Cultural studies: customs and traditions Books

In 1801, some five years after Robert Burns' death, nine of his friends sat down to dinner in what is now known as Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his extraordinary life and to give thanks for his friendship. Over the years the informal theme from...

Toques, mittens and scarves are all associated with northern climates, but the quintessential garment of Canadian knitting is surely the bulky and distinctly patterned West Coast cardigan. In the early twentieth century, Indigenous woolworkers on...

With the appearance of the demonic Christmas character Krampus in contemporary Hollywood movies, television shows, advertisements, and greeting cards, medieval folklore has now been revisited in American culture. Krampus-related events and parades occur...

Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima...

What makes Canada a different kind of society from the United States? In this book-length essay, Philip Resnick argues that, in more ways than one, Canada has been profoundly marked by its European origins. This is most apparent where the European...

It's not your father's Ireland. Not anymore.In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal, three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage, becoming the only country in the world to pass such a...

Throughout history, the mystery of death has captivated artists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, and theologians. This eerie chronology ventures to the borderlines of science and sheds light into the darkness, exploring such diverse topics as the...

Two volumes in one!This is a complete, two-volume set of one of the greatest books on 19th century Japanese history and culture. Though Lafcadio Hearn went on to write a dozen more books on Japan, this collection of first impressions remains his most...

An affordable version of the classic 1906 essay on tea drinking and aesthetics.This brief but classic essay on tea drinking, its history, restorative powers, and rich connection to Asia places "teaism" at the very center of Japanese life, shaping...

"This new and valuable book delves into the 'interior' experience of voodoo, as opposed to the usual outsider focus on ritual and cosmology. In telling the story of her own initiation and painstaking education in voodoo, Beaubrun takes us into the...

This book teaches the two fundamental secrets to tea as practiced in ancient China-technique and taste. These exemplify some of the basic concepts of the philosophy of tea, which greatly enhances tea enjoyment. Not only an exhaustive source of tea...