In these stimulating essays, Alan Dundes presents a history of psychoanalytic studies of folklore while also showing how folklore methodology can be used to clarify and validate psychoanalytic theory. Dundes’ work is unique in its symbolic analysis of the ordinary imagination. His data are children’s games, folktales, everyday speech, cultural metaphors for power and prestige, and rituals associated with childbirth.
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 Passion to Preserve explores this authentic and complex dimension of gay men’s lives by profiling early and contemporary preservationists from throughout the United States, highlighting contributions to the larger culture that gays are exceptionally inclined to make.
"A tour de force, a remarkable narrative of spiritual and political development. . . . [Cohen's] oft unanswered, and unanswerable, questions, his views of Muir's spiritual, intellectual, and political growth are insightful, challenging, and new. They deserve an audience with scholars and Muir devotees."—Shirley Sargent, Pacific Historian
In this powerful study, Michael Cohen captures as never before the powerful consciousness, vision, and legacy of the pioneering environmentalist John Muir. Ultimately, Cohen stresses, this ecological consciousness would generate an ecological conscience.
It was no longer enough for Muir to individually test and celebrate his enlightenment in the wild. His vision, he now felt, must lead to concrete action, and the result was a protracted campaign that stressed the ecological education of the American public, governmental protection of natural resources, the establishment of the National Parks, and the encouragement of tourism.
Anyone interested in environmental studies, in American history and literature, or in the future of our natural heritage will be drawn by the very bracing flavor of his wilderness odyssey, evoked here by one of his own—a twentieth-century mountaineer and literary craftsman.
Vansina’s scope is breathtaking: he reconstructs the history of the forest lands that cover all or part of southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Congo, Zaire, the Central African Republic, and Cabinda in Angola, discussing the original settlement of the forest by the western Bantu; the periods of expansion and innovation in agriculture; the development of metallurgy; the rise and fall of political forms and of power; the coming of Atlantic trade and colonialism; and the conquest of the rainforests by colonial powers and the destruction of a way of life.
“In 400 elegantly brilliant pages Vansina lays out five millennia of history for nearly 200 distinguishable regions of the forest of equatorial Africa around a new, subtly paradoxical interpretation of ‘tradition.’” —Joseph Miller, University of Virginia
“Vansina gives extended coverage . . . to the broad features of culture and the major lines of historical development across the region between 3000 B.C. and A.D. 1000. It is truly an outstanding effort, readable, subtle, and integrative in its interpretations, and comprehensive in scope. . . . It is a seminal study . . . but it is also a substantive history that will long retain its usefulness.”—Christopher Ehret, American Historical Review
Scholars who study peasant society now realize that peasants are not passive, but quite capable of acting in their own interests. But, do coherent political ideas emerge within peasant society or do peasants act in a world where elites define political issues? Peasant Intellectuals is based on ethnographic research begun in 1966 and includes interviews with hundreds of people from all levels of Tanzanian society. Steven Feierman provides the history of the struggles to define the most basic issues of public political discourse in the Shambaa-speaking region of Tanzania. Feierman also shows that peasant society contains a rich body of alternative sources of political language from which future debates will be shaped.
In The People and the King, John Leddy Phelan reexamines a well-known but long misunderstood event in eighteenth-century Colombia. When the Spanish colonial bureaucratic system of conciliation broke down, indigenous groups resorted to armed revolt to achieve their political ends.
As Phelan demonstrates in these pages, the crisis of 1781 represented a constitutional clash between imperial centralization and colonial decentralization. Phelan argues that the Comunero revolution was not, as it has often been portrayed, a precursor of political independence, nor was it a frustrated social upheaval. The Comunero leaders and their followers did not advocate any basic reordering of society, Phelan concludes, but rather made an appeal for revolutionary reform within a traditionalist framework.
For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers.
This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the world.
People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys, photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann’s five years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth, urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.
Homer’s Iliad is often considered a poem of blunt truthfulness, his characters’ motivation pleasingly simple. A closer look, however, reveals a complex interplay of characters who engage in an awful lot of lies. Beginning with Achilles, who hatches a secret plot to destroy his own people, Mark Buchan traces motifs of deception and betrayal throughout the poem. Homer’s heroes offer bluster, their passion linked to and explained by their lack of authenticity. Buchan reads Homer’s characters between the lies, showing how the plot is structured individual denial and what cannot be said.
This second edition of Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest includes Stern’s 1992 reflections on the ten years of historical interpretation that have passed since the book’s original publication—setting his analysis of Huamanga in a larger perspective.
“This book is a monument to both scholarship and comprehension, comparable in its treatment of the indigenous peoples after the conquest only to that of Charles Gibson for the Aztecs, and perhaps the best volume read by this reviewer in several years.”—Frederick P. Bowser, American Historical Review
“Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest is clearly indispensable reading for Andeanists and highly recommended to ethnohistorians generally. In technical respects it is a job done right, and conceptually it stands out as a handsome example of anthropology and history woven into one tight fabric of inquiry.”—Frank Salomon, Ethnohistory
Since its founding three hundred years ago, the city of Saint Petersburg has captured the imaginations of the most celebrated Russian writers, whose characters map the city by navigating its streets from the aristocratic center to the gritty outskirts. While Tsar Peter the Great planned the streetscapes of Russia’s northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the “Petersburg myth” in Russian culture, takes issue with the city’s premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century.
“Petersburg”/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. It begins with new readings of the novel—as a detective story inspired by bomb-throwing terrorists, as a representation of the aversive emotion of disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text—stressing the novel’s phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburg’s narrator, the rest of this volume (and the companion Web site, stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/) explores the city from vantage points that have not been considered before—from its streetcars and iconic art-nouveau office buildings to the slaughterhouse on the city fringes. From poetry and terrorist memoirs, photographs and artwork, maps and guidebooks of that period, the city emerges as a living organism, a dreamworld in flux, and a junction of modernity and modernism.
Last seen in the 1880s, cougars (also known as pumas or mountain lions) are making a return to the plains regions of the Midwest. Their comeback, heralded by wildlife enthusiasts, has brought concern and questions to many. Will the people of the region make room for cougars? Can they survive the highly altered landscape of the Midwest? Is there a future for these intrepid pioneers if they head even farther east?
Using GIS technology, and historical data, among many other methods, Phantoms of the Prairie takes readers on a virtual journey, showing how the cougar might move over the landscape with minimal human contact. Drawing on his years of research on cougars, John W. Laundré offers an overview of what has been, what is, and what might be regarding the return of cougars to their ancestral prairie homeland.
As the United States nears the twenty-first century, many of its citizens are troubled by the sense that something is wrong. Even though it is argued that our national situation is good, there persists the widespread feeling that somehow we are on the wrong social and historical track. It is the contention of this book that much of this dis-ease stems from our construction of a phony culture, a culture dominated by the value of the confidence man and woman.
Winner, Book Award of Merit, Wisconsin Historical Society, Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
Internationally renowned for its pioneering role in the ecological restoration of tallgrass prairies, savannas, forests, and wetlands, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum contains the world’s oldest and most diverse restored ecological communities. A site for land restoration research, public environmental education, and enjoyment by nature lovers, the arboretum remains a vibrant treasure in the heart of Madison’s urban environment.
Pioneers of Ecological Restoration chronicles the history of the arboretum and the people who created, shaped, and sustained it up to the present. Although the arboretum was established by the University of Wisconsin in 1932, author Franklin E. Court begins his history in 1910 with John Nolen, the famous landscape architect who was invited to create plans for the city of Madison, the university campus, and Wisconsin state parks. Drawing extensive details from archives and interviews, Court follows decades of collaborative work related to the arboretum’s lands, including the early efforts of Madison philanthropists and businessmen Michael Olbrich, Paul E. Stark, and Joseph W. “Bud” Jackson.
With labor from the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s Depression, University of Wisconsin scientists began establishing both a traditional horticultural collection of trees and plants and a completely new, visionary approach to recreate native ecosystems. Hundreds of dedicated scientists and staff have carried forward the arboretum’s mission in the decades since, among them G. William Longenecker, Aldo Leopold, John T. Curtis, Rosemary Fleming, Virginia Kline, and William R. Jordan III.
This archival record of the arboretum’s history provides rare insights into how the mission of healing and restoring the land gradually shaped the arboretum’s future and its global reputation; how philosophical conflicts, campus politics, changing priorities, and the encroaching city have affected the arboretum over the decades; and how early aspirations (some still unrealized) have continued to motivate the work of this extraordinary institution.
Jim Daniels, in his first book of poems, draws upon his experiences in living and working in his native Detroit to present a start, realistic picture of urban, blue-collar life. Daniels, his brothers, his father, and his grandfather have all worked in the auto industry, and that background seeps into nearly all these poems.
The first of the book’s three sections sketches out this background, then moves into a neighborhood full of people whose lives are so linked to the ups and downs of the auto industry that they have to struggle to find their own lives; in "Still Lives in Detroit, #2," Daniels writes, "There’s a man in this picture. / No one can find him." The second section contains the "Digger" poems, a series on the lives of a Detroit auto worker and his family which tries to capture the effects of the work on life outside the factory. Here, we listen to Digger think, dream, wander on psychological journeys while he moves through his routines, shoveling the snow, mowing the lawn, and so forth. In section three, the poems move into the workplace, whether that be a liquor store, a hamburger joint, or a factory.
These poems, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, concentrate on the efforts of workers to rise above the often depressing work of blue-collar or minimum-wage jobs, to salvage some pride and dignity. The poems in this book try to give a voice to those who are often shut out of poetry. They are important. These lives are important, and the poems, more than anything, say that.
Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician, did not himself eat fava beans in any form; in fact, he banned his followers from eating them. Cultural geographer Frederick Simoons disputes the contention that Pythagoras established that ban because he recognized the danger of favism, a disease that afflicts genetically-predisposed individuals who consume fava beans. Contradicting more deterministic explanations of history, Simoons argues that ritual considerations led to the Pythagorean ban.
In his fascinating and thorough new study, Simoons examines plants associated with ritual purity, fertility, prosperity, and life, on the one hand, or with ritual impurity, sickness, ill fate, and death, on the other. Plants of Life, Plants of Death offers a wealth of detail from not only history, ethnography, religious studies, classics, and folklore, but also from ethnobotany and medicine. Simoons surveys a vast geographical region extending from Europe through the Near East to India and China. He tells the story of India's giant sacred fig trees, the pipal and the banyan, and their changing role in ritual, religion, and as objects of pilgrimage from antiquity to the present day; the history of mandrake and ginseng, “man roots” whose uses from Europe to China have been shaped by the perception that they are human in form; and the story of garlic and onions as impure foods of bad odor in that same broad region.
Simoons also identifies and discusses physical characteristics of plants that have contributed to their contrasting ritual roles, and he emphasizes the point that the ritual roles of plants are also shaped by basic human concerns—desire for good health and prosperity, hopes for fertility and offspring, fear of violence, evil and death—that were as important in antiquity as they are today.
“It dazzles as a piece of scholarship.”—Daniel W. Gade, University of Vermont
Balanced precariously between fact and fiction, the historical novel is often viewed with suspicion. Some have attacked it as a mongrel form, a “bastard son” born of “history’s flagrant adultery with imagination.” Yet it includes some of the most celebrated achievements of Russian literature, with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and scores of other writers contributing to this tradition.
Dan Ungurianu’s Plotting History traces the development of the Russian historical novel from its inception in the romantic era to the emergence of Modernism on the eve of the Revolution. Organized historically and thematically, the study is focused on the cultural paradigms that shaped the evolution of the genre and are reflected in masterpieces such as The Captain’s Daughter and War and Peace. Ungurianu examines the variety of approaches by which Russian writers combined fact with fiction and explores the range of subjects that inspired the Russian historical imagination.
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
“Ungurianu has produced a most valuable work for literary scholars.”—Andrew M. Drozd, Slavic and East European Journal
“[Ungurianu’s] overwhelming knowledge, impeccable documentation, erudite notes, and valuable addenda make for a treasure house of information and keen analysis. . . . Essential.”—Choice
Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath.
As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war. Plum Wine examines human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war in a story that is both original and timeless.
In this, the fourth volume to win the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Lisa Zeidner’s twenty-two poems introduce a surprising range of characters, from a cryogenically preserved caveman to a 78-year-old widow arrested for shoplifting. Some of the narratives collected here are unusually long (like “Dementia Colander,” a mock-epic about the history of an unnamed nation whose king suffers a rare disease). These poems attempt to offer not just poetic moments, glimpses of joy or loss, but a sense of self in time and history—whole lives in all of their busy-ness and disorder. Lisa Zeidner’s dark wit considers any subject, from the Holocaust to child abuse, a subject for intellectual playfulness and emotional discovery.
Despite the range of subjects, the poems in Pocket Sundial are bound by a concern for time, for how we think about time. These are poems about memory, foresight, anticipation, regret—all of chronology’s complexities.
Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story.
In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, an unconventional work that searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical center that Scheub calls "the poem in the story." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in southern Africa and decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Scheub develops an original approach—a blend of field notes, diary entries, photographs, and texts of stories and poems—that guides readers into a new way of viewing, even experiencing, meaning in a story. Though this work is largely focused on African storytelling, its universal applications emerge when Scheub brings the work of storytellers as different as Shakespeare and Faulkner into the discussion.
In the variegated history of the philosophical definitions of man, one has survived since it has been given the status of the self-evident. The definition in question comes from Aristotle’s Politics: “the human is a political animal” (1253a3). There is something indisputable about this characterization: humans are, indeed, the most social of animals – they are denizens of the polis with its institutions and laws, its rulers, judges and generals. It would be difficult to contend that any other animal has recourse to the political as much as the human.
Aristotle’s Politics need not be surrendered to the strictures of humanism. It remains amenable to the new schema for the political animal that we are sketching here. Each article collected in this issue responds – in its own way and by establishing its own protocols – to the exigency of the animal as it was formulated in Aristotle’s Politics. Each article is an act of response, a moment of interruption.
The culmination of one of the most famous long-term studies in American sociology, this examination of political attitudes among women who attended Bennington College in the 1930s and 1940s now spans five decades, from late adolescence to old age. Theodore Newcomb’s 1930s interviews at Bennington, where the faculty held progressive views that contrasted with those of the conservative families of the students, showed that political orientations are still quite malleable in early adulthood. The studies in 1959-60 and 1984 show the persistence of political attitudes over the adult life span: the Bennington women, raised in conservative homes, were liberalized in their college years and have remained politically involved and liberal in their views, even in their sixties and seventies.
Here the authors analyze the earlier studies and then introduce the 1984 data. Using data from National Election Studies for comparison, they show that the Bennington group is more liberal and hold its opinions more intensely than both older and younger Americans, with the exception of the generation that achieved political maturity in the 1960s. The authors point out that the majority of the Bennington women’s children are of this 1945–54 generation and suggest that this factor played an important role in the stability of the women’s political views. Within their own generation, the Bennington women also appear to hold stronger political views than other college-educated women.
Innovative in its methodology and extremely rich in its data, this work will contribute to developmental and social psychology, sociology, political science, women’s studies, and gerontology.
In a series of stimulating essays, William E. Connolly explores the element of ambiguity in politics. He argues that democratic politics in a modern society requires, if it is to flourish, an appreciation of the ambiguous character of the standards and principles we cherish the most. Connolly’s work, lucidly, presented and intellectually challenging, will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, rhetoric, and law, and to all whose interests include the connections between contemporary epistemological arguments and politics and, more broadly, between thought and language.
Connolly criticizes the ways in which contemporary politics extends normalization into various areas of modern existence. He argues, against this trend, for an approach that would provide relief from the rigid identity formations that result from normalization.
In supporting his thesis, Connolly shows how the imperative for growth must be relaxed if normalizing pressures are to be obviated. His, however, is not the familiar antigrowth argument; rather, he ties his thesis to his general antinormalization argument, asking how one could create an ethic that would sustain itself when the growth imperatives are relaxed. Connolly’s chapters on the work of other thinkers (including Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor) are linked with his main theme, as he shows how various tendencies in the philosophy of the social sciences and in political theory aid and abed the normalizing tendency.
His analyses of Rorty and Taylor are especially important. Connolly shows the significance of antifoundationalism (Rorty’s contribution to the debate on epistemology), while providing a compelling critique both of Rorty’s stance and Taylor's alternative to it.
Especially important to Connolly’s thesis is the ontology on which it rests. He shows how the endorsement of an ontology of discordance within concord—a view that all systems of meaning impose order on that which was not designed to fit neatly within them—can support a more democratizing process. His final chapter, “Where the Word Breaks Off,” vindicates the ontology of discordance, which has governed the argument throughout the text.
Throughout these essays, Connolly builds a consistent argument for the politicalization of normalization, disclosing forms of normalization where others have seen unproblematic modes of communication and problem solving. Original in concept and bold in presentation, Connolly’s work will form the basis for considerable debate in the several disciplines it serves.
Rarely are the off-screen lives of actors examined for evidence of deep thinking or good citizenship. Still more rarely do the internal workings of labor unions attract public scrutiny. Nevertheless, as David Prindle shows in his examination of democracy in the Screen Actors Guild, this actors’ union has for over 50 years been an arena for idealistic, yet intense and hardboiled political maneuvering.
In The Politics of Glamour, readers become aware of the seriousness and political commitment displayed by people whom the general public has generally admired more for their artistic skills. After reading this account of politics among America’s screen royalty, no one could wonder about where Ronald Reagan, a former SAG president, received his political training.
Besides analyzing the politics of SAG, however, the author follows a good story wherever it leads. The reader can expect to learn something about the political economy of Hollywood and the American labor movement, the value of celebrity within the acting community, the impact of technological change, and even a bit of gossip.
The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy.
Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor.
By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.
This book takes another look at politics and popular culture. The author has tried to explain the politics of popular culture as part of historical and cultural processes, helping the reader understand not only how popular culture has affected our politics, but also where it is taking us.
Polykleitos of Argos is one of the most celebrated sculptors of classical Greece. This richly illustrated volume of superb essays by art historians, classical scholars, and archaeologists discusses Polykleitos’ life and influence, his intellectual and cultural milieu, and his best-known work—the bronze Doryphoros, or “Spear-Bearer.”
Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition displays an impressive range of approaches–from commentary on the artistic and philosophical antecedents that influenced Polykleitos’ own aesthetic to the role of contemporary Greek anatomical knowledge in his representation of the human form. The essays offer extended analysis of his work as well as reflections of his style in sculpture, paintings, coins, and other art in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. This volume also contains a thorough discussion of Polykleitos’ original bronze Doryphoros, its pose, its relation to other spear-bearer sculptures, and the fine Roman marble copy of it now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
Popular Abstracts is a reference tool providing access to information appearing in past issues of three journals published by the Bowling Green Popular Press. Abstracts are included for each article appearing in the first ten volumes of The Journal of Popular Culture (1967–1977), the first five volumes of The Journal of Popular Film (1972–1977), and the first four volumes of Popular Music and Society (1971–1975).
The culture of the Middle Ages was as complex, if not as various, as our own, as the essays in this volume ably demonstrate. The essays cover a wide range of tipics, from church sculpture as "advertisement" to tricks and illusions as "homeeconomics."
The Middle English romance has elicited throughout the centuries a curious mixture of indifference,hostile apprehension, and contempt that perhaps no other literature—except its most likely offspring, modern best-sellers—has provoked.
Sarah E. Van De Vort Emery, a Michigan woman transplanted from the Finger Lakes region of New York, was for many years a voice for Populism in the late 19th century. Emery was a woman who believed and acted on her beliefs that freedom and the flowering of the human potential should not five way to the demands of the "money power."
Welfare reform was supposed to end welfare as we know it. And it has. The welfare poor have been largely transformed into the working poor, but their poverty persists. This hard-hitting book takes a close look at where we’ve gone wrong—and where we might go next if we truly want to improve the lot of America’s underclass.
Tracing the roots of recent reforms to the early days of the war on poverty, A Poverty of Imagination describes a social welfare system grown increasingly inept, corrupt, and susceptible to conservative redesign. Investigating the causes of the ongoing failure of welfare assistance, Stoesz focuses on the economic barriers that impede movement out of poverty into the American mainstream. He explores such issues as the heterogeneity of welfare families, generational welfare, inadequate benefits, the negative effects of time limits on welfare recipients, a fringe banking industry that exploits low-income families, the limited capacity of low-wage markets, and the unavailability of credit.
Stoesz suggests that a form of "bootstrap capitalism" would allow individuals and families to participate more fully in American society and achieve upward economic mobility and stability. This proposal, emphasizing wage supplements, asset building, and community capitalism, sets the stage for the next act in poverty policy in the United States. With its valuable insights on the American welfare system and its positive agenda for change, this book makes a significant intervention in our ongoing struggle to come to terms with widespread poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth.
In 1985 Johannes Fabian, while engaged in fieldwork in the Shaba province of Zaire, first encountered this saying. Its implications—for the charismatic religious movements Fabian was examining, for the highly charged political atmosphere of Zaire, and for the cultures of the Luba peoples—continued to intrigue him, though its meaning remained elusive. On a later visit, he mentioned the saying to a company of popular actors, and triggered an ethnographic brainstorm. “Spontaneously, they decided it would be just the right topic for their next play. On the spot they began planning—suggestions for a plot were made, problems of translating the French term ‘pouvoir’ were debated, several actors cited sayings and customs from their home villages. . . .”
Power and Performance examines traditional proverbs about power as it illustrates how the performance of Le pouvoir se mange entier was created, rehearsed, and performed. The play deals with the issue of power through a series of conflicts between villagers and their chief. Both rehearsal and performance versions of the text of this drama are included, in Swahili and in English translation.
Prairie plants are among the toughest of all ornamentals. While they fascinate gardeners with their beauty and versatility, they require little maintenance. They are highly resistant to insect and disease damage, and they need not be replanted every year.
In recent years, the idea of growing prairie plants has gained increasing appeal among gardeners. Bob and Beatrice Smith have prepared this practical growing guide—based on their more than fourteen years of experience and experimentation—for all people who wish to grow prairie plants. The Smiths, who have grown all the plants they discuss here, share their wealth of experience with the reader. They recommend the best sites, tell how to plan and prepare the site and how to treat and plant seeds, and share important tips on propagation, transplanting, and managing the prairie garden or landscape. To aid in both planning and identification, the book includes full-color illustrations of all seventy plants.
In the rush of modern life, we measure our lives by the clock, the calendar, the timetable. But there are older rhythms in nature: the call of chickadees before the first hint of spring, the golden face of a compass plant in July, the first snowfall. These signs mark the passage of time in a world that Aldo Leopold knew well and eloquently described.
With notebook and camera in hand, John and Beth Ross revisit the Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve in south-central Wisconsin fifty years after Leopold’s death. Thanks to the efforts of Leopold, his family, and the Leopold Foundation, this once-ruined farmland is now largely restored to a natural state. The Rosses explore the terrain of this sandy land, encounter its natural citizens, and relate life here to its physical underpinnings. Following Leopold’s own practice of phenology, they note the seasonal changes: arrivals and departures of wild geese, the blossoming of the pasque flower at the edge of melting snow, the appearance of monarch butterflies on the milkweed. And further, they seek to find in this landscape an underlying morality, a communion of understanding, a sense of place in the cosmos.
Beautifully illustrated with color photographs, the book also includes notes on the behavior, habitat, and human interactions with ninety-four species of plants, birds, and other animals found in the reserve. An extensive glossary explains terms from geology, ecology, meteorology, and related life and earth sciences.
In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship.
Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation.
Finalist, Social Sciences Book Award, the International Convention of Asian Scholars
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