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Subject Area: Anthropology
Konye, Paul2007 0-7734-5253-2 268 pages
This study makes a distinction between modern Nigerian art music, which evolved in the twentieth century and emphasizes Western music notation, and the previously existing art music tradition in Nigeria before the advent of missionaries in the nineteenth century. Specifically, this research examines the social, political, and cultural factors involved in the evolution and practice of art music in Nigeria. This book contains 4 color photographs.
Varenne, Hervé
2009 0-7734-5023-8 324 pages
[Note: This book is a reprint of the text of Vol 109, Number 7, July 2007 of the Teachers College Record, Teachers College, Columbia University]
This work adds to the scholarship in the field by exploring educational processes in the broadest manner and from a variety of disciplinary orientations. At its core is the challenge it issues: what sort of research should one conduct if s/he believes the commonly held idea that education is a broader process that it is made to be when one takes schooling as a paradigmatic institution of education?
Morrow, John A.
2008 0-7734-5119-6 332 pages
This study explores the indigenous presence in the works of Rubén Darío, one of the most important and influential literary figures in the Spanish-speaking world. The work uncovers indigenous thematic, symbolic, mythological, and stylistic influences in Darío’s poetry, and reveals his deep social concerns along with the duality of his poetic inspiration, both European and Amerindian.
Bratton, Angela
2010 0-7734-3597-2 232 pages
This study explores the formation of gender identity and the sexual practices of teens in Kumasi, Ghana within the context of the growing emphasis on formal schooling. Direct interviews with students, teachers and members of the community offer a rich variety of data that allows for important conclusions about shifting conceptions of family, education, production and reproduction.
Hall, Raymond
2008 0-7734-4929-9 140 pages
One of only a few studies using ethnographic research to document, analyze, and present the traditional culture of Afro-Mexicans in Tamiahua, Veracruz, Mexico.
Wardle, Huon
2000 0-7734-7552-4 256 pages
This ethnography of social life in Kingston, Jamaica, is also a study of the relationship between two major, often conflictive, forces in current cultural experience, community and cosmopolitanism. People from the Caribbean – subject to slavery, the plantation economy, and labor migration – have experienced one of the longest exposures to a global political and economic order of any social grouping. For centuries, Jamaicans have lived at a crossroads of transnational economic social and cultural dynamics. The Jamaican social milieu is characterized by massively heterogeneous and creative cultural activity, violent social fragmentation and individuation, as well as a celebration of the role of geographical mobility in the establishment of personality. A central proposition in this book is that Jamaicans in the capital, Kingston, are still living out the aesthetic and moral consequences and contradictions of the Enlightenment and modernity. The author draws a parallel between Jamaican understandings of the self, and the late philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The ethnographic material presented here, derived from two years fieldwork in Kingston, suggest that Jamaicans understand themselves as global citizens. This sense of self can be identified across multiple contexts – oral performance, music, kinship and friendship, economics and politics. In light of Jamaican cultural experience, the book argues for a reframing of ethnographic practice as an explicitly cosmopolitan cultural practice.
Durst, Maribeth
1992 0-7734-9634-3 136 pages
A descriptive analysis of the results of a multi-method research study which utilized both qualitative and quantitative techniques to study the student culture at Saint Leo College. Describes the college student culture in detail: its mores and customs, its beliefs, values, and attitudes, its pattern of daily life, its developmental phases, and the interpersonal relationships among members of the culture. Although the methodology used in the study is common among anthropological researchers, it has rarely been used to study college students. Those taking or teaching anthropology or sociology can benefit from the description of methodology employed in the study. Also, the campus-specific data can be used to examine college policies and practices.
Lyon, Stephen M.
2004 0-7734-6496-4 272 pages
Asymmetrical power relationships are found throughout Pakistan’s Punjabi and Pukhtun communities. These relationships must be examined as manifestations of cultural continuity rather than as separate structures. The various cultures of Pakistan display certain common cultural features which suggest a re-examination of past analytical divisions of tribe and peasant societies. This book looks at the ways power is expressed, accumulated and maintained in three social contexts: kinship, caste, and political relationships. These are embedded within a collection of ‘hybridising’ cultures. Socialisation within kin groups provides the building blocks for Pakistani asymmetrical relationships, which may be understood as a form of patronage. As these social building blocks are transferred to non-kin contexts, the patron/client aspects are more easily identified and studied. State politics and religion are examined for the ways in which these patron/client roles are enacted on much larger scales but remain embedded within the cultural values underpinning those roles.
Westphalen, Linda
2012 0-7734-1593-9 480 pages
This book examines life history writing by Australian Aboriginal women in the context of ongoing negotiations about one's status and claims to country. It uses a methodological combination of literary analysis, history and anthropology to draw out the distinctive cultural heritages held in palimpsest within texts.
Whelehan, Patricia
2001 0-7734-7604-0 248 pages
This work is essentially an ethnography, written and researched by an anthropologist. As such, the use of participant observation, in-depth interviews and a holistic, relativistic, culture-based approach provide a perspective not usually found in the literature on prostitution. The daily, nonwork lives of prostitutes are explored, showing their commonness, humanity and connections with the ‘straight’ world as ordinary people. By getting deep, rich data through the use of participant observation and ethnographic approach, it serves to address myths, and challenge stereotypes about sexuality, women, and prostitution.
Kressel, Gideon M.
2010 0-7734-3738-X 360 pages
This study in economic anthropology focuses on micro-changes in economic and social orders in Eastern Europe, mainly in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, of the 1990s.
Arora, Daljeet
2008 0-7734-4796-2 308 pages
This work argues for the importance of studying rural India that is witnessing significant economic, political and social changes. Dr. Arora demonstrates for a village in Punjab, a north-west province of India, its complex embedded nature within regional, national and at times international network of relationships.
The author suggests that while Punjab gained considerably with changes in agricultural practices, little attention has been paid on ‘unintended consequences’ of change in relationships of production in the province and the role ‘social actors’ have played in developing adaptation strategies.
Webster, Gary
2000 0-7734-3121-7 84 pages
V. Gordon Childe was a major figure in prehistoric archaeology from 1930-50s. These extended poems are reflections on, distillations, reinterpretations, and re-imaginings of a selection of Childe’s scholarly writings, to engender transparency, lyricism, and irony as well as sound archaeological argumentation. Gary Webster is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University – Mont Alto. This is his first book of poetry. He is better known for his many publications on the archaeology of ancient Sardinia, which include his most recent book, A Prehistory of Sardinia 2300-500 BC (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
Edgerton, Robert B.
2005 0-7734-6287-2 304 pages
This book reviews the many conflicting theories about human nature, those that stress our dark side, and those that emphasize our goodness. It then explores actual human behavior in societies around the world beginning with earliest and smallest known societies, foraging people such as the !Kung San Pygmies, then various kinds of farming people, and finally, city dwellers. It also focuses on human behavior during the 20th Century providing detailed examples of human kindness and inhumanity. It also examines human behavior under the most terrible kind of stress imaginable--deadly, prolonged famine. How people respond to famine around the world is described with an emphasis on the killer famine that starved much of Ireland from 1845 to 1850. Many Irish people died of starvation but unlike other parts of the world where starvation led the strong to kill and eat the weak, Irish culture forbade such killing and in reality it did not take place. Finally, the book summarizes the evidence, then concludes that even though people have biological urges that lead toward anti-social behavior, human rule systems can control most of these anti-social predispositions.
Mendoza, Marcela
2002 0-7734-7080-8 248 pages
Mendoza presents an ethnographic description of the Western Toba, an indigenous population of around 1,200 living in Formosa Province, Argentina. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, she analyzes the past and present organization of their society, focusing on how it has been affected by changes in the seasonal movements of bands. She argues that despite widespread cultural change among these people, their egalitarian concept of leadership still persists.
Gardner, Peter M.
2000 0-7734-7819-1 280 pages
Dr. Peter Gardner’s ethnographic study of Paliyans is one of the most complete and up-to-date accounts of a South Asian hunting and gathering people. It covers the spectrum of Paliyan culture, from subsistence to medicine and word play, and it details the beliefs and practices which allow Paliyans to achieve their extreme egalitarianism and non-violence. Brief case studies throughout the account not only bring the people to life, they give the reader a sense of the rich, complex texture of Paliyan existence. The study uses recent perspectives and modes of analysis, situating the foragers in their time and place and employing tools such as fuzzy-set analysis. An appendix includes a topical Paliyan lexicon.
Berezkin, Y. E.
2001 0-7734-3164-0 564 pages
Egan, Sean J.
2002 0-7734-7171-5 252 pages
In addition to examining their games and pastimes, this study examines the Celtic psyche and culture. It examines all the Celtic peoples: Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Brittany, Basque Region, Icelandic Connections; children’s Celtic games; and dance and music. This book fills a gap in the recreation literature of the warrior people known as the Celts and knits together the common threads that exist between the various Celtic nations.
Bower, John R. F.
2002 0-7734-7221-5 176 pages
This study is a comparison of the Palaeoindian and the archaic communities of north America and those of the final Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic of northern Eurasia.
Fabrega, Horacio
2012 0-7734-4512-9 1060 pages
This is a truly groundbreaking work that exemplifies cutting edge scholarship. It shows that there were conditions of psychiatric interest in pre-historical societies. Did some cavemen experience something that we today would call psychiatric conditions? Can these disturbances grow out of mystical experiences that one would call otherworldly, or interpersonal circumstances? Would this apply to situations where these do not exist in any way that would be recognizable by contemporary standards?
Boland, Tom
2012 0-7734-4548-X 440 pages
What are the origins and purposes of social critique? Rather than use critique as a mode of investigating social phenomenon, this book analyses critique as a social phenomenon. Critique is both constitutive of modernity and exceedingly diverse, and not only that but widely taken for granted in scholarly communities. Herein, the resources of historical sociology and anthropology are used in order to gain perspective on critique as something culturally specific to modernity. Based on this, I analyze critique as moving force in history, part of the dynamic of capitalism and consumerism, a recurring trope in the media from all any political positions, and finally as a common-place even of popular culture. Finally, I turn to some key literary writers who have explored critique as a social phenomenon within their work, thus providing a reflexive perspective on critique as a lived experience.
Sidky, H.
2003 0-7734-6781-5 506 pages
This book provides a focused critique of the currently fashionable literary/interpretive approaches in cultural anthropology and their challenge to science, scientific anthropology, and disciplinary origins and traditions. It takes on issues that must be addressed in light of what is shown to be the interpretivists’ unrelenting misrepresentation of the anthropological enterprise, science, and scientific paradigms in anthropology. The issues addressed encompass a number of highly significant intellectual/philosophical/theoretical questions with far-reaching implications for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. The challenge to disciplinary origins and traditions is emphatically addressed on empirical, theoretical, and epistemological grounds and in the context of the overall intellectual history and development of American anthropology. No other study engages the anti-science perspective in such an emphatic, uncompromising, jargon-free manner.
DeSoto, Hermine G.
1992 0-7734-1938-1 480 pages
Contributes to the development of research and theory in social anthropology generally and particularly in issues such as gender, class, poverty, power, dissent, kinship, ideology, linguistics, development anthropology, and urban anthropology. Geographical areas covered are Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Each contribution is original, offering the reader new cultural insights on an individual basis.
Bartelt, Guillermo
2023 1-4955-1097-2 164 pages
"[I]t will be argued in the present study that Sandoz's so-called "Indian voice" should indeed be regarded primarily as a stylistic device which employs lexicalization, calquing, figurative language, and clause chaining to indulge in the creative impulse called "defamiliarization." This technique emboldens an author to select language structures to intentionally disrupt conventionalized or habitualized meanings and thus restore freshness to textual perception. First coined by Viktor Shklovsky, a critic of the Russian formalist tradition, defamiliarization was understood as the main goal in art and poetry that intended to transform the familiar or mundane into the unfamiliar and strange in order to offer new perspectives." -Guillermo Bartelt (Introduction)
Berner, Robert L.
1999 0-7734-8039-0 164 pages
The study of contemporary American Indian writers is complicated by problems in definitions which critics, scholars, teachers and editors so far have not addressed adequately. The subject of this study is not the traditional mythology, folklore, and song of particular tribes, but the literary uses of this material, particularly in the latter half of this century and particularly by Indian writers. The questions are basic: 1) What is an Indian writer? 2) What are the legitimate literary uses of Indians and their culture? 3) Can an American Indian literary tradition be defined? And 4) What is the relation of writing by Indians to American literature as a whole? Beside several non-Indian writers (Edwin Corle, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Charles L. McNichols, Jerome Rothenberg) the book deals with several representative Indian writers (Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Thomas King, Adrian C. Louis, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch) and also cites Paula Gunn Allen, Jim Barnes, Peter Blue Cloud, Diane Glancy, Joy Harjo, Geary Hobson, Linda Hogan, Duane Niatum, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Wendy Rose.
Keller II, Raymond Andrew
2012 0-7734-3072-5 316 pages
This book addresses the history of a small community of the African Diaspora mostly overlooked: the Afro-Zulians as the descendants of the first blacks brought over to the Sur del Lago Maracaibo region in Venezuela by the Basque-French slave trader Jean de Chourio in 1722. Despite attempts by Creole elites to strip away their African identity, it shows that they remained true to their African roots precisely because of the geographical remoteness of their settlements. The author links them to the Imbangala peoples of pre-colonial Angola, but shows how they adapted to a greater multicultural Venezuelan historical and social context through acculturation.
Salmin, Anton Kirillovich
2011 0-7734-1546-7 412 pages
An encyclopedia that covers a scientific study of the religions and customs of the Chuvash. This book is written in Russian.
Kapitza, P.L.
1999 0-7734-3258-2 276 pages
Of all global problems world population growth is the most significant. The growth of the number of people expresses the sum outcome of all economic, social and cultural activities that comprise human history. For a phenomenological description of the global demographic process the author developed an original non-linear mathematical model for explanation of the global demographic process.
Williams, Melvin D.
2002 0-7734-7123-5 280 pages
Bartelt, Guillermo
2022 1-4955-0993-1 132 pages
Dr. Guillermo Bartelt uses sociolinguistic analysis in his study of American Indian English. In this book, he focuses specifically on the powwow: "As a participant observer, I found powwows to offer fascinating discourse data for ethnographic and linguistic interpretations." He proceeds by, "analyzing the cognitive and social functions of discourse and semiotics in the context of powwow events in rural Oregon and Washington as well as urban Southern California."
Bennion, Janet
2008 0-7734-4939-6 248 pages
Highlights many of the inherent problems of polygyny, but challenges the media-driven depiction of plural marriage as uniformly abusive and harmful to women, criticizing techniques used by state and federal governments used to raid entire communities as they did in the 1950s and in April of 2008. This book contains six black and white photographs and two color photographs.
Maxwell-Stuart, Peter G
2016 1-4955-0444-1 245 pages
Herodotos’ reputation as the teller of tall stories has undergone revision over the years. In India, he said, there were ants almost as large as dogs. The story was repeated many times by Greek authors and then by Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Persian writers, before finding its way into Mediaeval and early Renaissance European literature. Attempts to rationalise the tale have centred upon the ants themselves. By the mid-twentieth century the puzzle appeared to be regarded as settled. However, based on studies of the etymology of various languages spoke in those area, and on anthropological investigations the book offers a new explanation of Herodotos’s story based on historical context rather than fantasy.
Shepherd, Gregory J.
2002 0-7734-7125-1 164 pages
Burris-Kitchen, Deborah
1997 0-7734-8617-8 224 pages
This is the only study that looks at female gang members in a small to medium size urban area, noting the lack of all-female gangs, conflicting views on the equal status of females in gender-mixed groups, continuing to investigate the level at which Black females are involved in the informal economy, and the possible time dimension aspects of Merton's innovator.
Westendorp, Grard
2006 0-7734-5682-1 336 pages
What sets mankind apart from all other species is not the naked skin, the upright stance, the use of tools or the capacity for thought and emotion. Not even the ability to speak makes the difference. The true ‘sapiens factor,’ the element which turned ape into man, was the transition from verbal communication to verbal thought.
Our forebears started out like any other great ape. Even the development of speech did not help to improve life much compared to that of other hominoids. But around 40,000 years ago, human cultural evolution exploded. Something very impressive takes place within a time span that would normally pass unnoticed. Compared with the preceding pace of evolution, there is an explosion of innovation. A new factor is at play here – what is the ‘sapiens factor’? Available data strongly indicate that what moved our forebears away from all other mammals, including other hominids, was not their use of words to communicate, but that they used them in a new way. Our ancestors moved the handy denominators for reality, which words are, from the realm of communication into the realm of thought.
Shaoming, Zhou
2009 0-7734-3890-4 296 pages
This work is the first detailed Western study of contemporary funeral rituals in villages in north China. At a time of great social transformation in China, this work examines funeral rituals, encompassing the rites of transformation and the rites of disposal.
Owen, Hilary
1996 0-7734-8849-9 240 pages
These readings of modern Portuguese, Brazilian, and Portuguese African texts articulate a challenge by drawing on different theories of how gender, ethnicity and class relate to the production and reception of culture. Consequently, the collection juxtaposes and connects new readings of well-known literary figures such as Ariano Suassuna, Agustina Bessa Luís, Hélia Correia, Henrique Teixeira de Sousa and Clarice Lispector with readings of "popular culture" as represented by samba, circo-teatro, images of women in advertising and oral narratives from the southeast of Brazil. The diversity of the critical approaches adopted demonstrates both the potential for new "coalitional" connections and the demands imposed by deconstructing the Lusist canon.
Colavito, Maria M.
1995 0-7734-8854-5 292 pages
The nature/nurture controversy, sometimes known as the evolution/environment controversy, seems to have trickled down into the information systems of the vernacular world as an unfortunate rift between duelling scholarly camps. The Biocultural Paradigm is offered as a model that transcends both camps, by recognizing the neuro-biological origins of human development and by delineating exactly how and when sociological influences can and cannot affect those neuro-biological invariants. The Biocultural Paradigm is established by using existing discoveries in evolutionary neuro-biology and Selection Theory. It is composed of five proto-cultural models ("biocultures") which correspond to the five evolutionary centers of our neurological structures.
Perea-Fox, Susana
2011 0-7734-1609-9 208 pages
Narrated by Carlos Quilaqueo, and meticulously transcribed and analyzed by Perea-Fox and Iriarte, this collection of Mapuche stories is an invaluable resource for Mapuche cultural, literary, and anthropological studies.
This text is the most complete collection and first direct transcription of Mapuche oral histories, myths, and legends.
Loewen, Gregory V.
2007 0-7734-5508-6 252 pages
Why do people, in our modern age of rationality, science, and materialism, commence the formation and celebration of the irrational, the unscientific, and the immaterial? What anxieties drive us to escape the cold light of the empirical? What desires are left unfulfilled by the premises and promises of technocracy and market capital? What beliefs are unbelievable, and what do we wish to avoid remembering at the cost of forgetting the history of ourselves? This book explores these questions with a combination of analyses of structures which impose themselves upon our thinking and create for us templates of prejudice and spaces of judgment, and a variety of qualitative case studies taken from many of the somewhat occlusive and tricky fjords of human experience.
Baptiste, Espelencia Marie
2013 0-7734-3598-0 228 pages
This book examines how an education system can provide mechanisms for nation building This work exposes how these mechanisms influence imagining, building, and enacting nation in a country with no native population It also examines how its colonially introduced ethnic groups proudly proclaim their differences in language and history.
Pascual Soler, Nieves
2012 0-7734-3930-7 224 pages
This text provides a new framework for examining the relationship between voluntary hunger as an emotion and the written voice.
Cox, James L.
1991 0-88946-072-8 261 pages
Provides a theological, historical, and methodological analysis of the impact of Christian missions on indigenous cultures by examining Alaska as a case study. Demonstrates that Protestant missionaries carried a "gospel" of Western civilization intended to Americanize the native peoples of Alaska. Describes approaches taken among the Inupiat and Yuit peoples (translated: the "real people.")
Leavitt, Gregory C.
2005 0-7734-6171-X 300 pages
This study is a sociological critic of Darwinian social science (human sociobiology), i.e., the application of Darwinian natural selection theory to complex human social behavior. More specifically, the manuscript examines Darwinian social science through the substantive topic of incest and inbreeding avoidance, a behavior forwarded by human sociobiology as the best example of sociocultural behavior naturally selected in humans. The sociobiology approach is now commonly presented in public forums and media leaving the impression on the general public that sociobiology and its many claims are scientific fact.
Bartelt, Guillermo
2022 1-4955-0992-3 166 pages
Using discourse analysis with a focus on literary style, Dr. Guillermo Bartelt offers an examination and discussion of N. Scott Momaday's literary works. "The examination of literary style presents a unique opportunity for the interdisciplinary exploration of the intersection of language and culture." In the course of his discussion, Bartelt shows that, "instead of deliberate obfuscation, of which Momaday has often been accused in the critical literature...[there is] a conscious decision on his part to offer an enhanced ability to present a native perspective."
Kamlian, Jamail A.
2018 1-4955-0641-X 212 pages
This book discusses the phenomenon of Pagsanda, an institution in the Philippines. Pagsanda is an institution that has its own merits and demerits. While Pagsanda provides the ordinary Tausug easy and available access to loans that are not readily available in formal financial institutions like banks, hard evidence would show that Pagsanda as presently practiced in Sulu could perpetuate peasant indebtedness; promote feudalism; fuel clan feuds; cause displacement; contribute to the proliferation of loose firearms; aggravate a violent electoral process; hamper the delivery of goods and services by the local government units; and expose or push the Tausug to other forms of criminality.
Mukuna, Kazadi wa
2003 0-7734-6690-8 274 pages
This interdisciplinary study sheds light on the communal creative process of music and discusses the process of music change in Bumba-meu-Boi, and provides an example of exo-semantic analysis in the quest for the truth of this folk drama. It argues that Bumba-meu-Boi, sheds light on 18th century Brazil, and reveals existing levels of interaction between classes (master-slave, oppressor-oppressed) on sugar can plantations and mills. A sociologist perspective demonstrates that the structure of the Bumba-meu-Boi reflects a similar network of relations as they exist in communities where it is performed. The study contains a glossary, comprehensive bibliography, and a reproduction of the entire play.
Avorgbedor, Daniel K.
2003 0-7734-6821-8 464 pages
These essays present new critical perspectives on the dynamic configurations of music, religion (indigenous, Islam, Christian), and ritual in contemporary African societies. Examples demonstrate issues and processes of accommodation, the construction of religious, ethnic, and cultural identities, and local articulations of gender and the aesthetic. Examples from African-American Pentecostalism, independent Christianity, Tumbuka healing, Yoruba kingship ritual, Senegalese Sufism, etc confirm both common and divergent patterns in African cultural traditions.
Kazakevich, Gennadiy
2016 1-4955-0432-8 176 pages
This fascinating study is devoted to the Iron Age Celtic presence in the territory of ancient Scythia and European Sarmatia (today’s Ukraine and nearby regions of Moldova, Russia and Belorus). It provides careful attention to the Celtic-Slavic relationship as it impacts cultural influences and adaptations of the indigenous populations of that time and area.
Salamone, Frank A.
2008 0-7734-5230-3 188 pages
This work examines the experience of Italians as Italian-Americans in Rochester, New York, following World War II. Overall, the work explores the meaning of ethnicity and sheds light on anthropological, sociological, and historical theories of ethnicity and its use to advance the goals of a people. This book contains eight black and white photographs.
Fishbane, Simcha
2022 1-4955-0876-5 96 pages
Dr. Simcha Fishbane describes the history and background of Jewish mourning rituals. It includes insights from history, culture, and important Rabbis.
Fishbane, Simcha
2018 1-4955-0686-X 60 pages
Dr. Simcha Fishbane examines the topic of menstruation and menstrual blood in the Torah. The study focuses on the views of Rabbis and other members of rabbinical culture in the second century C.E. Dr. Fishbane examines the relevant passages from the Torah on menstruation and menstrual blood and interprets them.
Neethling, Bertie
2005 0-7734-6167-1 277 pages
This is the first comprehensive monograph on naming in the Xhosa speaking community in South Africa. Although onomastic studies in South Africa have a fairly long history, the emphasis has been mainly on toponyms, and then not on data from the indigenous African communities. With the coming into being of the Names Society of Southern Africa in 1980, as well as its official mouthpiece, the journal Nomina Africana, the discipline received a very necessary stimulus. Various contributions on Xhosa naming did appear regularly in the journal, but episodically. This work brings together all available scholarly research on Xhosa naming as well as recent research by the author. It not only covers the well-known categories such as anthroponyms and toponyms, but also lesser-known topics such as the names of minibus taxis and month names. The work also incorporates other recent and relevant onomastic studies in particularly Southern African communities. This book should be of great value to names scholars working in Southern Africa, as well as further afield. Naming in Africa often takes on other dimensions than in western society, and this work illustrates this well regarding Xhosa society. The socio-onomastic approach should also interest anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, cultural studies experts, and even the general public who wish to learn more about Xhosa society as reflected through naming.
Fishbane, Simcha
2018 1-4955-0685-1 52 pages
Dr. Fishbane examines the treatment of prostitutes in the Babylonian Talmud, focusing on their status in the community. The book will consider cases cited in the Talmud looking at various mentions of prostitutes and prostitution, with a consideration of the different treatment given to Israelite women versus gentile women.
Forsyth, Dan W.
2002 0-7734-6923-0 484 pages
Fernández, Óscar
2016 1-4955-0447-6 256 pages
This book describes the acute structural plight of the Colombian Department of Chocó on the Pacific Coast. This Afro-Colombian, indigenous and mixed ancestry region is located in one of the richest areas of biodiversity remaining in the world and consequently gives rise to antagonistic confrontations due to the asymmetrical confluence of cultures in Colombian society.
Burton, Frances D.
1992 0-7734-9537-1 308 pages
This anthropological inquiry into the nature of non-human primates considers group social dynamics, organization and behavior as local phenomena with transcendent properties. Rejects the neo-Darwinian view that social behavior is subject to natural selection and that genetic determinism underlies manifest patterns. New models are introduced concerning: where behavior lies (Paterson, Hornshaw); what the meaning of proximal domain of behavior is to the actors (Burton); problems of epistemology within primate studies that have sent primatologists off track (Chan, Hornshaw, Burton, Zeller); nature of interaction among young female orangutans and the history of the development of solitary patterns (Galdikas); and how patterns of communication code intricate, complex information of social significance (Burton, Zeller). Includes maps, photographs, glossary of technical terms, and a joint bibliography with chapter numbers.
Watts, Linda K.
2001 0-7734-7660-1 244 pages
The author conducted ethnolinguistic fieldwork at Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, focussed on the folk semantics, linguistic composition and reported situational use of Zuni relational terminology. A social semiotic analysis relates these ethnolinguistic data to a revisionist, cultural model of Zuni social organization. Rather than a situation of wholesale cultural and linguistic loss due to acculturative influences such as Kroeber had asserted in 1917, this study finds a high degree of persistence in traditional patterns of Zuni social integration as reflected in the contemporary meanings and use of Zuni relational terminology.
Wortham, Robert A.
1999 0-7734-8025-0 174 pages
Loewen, Gregory V.
2005 0-7734-6238-4 388 pages
This book is a study in the sociology of knowledge. Specifically, a study of how anthropologists over the previous forty years have constructed anthropological knowledge. Interpretation of this material takes place within the discourses of the anthropology of knowledge and education.
Anthropologists say that ways of thinking about anthropological knowledge conflict at the theoretical level but do not conflict in practice. Practice is defined as fieldwork and teaching. here, theory is felt only indirectly. Various tensions follow from this understanding. They include those between subject and object, positivism and post-positivism, value and validity, field and archive, and cultural relativism versus scientific knowledge.
The concept which mediates these tensions is that of the field. Fieldwork is seen by anthropologists as an experience with both epistemological and ethical implications. Ethically, the field supports a certain manner of living and outlook on humanity. Yet, epistemologically, the field is divisive because it is cast as the promotional agent for various kinds of method, theory, and reflective analyses. These analyses include a belief in value relativism in concert with a scientific notion of validity. For example, if it were not for the fundamental tools of positivism in anthropology, anthropologists felt that anthropological knowledge might be seen as idiosyncratic. In their search for human knowledge, anthropologists are united by their methods and ethics. They are divided, however, by their theories. These divisions and unities are inherited in the culture of anthropology. Although anthropologists understand different cultures’ values to be equal, they suggest that ways of knowing another culture through anthropology are not equally valid.
Theoretical conflicts are also produced in institutions. These are seen as major influences on the ‘look’ of anthropology at various times and places. Departments, publishers, students and teachers are all influences on anthropological knowledge construction.
Anthropological knowledge is also seen as being constructed at a personal level. Anthropologists felt that the concept of vocation in the individual’s life-narrative as an anthropologist is important to this construction. Anthropology is seen as a calling or assignation. As well, the purpose of anthropological knowledge is seen as an ethical precept. The sanctity of field experiences for these anthropologists brings them together ethically but divides them epistemologically.
Ionesov, Vladimir I.
2002 0-7734-7290-8 316 pages
Schade, Aaron
2006 0-7734-5526-4 344 pages
Northwest Semitic syntax has been explored extensively on word, phrasal, and clausal levels. This has contributed much to our understanding of the languages in this linguistic family. There have also been numerous studies on micro level and isolated occurrences of literary devices within the corpus of texts. This work examines Northwest Semitic inscriptional material from the 10th – 5th centuries BCE and includes writings predominantly from the Phoenician, Moabite, and Hebrew languages. The inscriptions are analyzed based on a text level approach, and it will be demonstrated how clauses and sentences work together to form larger syntactic units. Additionally, the literary structure of the texts will be defined and the function of the macro level literary devices will be explained. As these larger levels of literary devices can only be detected when viewed in combination with the syntax of the compositions as a whole, the two approaches will be explained independently, yet cooperatively. Thus, the syntax and literary structure of the texts will compliment each other, as the syntax is the vehicle that conveys the literary devices within the inscriptions.
Hodges, Matthew
2008 0-7734-5285-0 692 pages
This book advances an anthropological understanding of time and history. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and the work of anthropologists Alfred Gell and Nancy Munn, the author presents the carefully documented case for the importance of time studies to anthropology.
The argument is channelled through an ethnographic account of the rapid and far-reaching changes affecting life in a Mediterranean French village. These are driven by the regional political economy, and heritage tourism in particular; but in an original analysis of such processes of modernization, the book traces their impact in terms of the lived experience of time.
Experiences of tradition, epoch, cultural rupture and remembrance, mythologizations of history, and the local “politics of time”, are brought clearly into focus; as is the place of heritage tourism, local history, and kinship in mediating disjuncture. A sensitive portrait emerges of how people inhabit the uncertain timescapes of modernity, in a wide range of everyday scenarios.
The book develops the notion of “living traditions” as a dynamic form of cultural continuity; and fashions a layered, integrated model of experience, time and history informed by Deleuze’s philosophy of flux. Discussion extends to pragmatist and phenomenological theories of time, and the work of philosophers such as MacIntyre. Generously illustrated, the book is notable for illuminating this complex field in clear, evocative language.
Comitas, Lambros
2022 1-4955-1014-X 400 pages
"This 'unintended ethnography' includes analysis by Professor Lambros Comitas of excerpts from interviews conducted during the 1970s in Greece with hashish users and non-users, and also excerpted words and phrases offering definitions and additional details to aid comprehension." -Note from the Editor
Bartelt, Guillermo
2024 1-4955-1272-X 140 pages
"After surveying selected animistic breath-wind constructs in Native America, this study focuses on the variant articulated by the Lakota, many of whom continue to participate in traditional religious observances such as the Sweat Lodge, a purification ceremony, the Sun Dance, a world renewal celebration, and the yuwipi, a shamanic curing ritual." -Dr. Guillermo Bartelt, "Introduction"
Aixelá-Cabré, Yolanda
2018 1-4955-0693-3 208 pages
The objective of this study is to provide a cartography of the most relevant ways of managing cultural diversity and of the most widely extended discourses about religious, ethnic, and cultural otherness in Europe. It reviews notions such as diversity, national identities, multicultural demands, democratic systems, and European challenges and the strong colonial continuities in the construction of otherness, and in the management of present-day coexistence in Western Europe.
Souza, Margaret
2009 0-7734-4688-5 452 pages
An interdisciplinary work that examines the representation of death in traditional and “new” media, explore the meaning of assassination and suicide in a post 9/11 context, and grapple with the use of legal and medical tools that affect the quest for a “good death.” The contributors treat their interrelated topics from the perspective of their expertise in medicine, law, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, religion, philosophy, literature, media, and visual culture.
Inbody, Joel
2022 1-4955-0974-5 256 pages
From the Introduction (pg. 9):
"In this book I have made an effort to reconstruct what inequality looked like in three ancient agricultural societies: the kingdoms of Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt. The inequality I consider in these societies was not defined in terms of gold, silver, or property, but in terms of a person's diet and command of excess food and drink. In simple terms, I will argue that elites in these agricultural societies enjoyed an upper-class lifestyle because they served food and drink offerings to gods. Those offerings were produced primarily by non-elites, who believed gods dined on them But the truth is that elites divided food and drink offerings among themselves. Religion disguised the fact that feasting rituals for gods amounted to a redistribution of resources."
Steckley, John
2017 1-4955-0600-2 264 pages
This work focuses on the first Catholic Catechism written by Jesuit Father Jean de Brebeuf in the Wendat (Huron) language. This work focuses on the translating successes, mistakes, and cultural challenges that went into the creation of this important piece of religious and cultural history. Dr. Steckley seeks to show how Jesuit missionaries introduced Catholicism to the Wendat tribes of New France.
Fishbane, Simcha
2017 1-4955-0540-5 100 pages
Author examines girl's puberty rites or rather the lack of such rites in rightwing Orthodox circles. The historical beginnings and cultural impact of the Bat Mitzvah and its development in Israel and the United States are explained.
Watts, Linda K.
2011 0-7734-1559-9 192 pages
An innovative examination of the “Life Map”, which conceives a new method for the practice of psychology.
Hall, Van-Anthoney Lawrence
2016 1-4955-0413-1 184 pages
This study critically examines Black aesthetic theory. The sociopolitical sensibilities of Black aesthetics may be viewed as a response or a critical “talking back” to the power structures in society that consciously perpetuate a dominant narrative of the beautiful or what it means to be beautiful. Ultimately it attempts to situate Black aesthetics in the context of education as a language through which to make meaning of the term social justice.
Baali, Fuad
2008 0-7734-5120-X 152 pages
This book illustrates the social structure of Iraqi society and the development of the national personality by dealing mainly with the great influence of Bedouin values upon the behavior and conduct of the sedentary population over the centuries and in the present. This book contains one black and white map.
Fishbane, Simcha
2018 1-4955-0684-0 52 pages
Dr. Fishbane suggests that in the patriarchal world of the Torah and Talmud, society perceives women as being liminal in its social order or on the fringe of the male centered society and this excluded from most central rituals. Women are regarded as threats to the patriarchal social structure if they do not act in accordance to traditional gender roles. Such women are regarded as witches or sorceresses.
Edgerton, Robert B.
2007 0-7734-5337-7 128 pages
This work, written by an accomplished anthropologist, provides vivid accounts of the horrific practice of torture from around the world, along with explanations from the torturers as to how they could carry out such acts and accounts from victims of torture, detailing their experiences. The result is a book that offers readers a glimpse of what may be mankind’s most appalling behavior. Readers should be cautioned that their reading will like be a painful one.
Appell-Warren, Laura
2014 0-7734-0053-2 292 pages
A comprehensive analysis of how the concept of personhood has been used by anthropologists and how it should be used in the future…This book is a very valuable contribution to the study of the history of anthropological thought, as well as a tremendously useful guide for scholars and students who want to use the concept of personhood analytically in their own work.