Book picks similar to
Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump by Kathleen M. Millar
non-fiction
anthropology
on-shelf
phding
Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story
Ruth Behar - 1993
The tale of Esperanza's extraordinary life yields unexpected and profound reflections on the mutual desires that bind together anthropologists and their "subjects."
Cultural Resource Laws and Practice (Heritage Resource Management Series)
Thomas F. King - 1998
In this third edition of Cultural Resource Laws and Practice, Thomas F. King presents clear, practical information for those who need to navigate the labyrinth of cultural resource management (CRM). He discusses the various federal, state, and local laws governing the protection of resources, how they have been interpreted, how they operate in practice, and even how they are sometimes in contradiction with each other. He provides helpful advice on how to ensure regulatory compliance in dealing with archaeological sites, historic buildings, urban districts, sacred sites and objects, shipwrecks, and archives. King also offers careful guidance through the confusing array of federal, state, and tribal offices concerned with cultural resource management.
A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an Other America
Kathleen Stewart - 1996
To Kathleen Stewart, this particular other exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women just settin' track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of just talk, Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal space on the side of the road. It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by progress.Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one occupied by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an official America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about America.
Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity
Julie Bettie - 2002
Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, Women Without Class, refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.
Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Julie Livingston - 2012
This affecting ethnography follows patients, their relatives, and ward staff as a cancer epidemic emerged in Botswana. The epidemic is part of an ongoing surge in cancers across the global south; the stories of Botswana's oncology ward dramatize the human stakes and intellectual and institutional challenges of an epidemic that will shape the future of global health. They convey the contingencies of high-tech medicine in a hospital where vital machines are often broken, drugs go in and out of stock, and bed-space is always at a premium. They also reveal cancer as something that happens between people. Serious illness, care, pain, disfigurement, and even death emerge as deeply social experiences. Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of the bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. Her ethnography is a profound reflection on the social orchestration of hope and futility in an African hospital, the politics and economics of healthcare in Africa, and palliation and disfigurement across the global south.Julie Livingston is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana and a coeditor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions and A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship."Improvising Medicine is as good as it gets. It is a book that will be read for decades to come. I have always thought that great ethnography transcends the specificities of time and place, of the particular, to offer a glimpse of the universal. This gripping book does just that, and the subtle and grounded way that it speaks to global health and debates in medical anthropology makes it a major addition to both fields."—Vinh-Kim Nguyen, M.D., author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS“Improvising Medicine is a luminous book by a highly respected Africanist whose work creatively bridges anthropology and history. A product of intense listening and observation, deep care, and superb analytical work, it will become a canonical ethnography of medicine in the global south and will have a big impact across the social sciences and medical humanities.”—João Biehl, author of Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival and Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human
Tom Boellstorff - 2008
Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe.Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group.Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.
Community and Public Health Nursing
Mary A. Nies - 1950
It shows how you, as a nurse, can take an active role in social action and health policy?- especially in caring for diverse population groups. Expert authors Mary A. Nies and Melanie McEwen discuss today's issues and trends, and describe the key issues and responsibilities of contemporary community/public health nursing.
Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society
Holly Wardlow - 2006
Focusing on Huli “passenger women,” (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of “prostitution” and “sex work,” Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated “olsem maket” (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming “wayward.” Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women’s own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
James C. Scott - 1985
Anderson, Cornell University"The book is a splendid achievement. Because Scott listens closely to the villagers of Malaysia, he enormously expands our understanding of popular ideology and therefore of popular politics. And because he is also a brilliant analyst, he draws upon this concrete experience to develop a new critique of classical theories of ideology."—Frances Fox Piven, Graduate Center of the City University of New York“An impressive work which may well become a classic.”—Terence J. Byres, Times Literary Supplement“A highly readable, contextually sensitive, theoretically astute ethnography of a moral system in change…. Weapons of the Weak is a brilliant book, combining a sure feel for the subjective side of struggle with a deft handling of economic and political trends.”—John R. Bown, Journal of Peasant Studies“A splendid book, a worthy addition to the classic studies of Malay society and of the peasantry at large…. Combines the readability of Akenfield or Pig Earth with an accessible and illuminating theoretical commentary.”—A.F. Robertson, Times Higher Education Supplement“No one who wants to understand peasant society, in or out of Southeast Asia, or theories of change, should fail to read [this book].”—Daniel S. Lev, Journal of Asian Studies“A moving account of the poor’s refusal to accept the terms of their subordination…. Disposes of the belief that theoretical sophistication and intelligible prose are somehow at odds.”—Ramachandra Guha, Economic and Political Weekly“A seminally important commentary on the state of peasant studies and the global literature…. This enormously rich work in Asian and comparative studies is… an essential contribution to participatory development theory and practice.”—Guy Gran, World DevelopmentJames C. Scott is professor of political science at Yale University.
Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty and Sexuality Among a Saharan People: Fatness and Beauty in the Sahara
Rebecca Popenoe - 2003
Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description
This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives
Ben Corbett - 2002
With personal stories that depict a people torn between following the directives of their government and finding a way to better their lot, journalist Ben Corbett gives us the daily life of many considered outlaws by Castro's regime. But are they outlaws or rather ingenious survivors of what many Cubans consider to be a forty-year mistake, a tangle of contradictions that has resulted in a strange hybrid of American-style capitalism and a homegrown black market economy. At a time when Cuba walks precariously on the ledge between socialism and capitalism, This Is Cuba gets to the heart of this so-called outlaw culture, taking readers into the living rooms, rooftops, parks, and city streets to hear stories of frustration, hope, and survival. Updated with a new preface.
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.
Culture Sketches: Case Studies in Anthropology
Holly Peters-Golden - 1993
The groups selected are peoples whose traditional cultures are uniquely their own. Each has distinctive patterns and practices; each has faced the challenge of an encroaching world, with differing results. Moreover, they often provide the prime illustrations of important concepts in introductory anthropology course including Azande witchcraft, Ju/'hoansi egalitarianism, Trobriand kula exchange, and Minangkabau matriliny. As such, this volume can stand alone as an introduction to central ethnographic concepts through these 15 societies, or serve as a valuable companion to anthropology texts. Many of the peoples presented are involved in the diaspora; some struggle to preserve old ways in new places. All sketches follow a logical, consistent organization that makes it easy for students to understand major themes such as history, subsistence, sociopolitical organization, belief systems, marriage, kinship, and contemporary issues.
The Murder of Sheree
Wayne B. Miller - 1996
At its heart, it's a powerful and compelling account of how one of the most infamous and shocking murders in Australian history came to happen - and how justice came to be done. But it's also a forensic examination of how the crime would shatter the lives of dozens of people, some of whom had never met six-year-old Sheree Beasley. Wayne Miller's newspaper reporting on the case earned him a Walkley Award for excellence in journalism. With The Murder of Sheree he went much deeper, his enduring relationship with those most deeply affected by the murder revealing just how much devastation such a crime can cause. Miller's writing is as clear, passionate and compelling as ever, and The Murder of Sheree remains one of the finest books of its kind ever published in Australia. Brad Newsome, Fairfax Media
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
Pierre Clastres - 1972
"Determined not to let the slightest detail" escape him or to leave unanswered the many questions prompted by his personal experiences, Clastres follows the Guayaki in their everyday lives.Now available for the first time in a stunningly beautiful translation by Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians radically alters not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was awarded the Alta Prize in nonfiction by the American Literary Translators Association.