Book picks similar to
Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas by José E. Limón
anthropology
folklore
antropologia
anthropology-primatology
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
João Biehl - 2005
This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology’s unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. Vita’s methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.
The Forest of Symbols: Aspects Of Ndembu Ritual
Victor Turner - 1967
Mountford on Aboriginal colour symbolism; Primarly for use in cultural comparison."This is a collection of ten essays dealing with various aspects of symbolism and ritual among the Ndembu of Zambia in central Africa. . . . Using data of extraordinary richness, it presents some of the most provocative and suggestive theories recently advanced in the study of ritual behavior and symbolism. . . It provides one of the few postwar studies sure to rank as an ethnographic classic."-Africa"A collection of ten of the most brilliant and important essays on ritual yet written. These papers by Victor Turner . . . are all seminal and distinguished."-American Anthropologist
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Jonathan Gottschall - 2012
We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.
The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents
Theda Perdue - 1995
Using documents that convey Cherokee voices, government policy, and white citizens’ views, Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green present a multifaceted account of this complicated moment in American history. The second edition of this successful, class-tested volume contains four new sources, including the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 and a modern Cherokee’s perspective on the removal. The introduction provides students with succinct historical background. Document headnotes contextualize the selections and draw attention to historical methodology. To aid students’ investigation of this compelling topic, suggestions for further reading, photographs, and a chronology of the Cherokee removal are also included.
Managerial Economics: A Problem Solving Approach
Luke M. Froeb - 2007
Froeb/McCann's MANAGERIAL ECONOMICS: A PROBLEM SOLVING APPROACH, 2E covers traditional material using a problem-based pedagogy built around common business mistakes. Models are used sparingly, and then only to the extent that they help students figure out why mistakes are made, and how to fix them. This edition's succinct, fast-paced presentation and challenging, interactive applications place students in the role of a decision maker who has to identify mistakes that reduce profits, and propose solutions to bring profits back up. The lively book provides an excellent ongoing reference for students pursuing business careers. New chapters and updates highlight mistakes that precipitated the financial crisis. With MANAGERIAL ECONOMICS, 2E your students are taught to use economics to not only identify profitable decisions, but also how to implement them within an organization.
The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition
Arthur Kleinman - 1988
But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring.Before Being Mortal, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel L. Everett - 2008
Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977–with his wife and three young children–intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them. Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.
Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture
Deena Weinstein - 1991
Embraced by millions of fans, it has also attracted a chorus of critics, who have denounced it as a corrupter of youth—even blamed it for tragedies like the murders at Columbine. Deena Weinstein argues that these fears stem from a deep misunderstanding of the energetic, rebellious culture of metal, which she analyzes, explains, and defends. She interprets all aspects of the metal world—the music and its makers, its fans, its dress code, its lyrics—and in the process unravels the myths, misconceptions, and truths about an irreverent subculture that has endured and evolved for twenty years.
Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering
Sherry B. Ortner - 1999
Everest. Members of a French climbing expedition, sensitive perhaps about leaving the bodies where they could not be recovered, rolled them off a steep mountain face. One body, however, crashed to a stop near Sherpas on a separate expedition far below. They stared at the frozen corpse, stunned. They said nothing, but an American climber observing the scene interpreted their thoughts: Nobody would throw the body of a white climber off Mt. Everest.For more than a century, climbers from around the world have journ-eyed to test themselves on Everest's treacherous slopes, enlisting the expert aid of the Sherpas who live in the area. Drawing on years of field research in the Himalayas, renowned anthropologist Sherry Ortner presents a compelling account of the evolving relationship between the mountaineers and the Sherpas, a relationship of mutual dependence and cultural conflict played out in an environment of mortal risk.Ortner explores this relationship partly through gripping accounts of expeditions--often in the climbers' own words--ranging from nineteenth-century forays by the British through the historic ascent of Hillary and Tenzing to the disasters described in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. She reveals the climbers, or sahibs, to use the Sherpas' phrase, as countercultural romantics, seeking to transcend the vulgarity and materialism of modernity through the rigor and beauty of mountaineering. She shows how climbers' behavior toward the Sherpas has ranged from kindness to cruelty, from cultural sensitivity to derision. Ortner traces the political and economic factors that led the Sherpas to join expeditions and examines the impact of climbing on their traditional culture, religion, and identity. She examines Sherpas' attitude toward death, the implications of the shared masculinity of Sherpas and sahibs, and the relationship between Sherpas and the increasing number of women climbers. Ortner also tackles debates about whether the Sherpas have been spoiled by mountaineering and whether climbing itself has been spoiled by commercialism.
Early Works: Actos / Bernabe / Pensamiento Serpentino
Luis Valdez - 1990
EARLY WORKS: ACTOS, BERNABE AND PENSAMIENTO SERPENTINE is three books in one: 1) a collection of one act plays by Valdez and the famous farmworker theater, El Teatro Campesino, 2) one of the first fully realized, full-length plays by Valdez alone, and 3) an original narrative poem by Luis Valdez. In the first part are collected the original, improvised works of El Teatro Campesino that deal with the exploitation of Mexican farm labor in the California fields, the discrimination found by Mexicans in the schools, and Mexicans being turned into cannon fodder by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Bernabe is a touching, Lorcaesque poetic drama about a town fool's enchantment and ultimate unity with the earth. Pensamiento serpentino is a long, philosophical poem, based on Mayan thought and cosmology, which analyzes the cultural, religious and political circumstances of Mexican Americans and prepares a metaphysical framework for their future.
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
William Deresiewicz - 2014
His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively, and how to find a sense of purpose.Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Christopher Booker - 2004
Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.
Reading National Geographic
Catherine A. Lutz - 1993
This account of an American institution explores the possibility that the magazine, in purporting to teach about distant cultures, actually tells us much more about our own. Lutz & Collins go inside the Nat'l Geographic Society to investigate how its photographers, editors & designers select images & text to produce representations of 3rd World cultures. Thru interviews with editors, they describe the process as one of negotiating standards of balance, objectivity, informational content & visual beauty. Then, in a close reading of some 600 photos, they examine issues of race, gender, privilege, progress & modernity thru an analysis of the way such things as color, pose, framing & vantage point are used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, interviewing readers, they assess how the magazine's cultural narratives are received & interpreted, & identify a tension between the desire to know about other peoples' ways & the wish to validate middle-class American values. The result is a complex portrait of an institution & its role in promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges universal values & celebrates diversity while allowing readers to relegate non-Western peoples to earlier stages of progress. We see the magazine & the Society as a middlebrow arbiter of taste, wealth & power. We get a telling glimpse into middle-class culture & all the wishes, assumptions & fears it brings to bear on armchair explorations of the world.
The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work
Miliann Kang - 2010
Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
Marvin Harris - 1974
The author shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions. It is by isolating and identifying these conditions that we will be able to understand and cope with some of our own apparently senseless life styles. In a devastating attack on the shamans of the counterculture, the author states the case for a return to objective consciousness and a rational set of political commitments.