"Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one’s identity and worldview," Enrique Salmón writes in Eating the Landscape. Traversing a range of cultures, including the Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Rarámuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, the book is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmón weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional indigenous foodways—from the cultivation of crops to the preparation of meals—are rooted in a time-honored understanding of environmental stewardship.
In this fascinating personal narrative, Salmón focuses on an array of indigenous farmers who uphold traditional agricultural practices in the face of modern changes to food systems such as extensive industrialization and the genetic modification of food crops. Despite the vast cultural and geographic diversity of the region he explores, Salmón reveals common themes: the importance of participation in a reciprocal relationship with the land, the connection between each group’s cultural identity and their ecosystems, and the indispensable correlation of land consciousness and food consciousness. Salmón shows that these collective philosophies provide the foundation for indigenous resilience as the farmers contend with global climate change and other disruptions to long-established foodways. This resilience, along with the rich stores of traditional ecological knowledge maintained by indigenous agriculturalists, Salmón explains, may be the key to sustaining food sources for humans in years to come.
As many of us begin to question the origins and collateral costs of the food we consume, Salmón’s call for a return to more traditional food practices in this wide-ranging and insightful book is especially timely. Eating the Landscape is an essential resource for ethnobotanists, food sovereignty proponents, and advocates of the local food and slow food movements.
Although alcohol is generally forbidden in Muslim countries, beer has been an important part of Egyptian identity for much of the last century. Egypt’s Stella beer (which only coincidentally shares a name with the Belgian beer Stella Artois) became a particularly meaningful symbol of the changes that occurred in Egypt after British Occupation.
Weaving cultural studies with business history, Egypt’s Beer traces Egyptian history from 1880 to 2003 through the study of social, economic, and technological changes that surrounded the production and consumption of Stella beer in Egypt, providing an unparalleled case study of economic success during an era of seismic transformation. Delving into archival troves—including the papers of his grandfather, who for twenty years was CEO of the company that produced Stella—Omar D. Foda explains how Stella Beer achieved a powerful presence in all popular forms of art and media, including Arabic novels, songs, films, and journalism. As the company’s success was built on a mix of innovation, efficient use of local resources, executive excellence, and shifting cultural dynamics, this is the story of the rise of a distinctly Egyptian “modernity” seen through the lens of a distinctly Egyptian brand.
In an era when human lives are increasingly measured and weighed in relation to the medical and scientific, notions of what is “normal” have changed drastically. While it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as “normal,” the concept continues to haunt us in other ways. In The End of Normal, Lennard J. Davis explores changing perceptions of body and mind in social, cultural, and political life as the twenty-first century unfolds. The book’s provocative essays mine the worlds of advertising, film, literature, and the visual arts as they consider issues of disability, depression, physician-assisted suicide, medical diagnosis, transgender, and other identities.
Using contemporary discussions of biopower and biopolitics, Davis focuses on social and cultural production—particularly on issues around the different body and mind. The End of Normal seeks an analysis that works comfortably in the intersection between science, medicine, technology, and culture, and will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, bodily practices, disability, science and medical studies, feminist materialism, psychiatry, and psychology.
Explores questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Canadian cultural production
What does it mean to be at home? In a critical engagement with notions of territory, identity, racial difference, separatism, multiculturalism, and homelessness, this book delves into the question of what it means to belong—in particular, what it means to be at home in Canada. Ephemeral Territories weaves together many narratives and representations of Canadian identity—from political philosophy and cultural theory to art and films such as Srinivas Krishna’s Lulu, Clement Virgo’s Rude, and Charles Biname’s Eldorado—to develop and complicate familiar views of identity and selfhood.
Canadian identity has historically been linked to a dual notion of culture traceable to the French and English strains of Canada’s colonial past. Erin Manning subverts this binary through readings that shift our attention from nationalist constructions of identity and territory to a more radical and pluralizing understanding of the political. As she brings together issues specific to Canada (such as Quebec separatism and Canadian landscape painting) and concerns that are more transnational (such as globalization and immigration), Manning emphasizes the truly cross-cultural nature of the problems of racism, gender discrimination, and homelessness. Thus this impassioned reading of Canadian texts also makes an important contribution to philosophical, cultural, and political discourses across the globe.The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups. The apparent inability of the international community to respond firmly and purposefully to violent conflicts can be attributed partially to a general confusion and misunderstanding of the root causes of such conflicts. In some cases, the international community argued that violent conflicts could be attributed to irreconcilable ethnic differences, which, like earthquakes, are impossible to prevent or control.
At other times, the argument was that such conflicts were the results of evil leaders capable of engineering mass violent acts. Ethnic Conflict presents an interdisciplinary and comparative effort to explain the root causes of ethnic conflicts in terms of political, economic, and social common denominators that characterize all such conflicts. It seeks to dispel misplaced assumptions about violent domestic conflicts and, by providing a clearer picture of the mechanics of such conflicts, it hopes to assist in the process of conflict resolution and prevention.
Hispanic or Latino? Mexican American or Chicano? Social labels often take on a life of their own beyond the control of those who coin them or to whom they are applied. In Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives, Suzanne Oboler explores the history and current use of the label “Hispanic” as she illustrates the complex meanings that ethnicity has acquired in shaping our lives and identities.
Exploding the myth of cultural and national homogeneity among people of Latin American descent, Oboler interviews members of diverse groups who have traditionally been labeled “Hispanic” and records the many different meanings and social values they attribute to this label. For example, a person of Mexican descent has a different historical relationship with the United States and a different cultural background than an individual of Puerto Rican or Brazilian descent. The different meanings and social values those interviewed attribute to the label "Hispanic" also correspond to their gender and social class position, including racial prejudices and values stemming from their countries of origin. Though we have witnessed in recent years the fading of the idealized image of U.S. society as a melting pot, we have also realized that the possibility of recasting it in multicultural terms is problematic. Oboler discusses the historical process of labeling groups of individuals, illustrating how labels affect the meaning of citizenship and the struggle for full social participation in the United States. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives aims to understand the role ethnic labels play in our society and brings us closer toward actualizing a society that values cultural diversity.Jews have always played an important role in the generation of culture in Latin America, despite their relatively small numbers in the overall population. In the early days of cinema, they served as directors, producers, screenwriters, composers, and broadcasters. As Latin American societies became more religiously open in the later twentieth century, Jewish characters and themes began appearing in Latin American films and eventually achieved full inclusion. Landmark films by Jewish directors in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, which are home to the largest and most influential Jewish communities in Latin America, have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim.
Evolving Images is the first volume devoted to Jewish Latin American cinema, with fifteen critical essays by leading scholars from Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Israel. The contributors address transnational and transcultural issues of Jewish life in Latin America, such as assimilation, integration, identity, and other aspects of life in the Diaspora. Their discussions of films with Jewish themes and characters show the rich diversity of Jewish cultures in Latin America, as well as how Jews, both real and fictional, interact among themselves and with other groups, raising the question of how much their ethnicity may be adulterated when adopting a combined identity as Jewish and Latin American. The book closes with a groundbreaking section on the affinities between Jewish themes in Hollywood and Latin American films, as well as a comprehensive filmography.
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