This volume brings together leading scholars of Etruria to provide up-to-date findings from the key archaeological site of Kainua. Located in what is now the Italian town of Marzabotto, Kainua is the only Etruscan site whose complete urban layout has been preserved, making it possible to trace houses, roads, drainage systems, cemeteries, craft workshops, and an acropolis.

Under excavation since the 1850s, Kainua offers a trove of insights into Etruscan culture and society. The volume’s editor, Elisabetta Govi, and her fellow experts examine the material evidence underlying our understanding of the history, economy, religion, and social structures of Kainua, including trade routes that linked the city with the wider Mediterranean. Particularly exciting are recent discoveries of sanctuaries dedicated to Tinia and Uni, analogous to the Greek Zeus and Hera, which provide new information about Etruscan cults. Kainua (Marzabotto) also draws on the latest research to reconstruct the city’s foundation rites, a sacred charter, and urban plan. Finally, the authors explore the site’s archaeological history, discussing new knowledge made possible since the introduction of modern techniques of remote sensing and 3D modeling.

Presenting a new Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) curriculum that can be used in secondary and postsecondary educational settings, Kalima wa Nagham (Volume I) is a textbook that uniquely and simultaneously introduces Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and salient aspects of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) to beginning language students. Students who fully utilize this book should be able to develop the different language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and expressing deep cultural knowledge.

Written by Arabic language teaching practitioners and experienced educators who are certified language testers, Volume I of Kalima wa Nagham employs a threaded story that introduces language concepts along with music to enhance vocabulary retention and recall. At the core of the textbook are dialogues that present students and teachers with examples of Arabic grammatical concepts and important cultural aspects, as well as related vocabulary. These are supplemented by drills and activities that can be used in a classroom setting or pursued individually. Dialogues, pronunciation and listening drills, and charts to accompany the lessons are available on the UT Press website. This volume is student-centered in content and methodology, which will enable learners to meet and exceed linguistic and cultural proficiency expectations.

Presenting a new Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) curriculum that can be used in secondary and postsecondary educational settings, Kalima wa Nagham, Volume 2, is a textbook that uniquely and simultaneously introduces Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and salient aspects of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) to level two language students. Students who fully utilize this book should be able to develop important language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and expressing deep cultural knowledge.

Written by Arabic language teaching practitioners and experienced educators who are certified language testers, Kalima wa Nagham employs a threaded story that introduces language concepts along with music to enhance vocabulary retention and recall. At the core of the textbook are dialogues that present students and teachers with examples of Arabic grammatical concepts and important cultural aspects, as well as related vocabulary. These are supplemented by drills and activities that can be used in a classroom setting or pursued individually. Volume 2 incorporates media language to help students understand news reports and other media texts as well as original cartoons that demonstrate the meaning and significance of idiomatic expressions in a refreshing way. Dialogues and pronunciation and listening drills to accompany the lessons are available on the University of Texas Press website. This volume is student-centered in content and methodology, which will enable learners to meet and exceed linguistic and cultural proficiency expectations.

Presenting a new Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) curriculum that can be used in secondary and postsecondary educational settings, Kalima wa Nagham, volume 3, is a textbook that uniquely and simultaneously introduces Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and salient aspects of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) to students whose proficiency level is at least intermediate high according to ACTFL’s rating scale. Students who fully use this book should be able to develop important language skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing, and expressing deep cultural knowledge—and reach the advanced high proficiency level by the end of the book.

Written by Arabic language teaching practitioners and experienced educators who are certified language testers, Kalima wa Nagham employs a threaded story that introduces language concepts along with music to enhance vocabulary retention and recall. At the core of the textbook are written and oral texts that present students and teachers with examples of Arabic grammatical concepts and important cultural aspects, as well as related vocabulary. These are supplemented by drills and activities that can be used in a classroom setting or pursued individually. Dialogues and pronunciation and listening drills that accompany the lessons are available on the University of Texas Press website. This volume is student-centered in content and methodology, which will enable learners to meet and exceed linguistic and cultural proficiency expectations.

An author’s true meaning has always been largely a matter of opinion among literary critics, even when only objective language was analyzed. However, a writer’s inner meaning, which perhaps not even he or she consciously realizes, interests the “new critics,” who base their theory of criticism on the writings of Immanuel Kant and hold philosophical values to be essential in studying a literary work.

William J. Handy, a former student of John Crowe Ransom, himself a critic of note, reveals the inadequacy of logical concept to represent the full quality of human experience. In Kant and the Southern New Critics he discusses the theories and practices of some pioneers of philosophical criticism—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others—and traces the influence of the Kantian generative idea on their assumption that a work of art is the celebration of one’s qualitative experience.

Critics in the new school believe that knowledge of experience is distorted when abstracted into scientific, quantitative notations, and that the artist, to portray things in their more natural state, must employ particulars in order to achieve “universals.” Knowledge of any subject or object must include the aesthetic qualities of imagination and emotion that cannot be discovered through analysis.

This study explores Ransom’s theory of “ontological criticism.” The basic difference in symbols representing things and those representing ideas was discerned by Kant, who distinguished between understanding (analysis of an object in order to classify it)and imagination (realization of an object undistorted by logical reduction). Handysuggests that ontological structure requires a writer to use the logic that springs from his image-making faculty—a thought also expressed by T. S. Eliot, who says, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative.’ ”

The discipline of philosophical aesthetics is necessary for the critic, Handy says, if his principles are to be substantial enough to make a significant contribution to knowledge of literary theory. This book clearly delineates the origins of a philosophical approach and leads the reader to an appreciation of the deeper enjoyment and meaning it can give to literary experience.

The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes.

While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.

Popular lore has long depicted the Karankawa Indians as primitive scavengers (perhaps even cannibals) who eked out a meager subsistence from fishing, hunting and gathering on the Texas coastal plains. That caricature, according to Robert Ricklis, hides the reality of a people who were well-adapted to their environment, skillful in using its resources, and successful in maintaining their culture until the arrival of Anglo-American settlers.

The Karankawa Indians of Texas is the first modern, well-researched history of the Karankawa from prehistoric times until their extinction in the nineteenth century. Blending archaeological and ethnohistorical data into a lively narrative history, Ricklis reveals the basic lifeway of the Karankawa, a seasonal pattern that took them from large coastal fishing camps in winter to small, dispersed hunting and gathering parties in summer. In a most important finding, he shows how, after initial hostilities, the Karankawa incorporated the Spanish missions into their subsistence pattern during the colonial period and coexisted peacefully with Euroamericans until the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. These findings will be of wide interest to everyone studying the interactions of Native American and European peoples.

There is growing interest in Europe and the United States in the work of the major German social-political philosopher Karl Korsch. Korsch participated in the turbulent struggles in Weimar Germany and while in exile continually reflected on history and politics. His work affords one of the most important interpretations of the role of Marxism in twentieth-century revolutionary movements, while developing an ongoing critical interrogation of Marxism. His thought provides an illuminating perspective on the process of revolution and counterrevolution in recent history. Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory is the first English anthology of his most important writings.

This collection presents Korsch's essays on a wide range of subjects, including Marxism and socialization, Lenin and the Soviet Union, the crisis of Marxism, models of revolutionary practice, fascism and counterrevolution, and Korsch's final evaluation of Marxism. Much of this work is translated into English for the first time, and many unknown essays first published in radical journals which are no longer available appear here. The volume includes Korsch's major essays written during the 1920s and 1930s as well as some of his later work.

Douglas Kellner's detailed introduction, "Korsch's Revolutionary Marxism," contains the first comprehensive critical interpretation of Korsch's work to appear in English. It provides a historical-theoretical reconstruction of Korsch's life and thought and roots his political theory in the sociopolitical context in which it evolved. The introduction has been described by Korsch scholars as a "first-class piece of exposition and interpretation" and a "serious, first-rate contribution likely to preempt the field in the English language." The editor's introduction along with the representative selection of essays provide firm grounding in the ideas and historical significance of Karl Korsch.

Roy Bedichek spent most of his life working in the educational field in Texas, but his main interest was always the great outdoors. His first book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, was published when he was almost seventy, and his second, Karánkaway Country, appeared three years later. Both were the result of a lifetime of exploring a beloved land, of searching observation, of discussion, debate, wide reading, and reflection. Long out of print, Karánkaway Country is now available in a handsome second edition with a new Foreword by W. W. Newcomb, Jr.

Karánkaway Country focuses on the natural history of a strip of coastal prairie lying roughly between Corpus Christi and Galveston and once inhabited by the poorly known and much maligned Karankawa Indians. It serves as home base for an exposition of Bedichek's philosophy, providing a convenient local setting for richly tailored essays on wildlife, soil, human skin, and a variety of other topics suggested by a wide-ranging intellect. Bedichek's philosophy, if it can be reduced to a few words, is essentially that humans must learn to live on peaceful and conciliatory terms with our natural environment.

In 1920, an unknown journalist named Katherine Anne Porter first sojourned in Mexico. When she left her "familiar country" for the last time in 1931, she was the celebrated author of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and had accumulated a wealth of experiences and impressions that would inspire numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as the opening section of her only novel, Ship of Fools.

In this perceptive study of Porter's Mexican experiences, Thomas Walsh traces the important connections between those events and her literary works. Separating fact from the fictions that Porter constantly created about her life, he follows the active role that she played in Mexican political and intellectual life—even to the discovery of a plot to overthrow the Mexican government, which eventually figured in Flowering Judas.

Most important, Walsh discerns how the great swings between depression and elation that characterized Porter's emotional life influenced her alternating visions of Mexico. In such works as "Xochimilco," Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized, but in other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe," she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples.

Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Given the unhappiness of that past, her feelings toward Mexico would always be ambivalent, but her Mexican experiences influenced all her subsequent works to some degree, even those pieces not specifically Mexican in setting. Walsh's study, then, is an essential key for anyone seeking greater understanding of the life or works of Katherine Anne Porter.

Kawsay Vida is a course book and interactive multimedia program for the teaching and learning of the Quechua language from beginner to advanced levels. The course book is based on contemporary Bolivian Quechua, while the multimedia program contains a section on Bolivian Quechua (beginner to intermediate levels) and a section on southern Peruvian Quechua (advanced level). The book provides a practical introduction to spoken Quechua through the medium of English, while the multimedia program offers a choice of English or Spanish as the medium of instruction. The video clips introduce us to Quechua speakers in the valleys of Northern Potosí (Bolivia) and Cuzco (Peru), giving a sense of immediacy that the printed page cannot achieve, and highlighting the social and cultural settings in which the language is spoken. The multimedia program is available for both PC and Macintosh platforms.

The book contains twenty-two units of study. As students work through these, cross-references take them to relevant sections of the multimedia program. The Bolivian and Peruvian Quechua sections of the multimedia program are divided into thematically and grammatically ordered modules, which introduce users to different aspects of Andean life, while progressing language learning in a structured way. Users engage with the audio, video, and visual material contained in the program through a range of interactive exercises, which reinforce listening and comprehension skills. Once familiarity with the language is acquired, the multimedia program may be used independently from the book.
 

Agrarian reforms transformed the Mexican countryside in the late twentieth century but without, in many cases, altering fundamental power relationships. This study of the Tehuacán Valley in the state of Puebla highlights different strategies to manipulate the local implementation of federal government programs. With their very differing successes in the struggle to regain and maintain control of land and water rights, these strategies raise important questions about the meaning of the phrase "locally controlled development."

Because Mexico is dependent on irrigation for 45 percent of its cash crop production, national policy has focused on developing vast government controlled and financed irrigation systems. In the Tehuacán Valley, however, the inhabitants have developed a complex irrigation system without government aid or supervision. Yet, in contrast to most parts of Mexico, water rights can be bought and sold as a commodity, leading to accumulation, stratification, and emergence of a regional elite whose power is based on ownership of land and water. The analysis provides an important contribution to the understanding of local control.

The findings of this study will be important to a wide audience involved in the study of irrigation, local agricultural systems, and the interplay between local power structures and the national government in developing countries. The book also presents unique material on gravity-fed, horizontal wells, known as qanat in the Middle East, which had been unknown in the literature on Latin America before this book.

Whether she knows it or not, every girl who has ever dreamed of taking her place in a line of high-kicking dancers on a football field at halftime has been inspired by the Kilgore College Rangerettes, the world's first precision dance drill team. Founded in Kilgore, Texas, in 1939-1940 by the incomparable Gussie Nell Davis, the Rangerettes have performed for national and international audiences, appearing frequently at events such as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and major football bowl games across the nation, including the New Year's Cotton Bowl Classic in Dallas each year since 1951.

An icon of Americana, the red-white-and-blue clad Rangerettes have drawn the attention of numerous photographers and writers seeking to understand the enduring appeal of a group that some might view as anachronistic. O. Rufus Lovett, a fine art photographer who has taught at Kilgore College for more than thirty years, began photographing the 'Rettes in 1989. His interpretive photo essay in this book expresses his fascination with "the glamour of the Rangerettes' performances juxtaposed with the small-town atmosphere, football turf, metal bleachers, chain-link fences, and asphalt and concrete environment." In Lovett's masterfully composed photographs, the Rangerette performances captivate with their multiplicity of "shapes, patterns, and designs."

While Lovett treats the 'Rettes as an artistic subject, he also captures the esprit de corps that keeps the girls smiling even when they have to march on icy pavement and prompts their mothers to wear T-shirts that proudly proclaim "Rette Mom." An affectionate, yet unsentimental and occasionally irreverent portrait, Kilgore Rangerettes beautifully conveys the timeless quality of this unique subculture of young American womanhood.

The Vietnam War (1964–1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace.

Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists’ individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists’ groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC’s Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC’s The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists’ approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions—advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect—to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war’s end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials.

Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day.

In this masterful study, Aníbal González traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing. Using an approach that owes much to the recent "turn to ethics" in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel Zeno Gandía, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls "graphophobia," an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time.

Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence.

Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.

In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land.

Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere."

The history of the Middle Eastern family presents as many questions as there are currently answers. Who lived together in the household? Who married whom and for how long? Who got a piece of the patrimonial pie? These are the questions that Margaret Meriwether investigates in this groundbreaking study of family life among the upper classes of the Ottoman Empire in the pre-modern and early modern period.

Meriwether recreates Aleppo family life over time from records kept by the Islamic religious courts that held jurisdiction over all matters of family law and property transactions. From this research, she asserts that the stereotype of the large, patriarchal patrilineal family rarely existed in reality. Instead, Aleppo's notables organized their families in a great diversity of ways, despite the fact that they were all members of the same social class with widely shared cultural values, acting under the same system of family law. She concludes that this had important implications for gender relations and demonstrates that it gave women more authority and greater autonomy than is usually acknowledged.

In September 1930, the New York Times published a list of the clergy whom Rabbi Stephen Wise considered "the ten foremost religious leaders in this country." The list included nine Christians and Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas. Little-known today, Henry Cohen was a rabbi to be reckoned with, a man Woodrow Wilson called "the foremost citizen of Texas" who also impressed the likes of William Howard Taft and Clarence Darrow. Cohen's fleeting fame, however, was built not on powerful friendships but on a lifetime of service to needy Jews—as well as gentiles—in London, South Africa, Jamaica, and, for the last sixty-four years of his life, Galveston, Texas.

More than 10,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, arrived in Galveston in the early twentieth century. Rabbi Cohen greeted many of the new arrivals in Yiddish, then helped them find jobs through a network that extended throughout the Southwest and Midwest United States. The "Galveston Movement," along with Cohen's pioneering work reforming Texas prisons and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, made the rabbi a legend in his time. As this portrait shows, however, he was also a lovable mensch to his grandson. Rabbi Henry Cohen II reminisces about his grandfather's jokes while placing the legendary rabbi in historical context, creating the best picture yet of this important Texan, a man perhaps best summarized by Rabbi Wise in the New York Times as "a soul who touches and kindles souls."

The Martínez del Río family was a vigorous contestant in the highly politicized economy of early national Mexico. David Walker’s case study of its successes and failures provides a unique insider’s view of the trials and tribulations of doing business in a hostile environment. The family’s ordeal in Mexico—a series of personal dislocations and traumas—mirrored the painful contractions of an old society reluctantly giving birth to a new nation.

Using previously undiscovered primary source materials (including the private correspondence and business records of the family, public notary documents, transcripts of judicial proceedings, and the archives of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations and the British Foreign Office), Walker employs family history to analyze problems relating more generally to the development of state and society in newly independent Mexico.

The processes of socioeconomic formation in Mexico differed from those of Western Europe and the United States; accordingly, entrepreneurial activity had markedly contrasting implications for economic development and class formation. In the downwardly spiraling economy of nineteenth-century Mexico, economic activity was a zero-sum game. No new wealth was being created; most sectors remained stagnant and unproductive. To make their fortunes, empresarios, the Mexican capitalists, could not rely on income generated from authentic economic growth. Instead, they exploited the arbitrary acts of the interventionist Mexican state, which proscribed the free movement of factors within the marketplace. Speculation in the public debt took the place of more substantive undertakings. Coercive state power was diverted to create artificial environments in which otherwise inefficient and unproductive enterprises could flourish. But however well the empresarios might imitate the outward forms of industrial capitalism, they could not unlock the productive capacity of the Mexican economy. Instead, they and their allies and rivals engaged in destructive struggles to manipulate the state for personal gain, to the detriment of class interests, economic growth, and political stability.

In ancient Greece, interstate relations, such as in the formation of alliances, calls for assistance, exchanges of citizenship, and territorial conquest, were often grounded in mythical kinship. In these cases, the common ancestor was most often a legendary figure from whom both communities claimed descent.

In this detailed study, Lee E. Patterson elevates the current state of research on kinship myth to a consideration of the role it plays in the construction of political and cultural identity. He draws examples both from the literary and epigraphical records and shows the fundamental difference between the two. He also expands his study into the question of Greek credulity—how much of these founding myths did they actually believe, and how much was just a useful fiction for diplomatic relations? Of central importance is the authority the Greeks gave to myth, whether to elaborate narratives or to a simple acknowledgment of an ancestor. Most Greeks could readily accept ties of interstate kinship even when local origin narratives could not be reconciled smoothly or when myths used to explain the link between communities were only "discovered" upon the actual occasion of diplomacy, because such claims had been given authority in the collective memory of the Greeks.

Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women’s subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society.

Using a Marxist-feminist approach, Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women’s status in one society over three hundred years, from a period when kinship relations organized property, work, distribution, consumption, and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands, Tonga, in the South Pacific, the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world.

This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology, political science, sociology, and women’s studies, this work is a major contribution to social history.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

For many Plains Indians, being a warrior and veteran has long been the traditional pathway to male honor and status. Men and boys formed military societies to celebrate victories in war, to perform community service, and to prepare young men for their role as warriors and hunters. By preserving cultural forms contained in song, dance, ritual, language, kinship, economics, naming, and other semireligious ceremonies, these societies have played an important role in maintaining Plains Indian culture from the pre-reservation era until today.

In this book, Williams C. Meadows presents an in-depth ethnohistorical survey of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche military societies, drawn from extensive interviews with tribal elders and military society members, unpublished archival sources, and linguistic data. He examines their structure, functions, rituals, and martial symbols, showing how they fit within larger tribal organizations. And he explores how military societies, like powwows, have become a distinct public format for cultural and ethnic continuity.

Examining the place names, geographical knowledge, and cultural associations of the Kiowa from the earliest recorded sources to the present, Kiowa Ethnogeography is the most in-depth study of its kind in the realm of Plains Indian tribal analysis. Linking geography to political and social changes, William Meadows applies a chronological approach that demonstrates a cultural evolution within the Kiowa community.

Preserved in both linguistic and cartographic forms, the concepts of place, homeland, intertribal sharing of land, religious practice, and other aspects of Kiowa life are clarified in detail. Native religious relationships to land (termed "geosacred" by the author) are carefully documented as well. Meadows also provides analysis of the only known extant Kiowa map of Black Goose, its unique pictographic place labels, and its relationship to reservation-era land policies. Additional coverage of rivers, lakes, and military forts makes this a remarkably comprehensive and illuminating guide.

Throughout the world, the kitchen is the heart of family and community life. Yet, while everyone has a story to tell about their grandmother's kitchen, the myriad activities that go on in this usually female world are often devalued, and little scholarly attention has been paid to this crucial space in which family, gender, and community relations are forged and maintained. To give the kitchen the prominence and respect it merits, Maria Elisa Christie here offers a pioneering ethnography of kitchenspace in three central Mexican communities, Xochimilco, Ocotepec, and Tetecala.

Christie coined the term "kitchenspace" to encompass both the inside kitchen area in which everyday meals for the family are made and the larger outside cooking area in which elaborate meals for community fiestas are prepared by many women working together. She explores how both kinds of meal preparation create bonds among family and community members. In particular, she shows how women's work in preparing food for fiestas gives women status in their communities and creates social networks of reciprocal obligation. In a culture rigidly stratified by gender, Christie concludes, kitchenspace gives women a source of power and a place in which to transmit the traditions and beliefs of older generations through quasi-sacramental food rites.

Known for their beautiful textile art, the Kuna of Panama have been scrutinized by anthropologists for decades. Perhaps surprisingly, this scrutiny has overlooked the magnificent Kuna craft of nuchukana—wooden anthropomorphic carvings—which play vital roles in curing and other Kuna rituals. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Paolo Fortis at last brings to light this crucial cultural facet, illuminating not only Kuna aesthetics and art production but also their relation to wider social and cosmological concerns.

Exploring an art form that informs birth and death, personhood, the dream world, the natural world, religion, gender roles, and ecology, Kuna Art and Shamanism provides a rich understanding of this society’s visual system, and the ways in which these groundbreaking ethnographic findings can enhance Amerindian scholarship overall. Fortis also explores the fact that to ask what it means for the Kuna people to carve the figure of a person is to pose a riddle about the culture’s complete concept of knowing.

Also incorporating notions of landscape (islands, gardens, and ancient trees) as well as cycles of life, including the influence of illness, Fortis places the statues at the center of a network of social relationships that entangle people with nonhuman entities. As an activity carried out by skilled elderly men, who possess embodied knowledge of lifelong transformations, the carving process is one that mediates mortal worlds with those of immortal primordial spirits. Kuna Art and Shamanism immerses readers in this sense of unity and opposition between soul and body, internal forms and external appearances, and image and design.

Kurdish Awakening examines key questions related to Kurdish nationalism and identity formation in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The world’s largest stateless ethnic group, Kurds have steadily grown in importance as a political power in the Middle East, particularly in light of the “Arab Spring.” As a result, Kurdish issues—political, cultural, and historical alike—have emerged as the subject of intense scholarly interest. This book provides fresh ways of understanding the historical and sociopolitical underpinnings of the ongoing Kurdish awakening and its already significant impact on the region.

Rather than focusing on one state or angle, this anthology fills a gap in the literature on the Kurds by providing a panoramic view of the Kurdish homeland’s various parts. The volume focuses on aspects of Kurdish nationalism and identity formation not addressed elsewhere, including perspectives on literature, gender, and constitution making. Further, broad thematic essays include a discussion of the historical experiences of the Kurds from the time of their Islamization more than a millennium ago up until the modern era, a comparison of the Kurdish experience with other ethno-national movements, and a treatment of the role of tribalism in modern nation building. This collection is unique in its use of original sources in various languages. The result is an analytically rich portrayal that sheds light on the Kurds’ prospects and the challenges they confront in a region undergoing sweeping upheavals.

Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state.

Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal Politics focuses on central spheres of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, particularly governing practices, agrarian reform, women’s collective work, and the implementation of justice, as well as health and education projects. Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. Mora’s findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.