essays collected here, some of the South’s leading historical archaeologists examine various aspects of the colonial experience, attempting to understand how cultural identity was expressed, why cultural diversity was eventually replaced by a common identity, and how the various cultures intermeshed.
 
Written in accessible language, this book will be valuable to archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. Cultural, architectural, and military historians, cultural anthropologists, geographers, genealogists, and others interested in the cultural legacy of the South will find much of value in this book.
[more]
cover of At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

At the Hearth of the Crossed Races

A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

Melinda Marie Jetté

Oregon State University Press, 2015

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.  

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.
[more]
cover of Colonizing Trick: National Culture And Imperial Citizenship In Early America

Colonizing Trick

National Culture And Imperial Citizenship In Early America

David Kazanjian

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America

The idea that “all men are created equal” is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire-—one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations.

Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.–Mexico War and the Yucatán’s Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.
[more]
cover of Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity

Culture, Globalization and the World-System

Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity

Anthony D. King

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

A foundational work in the study of the globalization of culture.

First published in 1991, Culture, Globalization and the World-System is one of the inaugural books discussing the increasing tendency of cultural practices to cross national boundaries. Now widely available in the United States for the first time and updated with a new preface, these influential essays by a distinguished group of scholars and cultural critics lay the groundwork for a vital and exciting new field of inquiry.

Culture, Globalization and the World-System views culture through different prisms and categories—including race, gender, ethnicity, class, and nation. The contributors consider how socially organized systems of meaning are produced and represented. Drawing from sociology, art history, film studies, and anthropology, these essays—many of them representing their authors’ only treatment of globalization—provide paradigms for understanding cultures and the representation of identity in “the world as a single place.” Contributors: Barbara Abou-El-Haj, SUNY, Binghamton; Janet Abu-Lughod, New School for Social Research; Stuart Hall, Open U, UK; Ulf Hannerz, U of Stockholm, Sweden; Roland Robertson, U of Pittsburgh; John Tagg, SUNY, Binghamton; Maureen Turim, U of Florida, Gainesville; Immanuel Wallerstein, SUNY, Binghamton; Janet Wolff, U of Rochester.
[more]
cover of Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium

Cultures in Contact

World Migrations in the Second Millennium

Dirk Hoerder

Duke University Press, 2011

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis.

Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.

[more]
cover of Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy

Custom and Confrontation

The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy

Roger M. Keesing

University of Chicago Press, 1992

"Anthropologists and students of anthropology may read this book because it is a superior ethnography, detailed and enriched by theoretical insights. But at the heart of this book is a moral take, a simple but powerful story about an indigenous people who were wronged, who resisted for more than 100 years, and who may yet prevail. This message, ultimately, lends the book its true meaning and value."—William Rodman, Anthropologica

"A major contribution to the ethnography and history of Malaita and Melanesia, and to the growing literature on cultural resistance. But above all, his humane and painful analysis of the meeting of peoples living in different worlds and constructing their agendas and moralities on incommensurate—and apparently equally arbitrary—principles, represents a major contribution and challenge to anthropological thought, addressing the basic issue of what it is to be human."—Fredrik Barth
[more]
cover of Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After

Exchanging the Past

A Rainforest World of Before and After

Bruce M. Knauft

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.

In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.
[more]
cover of From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico: Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico

Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire

David Charles Wright-Carr

University Press of Colorado, 2023

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico compares the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the evangelization of Mesoamerica, offering novel perspectives on the historical processes involved in the spread of Christianity. Combining concepts of empire and globalization with the notion of religion from a postcolonial perspective, the book proposes the method of analytical comparison as a point of departure to conceptualize historical affinities and differences between the ancient Roman Empire and colonial Mesoamerica.

An international team of specialists in classical scholarship and Mesoamerican studies engage in an interdisciplinary discussion involving ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, iconography, and philology. Key themes include the role of religion in processes of imperial domination; religion’s use as an instrument of resistance or the imposition, appropriation, incorporation, and adaptation of various elements of religious systems by hegemonic groups and subaltern peoples; the creative misunderstandings that can arise on the “middle ground”; and Christianity’s rejection of ritual violence and its use of this rejection as a pretext for inflicting other kinds of violence against peoples classified as “barbarian,” “pagan,” or “diabolical.”

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico presents a sympathetic vantage point for discussing and attempting to decipher past processes of social communication in multicultural contexts of present-day realities. It will be significant for scholars and specialists in the history of religions, ethnohistory, classical antiquity, and Mesoamerican studies.

Publication supported, in part, by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Contributors: Sergio Botta,Maria Celia Fontana Calvo, Martin Devecka, György Németh, Guilhem Olivier, Francisco Marco Simón, Paolo Taviani, Greg Woolf, David Charles Wright-Carr, Lorenzo Pérez Yarza
Translators: Emma Chesterman, Benjamin Adam Jerue, Layla Wright-Contreras
[more]
cover of Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom

Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities

Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom

Marshall D. Sahlins

University of Michigan Press, 1981

Hawaiian culture as it met foreign traders and settlers is the context for Sahlins's structuralist methodology of historical interpretation

[more]
cover of Histories of the Present: People and Power in Ecuador

Histories of the Present

People and Power in Ecuador

Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten

University of Illinois Press, 2011

The wellspring of critical analysis in this book emerges from Ecuador's major Indigenous Uprising of 1990 and its ongoing aftermath in which indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian action transformed the nation-state and established new dimensions of human relationships. The authors weave anthropological theory with longitudinal Ecuadorian ethnography to produce a unique contribution to Latin American studies.
[more]
cover of Hope's Promise: Religion and Acculturation in the Southern Backcountry

Hope's Promise

Religion and Acculturation in the Southern Backcountry

S. Scott Rohrer

University of Alabama Press, 2013

This eloquent study describes the complex process of assimilation that occurred among multi-ethnic groups in Wachovia, the evangelical community that settled a 100,000-acre tract in Piedmont North Carolina from 1750 to 1860. It counters commonplace notions that evangelicalism was a divisive force in the antebellum South, demonstrating instead the ability of evangelical beliefs and practices to unify diverse peoples and foster shared cultural values.


In Hope's Promise, Scott Rohrer dissects the internal workings of the ecumenical Moravian movement at Wachovia—how this disparate group of pilgrims hailing from many countries (Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, England) and different denominations (Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Anglican) yielded their ethnicities as they became, above all, a people of faith. By examining the "open" farm congregations of Hope, Friedberg, and Friedland, Rohrer offers a sensitive portrayal of their evangelical life and the momentous cultural changes it wrought: the organization of tight-knit congregations bound by "heart religion;" the theology of the new birth; the shape of religious discipline; the sacrament of communion; and the role of music. Drawing on courthouse documents and church records, Rohrer carefully demonstrates how various groups began to take on traits of the others. He also illustrates how evangelical values propelled interaction with the outside world—at the meetinghouse and the frontier store, for example—and fostered even more collective and accelerated change.


As the Moravians became ever more "American" and "southern," the polyglot of ethnicities that was Wachovia would, under the unifying banner of evangelicalism, meld into one of the most sophisticated religious communities in early America.
[more]
cover of Humane Development: Participation and Change Among the Sadama of Ethiopia

Humane Development

Participation and Change Among the Sadama of Ethiopia

John H. Hamer

University of Alabama Press, 1987

Seeks to show that the Sadama are a people quite adaptable to change on their own terms
 
Humane Development seeks to show that the Sadama are a people quite adaptable to change on their own terms. According to their narrative history and from what is know from documents in recent times, individuals have often taken risks that have sometimes favored and at other times gone against the enhancement of their lifestyle.
 
Certainly people can, as the experience of the Sadama shows, effectively participate in change at the local level. They bring a vast experience to the challenge of choosing, and also a knowledge of the relationship between their environment, tools, and organization that has enabled them to survive through the millennia. When people are permitted to draw upon their heritage in making choices, they approach the changing situation with confidence. More­over, the opportunity to choose among alternatives, rather than being subjected to an externally made choice, maximizes the possibility for innovation.
 
[more]
cover of Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019)

Images at War

Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019)

Serge Gruzinski

Duke University Press, 2001

“If colonial America was the melting pot of modernity, it was because it was also a fabulous laboratory of images. . . . Just as much as speech and writing, the image can be a vehicle for all sorts of power and resistance.” So writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to Images at War, his striking reinterpretation of the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Concentrating on the political meaning of the baroque image and its function within a multicultural society, Gruzinski compares its ubiquity in Mexico to our modern fascination with images and their meaning.
Although the baroque image played a decisive role in many arenas, especially that of conquest and New World colonization, its powerful resonance in the sphere of religion is a focal point of Gruzinski’s study. In his analysis of how images conveyed meaning across linguistic barriers, he uncovers recurring themes of false images, less-than-perfect replicas, the uprooting of peoples and cultural memories, and the violence of iconoclastic destruction. He shows how various ethnic groups—Indians, blacks, Europeans—left their distinct marks on images of colonialism and religion, coopting them into expressions of identity or instruments of rebellion. As Gruzinski’s story unfolds, he tells of Aztec idols, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, conquistadors, Franciscans, and neoclassical attempts to repress the baroque. In the final chapter he discusses the political and religious implications of contemporary imagery—such as that in Mexican soap operas—and speculates about the future of images in Latin America.
Originally written in French, this work makes available to an English audience a seminal study of Mexico and the role of the image in the New World.
[more]
cover of Imagined Globalization

Imagined Globalization

Néstor García Canclini

Duke University Press, 2014

A leading figure in cultural studies worldwide, Néstor García Canclini is a Latin American thinker who has consistently sought to understand the impact of globalization on the relations between Latin America, Europe, and the United States, and among Latin American countries. In this book, newly available in English, he considers how globalization is imagined by artists, academics, migrants, and entrepreneurs, all of whom traverse boundaries and, at times, engage in conflicted or negotiated multicultural interactions.

García Canclini contrasts the imaginaries of previous migrants to the Americas with those who live in transnational circuits today. He integrates metaphor and narrative, working through philosophical, anthropological, and socioeconomically grounded interpretations of art, literature, crafts, media, and other forms of expression toward his conclusion that globalization is, in important ways, a collection of heterogeneous narratives. García Canclini advocates global imaginaries that generate new strategies for dealing with contingency and produce new forms of citizenship oriented toward multiple social configurations rather than homogenization. This edition of Imagined Globalization includes a significant new introduction by George Yúdice and an interview in which the cultural theorist Toby Miller and García Canclini touch on events including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

[more]
cover of Immigrants in the Far West: Historical Identities and Experiences

Immigrants in the Far West

Historical Identities and Experiences

Jessie L. Embry

University of Utah Press, 2014

This book is a collection of essays showcasing cutting-edge research and innovative approaches that a new generation of scholars is bringing to the study of immigration in the American West. Often overlooked in general studies of immigration, the western United States has been and is an important destination for immigrants. The unique combination of ethnicities and races in the West, combined with political and economic peculiarities, has given the region an immigration narrative that departs significantly from that of the East and Midwest. This volume explores facets of this narrative with case studies that reveal how immigration in the American West has influenced the region’s development culturally, economically, socially, and politically. Contributors offer historical narrative and theory to illuminate factors that have galvanized immigration and the ways that agency, cultural resources, institutions, and societal attitudes have shaped immigrant experiences. With chapters written by scholars from multiple fields, the book’s interdisciplinary framework will make it of interest to readers from a variety of backgrounds. 
[more]
cover of Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean

Islands at the Crossroads

Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean

L. Antonio Curet

University of Alabama Press, 2011

A long sequence of social, cultural, and political processes characterizes an ever-dynamic Caribbean history. The Caribbean Basin is home to numerous linguistic and cultural traditions and fluid interactions that often map imperfectly onto former colonial and national traditions. Although much of this contact occurred within the confines of local cultural communities, regions, or islands, they nevertheless also include exchanges between islands, and in some cases, with the surrounding continents. recent research in the pragmatics of seafaring and trade suggests that in many cases long-distance intercultural interactions are crucial elements in shaping the social and cultural dynamics of the local populations.
 
The contributors to Islands at the Crossroads include scholars from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe who look beyond cultural boundaries and colonial frontiers to explore the complex and layered ways in which both distant and more intimate sociocultural, political, and economic interactions have shaped Caribbean societies from seven thousand years ago to recent times.
 
Contributors
Douglas V. Armstrong / Mary Jane Berman / Arie Boomert / Alistair J. Bright / Richard T. Callaghan / L. Antonio Curet / Mark W. Hauser / Corinne L. Hofman / Menno L. P. Hoogland / Kenneth G. Kelly / Sebastiaan Knippenberg / Ingrid Newquist / Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo / Reniel Rodríquez Ramos / Alice V. M. Samson / Peter E. Siegel / Christian Williamson
[more]
cover of Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands

Kinship to Kingship

Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands

By Christine Ward Gailey

University of Texas Press, 1987

Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women’s subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society.

Using a Marxist-feminist approach, Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women’s status in one society over three hundred years, from a period when kinship relations organized property, work, distribution, consumption, and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands, Tonga, in the South Pacific, the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world.

This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology, political science, sociology, and women’s studies, this work is a major contribution to social history.

[more]
cover of La Harpe's Post: Tales of French-Wichita Contact on the Eastern Plains

La Harpe's Post

Tales of French-Wichita Contact on the Eastern Plains

George H. Odell

University of Alabama Press, 2002

This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.

Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.

Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.

[more]
cover of Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage

Monsters and Revolutionaries

Colonial Family Romance and Metissage

Françoise Vergès

Duke University Press, 1999

In Monsters and Revolutionaries Françoise Vergès analyzes the complex relationship between the colonizer and colonized on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine, and psychology, Vergès constructs a political and cultural history of the island’s relations with France. Woven throughout is Vergès’s own family history, which is intimately tied to the history of Réunion itself.
Originally settled by sugar plantation owners and their Indian and African slaves following a seventeenth-century French colonial decree, Réunion abolished slavery in 1848. Because plantation owners continued to import workers from India, Africa, Asia, and Madagascar, the island was defined as a place based on mixed heritages, or métissage. Vergès reads the relationship between France and the residents of Réunion as a family romance: France is the seemingly protective mother, La Mère-Patrie, while the people of Réunion are seen and see themselves as France’s children. Arguing that the central dynamic in the colonial family romance is that of debt and dependence, Verges explains how the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are seen as gifts to Réunion that can never be repaid. This dynamic is complicated by the presence of métissage, a source of anxiety to the colonizer in its refutation of the “purity” of racial bloodlines. For Vergès, the island’s history of slavery is the key to understanding métissage, the politics of assimilation, constructions of masculinity, and emancipatory discourses on Réunion.
[more]
cover of Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i

Paradise Remade

The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i

Elizabeth Buck

Temple University Press, 1994

This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893.

Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment.

Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.

[more]
cover of Population, Contact, and Climate in the New Mexican Pueblos

Population, Contact, and Climate in the New Mexican Pueblos

Ezra B. W. Zubrow

University of Arizona Press, 1974

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.
[more]
cover of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture

Rain Forest Literatures

Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture

Lucia Sa

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Recaptures native literatures of the Amazonian rain forest

Native texts of the Amazonian rain forest have been viewed as myth or ethnographic matter—the raw material of literature—rather than as significant works in their own right. But in this unprecedented study, Lúcia Sá approaches indigenous texts as creative works rather than source material.

Disclosing the existence and nature of long-standing, rich, and complex Native American literary and intellectual traditions that have typically been neglected or demeaned by literary criticism, Rain Forest Literatures analyzes four indigenous cultural traditions: the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak. In each case, Sá considers principal native texts and, where relevant, their publication history. She offers a historical overview of the impact of these texts on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures, detailing comparisons with native sources and making close analyses of major instances, such as Mário de Andrade’s classic Macunaima (1928) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1986). A redrawing of the lineage of Brazilian and Spanish-American literatures, this book advocates an understanding of the relationships between cultures as a process of “transculturation” rather than “acculturation,” emphasizing the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance.
[more]
cover of The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians

The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians

William W. Newcomb, Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 1956

In 1951 and 1952, William W. Newcomb, Jr. visited the Delaware people of Oklahoma in order to write an ethnographic study of the tribe. He discusses the origins and linguistic affiliations of the Delaware, their social systems, economic and material culture, and religion and folklore, as well as the process of acculturation and assimilation that took place after European contact.
[more]
cover of The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

The Libertine Colony

Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

Doris Garraway

Duke University Press, 2005

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean.

Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

[more]
cover of Themes of Indigenous Acculturation in Northwest Mexico

Themes of Indigenous Acculturation in Northwest Mexico

Edited by Thomas B. Hinton and Phil C. Weigand

University of Arizona Press, 1981

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.
[more]
cover of When Worlds Collide: Hunter-Gatherer World-System Change in the 19th Century Canadian Arctic

When Worlds Collide

Hunter-Gatherer World-System Change in the 19th Century Canadian Arctic

T. Max Friesen

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Interactions between societies are among the most powerful forces in human history. However, because they are difficult to reconstruct from archaeological data, they have often been overlooked and understudied by archaeologists. This is particularly true for hunter-gatherer societies, which are frequently seen as adapting to local conditions rather than developing in the context of large-scale networks. When Worlds Collide presents a new model for discerning interaction networks based on the archaeological record, and then applies the model to long-term change in an Arctic society.

Max Friesen has adapted and expanded world-system theory in order to develop a model that explains how hunter-gatherer interaction networks, or world-systems, are structured—and why they change. He has utilized this model to better understand the development of Inuvialuit society in the western Canadian Arctic over a 500-year span, from the pre-contact period to the early twentieth century.

As Friesen combines local archaeological data with more extensive ethnographic and archaeological evidence from the surrounding region, a picture emerges of a dynamic Inuvialuit world-system characterized by bounded territories, trade, warfare, and other forms of interaction. This world-system gradually intensified as the impacts of Euroamerican colonial activities increased. This intensification, Friesen suggests, was based on pre-existing Inuvialuit social and economic structures rather than on patterns imposed from outside. Ultimately, this intense interacting network collapsed near the end of the nineteenth century. When Worlds Collide offers a new way to comprehend small-scale world-systems from the point of view of indigenous people. Its approach will prove valuable for understanding hunter-gatherer societies around the globe.
[more]