Society and culture: general Books

This is a book about death, comprehensive in its discussion of strategies for coping with loss and grief in rural northern Russia. Elizabeth Warner and Svetlana Adonyeva bring forth the voices of those for whom caring for their dead is deeply personal...

In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing almost its entire population with health protection coverage. However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not...

Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care after the collapse of the Congolese state in the 1980s and 1990s. This work brings into...

A rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen...

In this sensitive and personal investigation into Benin's occult world, Douglas J. Falen wrestles with the challenges of encountering a reality in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. He takes seriously his...

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency...

In parts of West Africa, some babies and toddlers are considered spirit children-nonhumans sent from the forest to cause misfortune and destroy the family. These are usually deformed or ailing infants, the very young whose births coincide with tragic...

Growing up on a secluded smuggling route along the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic, Packy Jim McGrath regularly heard the news, songs, and stories of men and women who stopped to pass the time until cover of darkness. In his early years, he...

Living Black breaks the stereotype of poor African American neighborhoods as dysfunctional ghettos of helpless and hopeless people. Despite real and enduring poverty, the community described here-the historic North End of Champaign, Illinois-has a...

Policymakers and scholars have come to realize that getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world's few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century's most formidable challenges. As these populations continue to grow,...

What happens to ethnic communities when they have two homelands to love-one real and immediate, the other distant but treasured in the heart and imagination?Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on...

Changing from child to young adult is difficult everywhere. But to experience childhood in continuous flight from conflict, then move into adolescence as a refugee in a radically different culture, is a more than usually complicated transition for teens...

From large cities to rural communities, gay men have long been impassioned pioneers as keepers of culture: rescuing and restoring decrepit buildings, revitalizing blighted neighborhoods, saving artifacts and documents of historical significance. A...

How are culturally constructed stereotypes about appropriate sex-based behavior formed? If a person who is biologically female behaves in a stereotypically masculine manner, what are the social, political, and cultural forces that may police her...

Peter F. Murphy's purpose in this book is not to shock but rather to educate, provoke discussion, and engender change. Looking at the sexual metaphors that are so pervasive in American culture-jock, tool, shooting blanks, gang bang, and others even more...

A fascinating and sophisticated exploration of cosmology, Magical Arrows connects the Western philosophical tradition with the cosmological traditions of non-Western societies, particularly those of Polynesia. Using the mythology and philosophy of the...

In this groundbreaking study, Paul Friedrich looks closely at the strong men of the Tarascan Indian village of Naranja: their leadership, friendship, kinship, and violent local politics (over a time depth of one generation), and ways to understand such...

The year was 1896, and nineteenth-century journalists called the murder of Pearl Bryan the "Crime of the Century." From the day Pearl's headless body was found to the execution of her murderers on the gallows, the details of the murder fascinated...

The story of humanity's earliest days on earth has come down to us chiefly in the tools and weapons early hominids shaped from flint. With these tools, they gained ascendancy over less dexterous beasts and began the slow conquest of their environment...

Scientists have long speculated on the impact of extreme natural catastrophes on human societies. Archeology and Volcanism in Central America provides dramatic evidence of the effects of several volcanic disasters on a major civilization of the Western...

An absorbing account of the descendants of the ancient Aztecs and of the survival of their culture into the twentieth century in the Valley of Mexico is presented in this fascinating volume. Focusing on San Francisco Tecospa-a village of some eight...

The Yanoama are one of the most numerous remaining aboriginal populations of the South American tropical forests, and their large territory constitutes a significant culture region. Although other scholars (anthropologists, geneticists, linguists) have...

Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late...

Explores the role of technology in journalism using historical narratives and empirical analysis. Argues for slower-paced journalism that prioritizes long-term collaboration and reflection to enhance journalism’s core missions and functions in...

(Italian - English Edition) Otto fratelli sotto lo stesso tetto uno di loro è intelligente, un altro abbastanza tonto.Cinque degli otto fratelli vendono davanti a casa e l'ultimo osserva tutto attentamente Chi sono?In effetti "Otto fratelli sotto lo...

Robert Weatherley examines the role of nationalism in Chinese thinking on democracy and human rights spanning four successive periods: the late Qing, the Republic, Mao's China and post-Mao China. During this time, many of the debates in China about...

This book shows how domestic political institutions and the lack of time pressure have an impact on negotiations at the WTO. It provides detailed information on WTO ministerial meetings as well as on the political economy of trade policy in the EU, U.S.,...

This book gives an account of the new possibilities and difficulties of long-term living with HIV and antiretroviral treatment. It takes an international perspective, looking at commonalities and differences across high and middle-income countries. The...

Amidst claims of threats to national identities in an era of increasing diversity, should we be worried about the upsurge in religious animosity in the United States, as well as Europe? This book explores how French society is divided along conflicts...

By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme...

Shelley Cobb explores film adaptations directed by women (often working with women screenwriters, producers, and sometimes editors) that foreground the figure of the female author. Through analysis of the films themselves, and their reception and...

Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet takes stock of where we are emotionally with regards to the Internet in social and cultural terms. Online users are switching between personal, national, international and global modes of being and...

Masculinity and Film Performance is a lively and engaging study of the complex relationship between masculinity and performance on and off screen, focusing on the performance of "male angst" in American film and popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s...

Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey...

Addressing the perennial question: why should we be moral? this book argues that we can only give a truly and morally satisfying answer to that question by radically reconfiguring our conception of the self and the way it relates to others.

The very idea of 'public service' came under fierce attack in the Thatcherite 1980s. This book takes the two key services, broadcasting and the NHS, and traces the heated debates and political pressures which radically transformed them both. It points to...

Forces for Good? explores British soldier 'herographies' to identify constructions of gender, race, class and nation and their consequences on complex, multi-dimensional operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book aims to intervene in the debates...

A discursive-sociological approach to the Europeanization of gender and other equality policies. Using largely unpublished empirical data covering twenty-nine European countries this book adopts a pluralistic perspective to explore the complex and often...

When the Berlin Wall came down suddenly in 1989, it marked a rupture of global significance. Almost overnight, November 9 became one of the most significant dates in global collective memory, as well as a signal event in German national history. This...