Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and introduction that place the memoir within historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of "America" and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.
Wartime hysteria over "foreign" ways fueled a movement for Americanization that swept the United States during and after World War I. Eileen H. Tamura examines the forms that hysteria took in Hawai'i, where the Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) were targets of widespread discrimination.
Tamura analyzes Hawaii's organized effort to force the Nisei to adopt "American" ways, discussing it within the larger phenomenon of Nisei acculturation. While racism was prevalent in "paradise," the Nisei and their parents also performed as active agents in their own lives, with the older generation attempting to maintain Japanese cultural ways and the younger wishing to become "true Americans." Caucasian "Americanizers," often associated with powerful agricultural interests, wanted labor to remain cheap and manageable; they lobbied for racist laws and territorial policies, portending the treatment of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. mainland during World War II.
Tamura offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts as well as statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.
Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, is best known for his pioneering work on the development of language and thought, mental retardation, and the cortical organization of higher mental processes. Virtually unnoticed has been his major contribution to the understanding of cultural differences in thinking.
In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their mission: to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz—from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.
The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the data: the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.
For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.
Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.
Between 1350 and 1750—a time of empires, exploration, and exposure to radically different lands and cultures—the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas during this pivotal period: Eurasia between Russia and Japan; the Muslim world of the Ottoman and Persian empires; Mughal India and the Indian Ocean trading world; maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania; and a newly configured transatlantic rim. While people in many places remained unaware of anything beyond their own village, an intense period of empire building led to expanding political, economic, and cultural interaction on every continent—early signals of a shrinking globe.
By the early fourteenth century Eurasia’s Mongol empires were disintegrating. Concurrently, followers of both Islam and Christianity increased exponentially, with Islam exerting a powerful cultural influence in the spreading Ottoman and Safavid empires. India came under Mughal rule, experiencing a significant growth in trade along the Indian Ocean and East African coastlines. In Southeast Asia, Muslims engaged in expansion on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and the Philippines. And both sides of the Atlantic responded to the pressure of European commerce, which sowed the seeds of a world economy based on the resources of the Americas but made possible by the subjugation of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.
Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.
Drawing on his work on contemporary postcolonial Pacific societies, Nicholas Thomas takes up three issues central to modern anthropology: the cultural and political dynamics of colonial encounters, the nature of Western and non-Western transactions (such as the gift and the commodity), and the significance of material objects in social life. Along the way, he raises doubts about any simple “us/them” dichotomy between Westerners and Pacific Islanders, challenging the preoccupation of anthropology with cultural difference by stressing the shared history of colonial entanglement.
Thomas integrates general issues into a historical discussion of the uses Pacific Islanders and Europeans have made of each other’s material artifacts. He explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century islanders, and visitors from the time of the Cook voyages up to the present day, have fashioned identities for themselves and each other by appropriating and exchanging goods. Previous writers have explored museums and the tribal art market, but this is the first book to concentrate on the distinct interests of European collectors and the islanders. In its comparative scope, its combination of historical and ethnographic scholarship, and its subversive approach to anthropological theory and traditional understandings of colonial relationships, Entangled Objects is a unique and challenging book. It will be tremendously interesting to all those working in the fields of cultural studies, from history to literature.
Hawaiian culture as it met foreign traders and settlers is the context for Sahlins's structuralist methodology of historical interpretation
García Canclini contrasts the imaginaries of previous migrants to the Americas with those who live in transnational circuits today. He integrates metaphor and narrative, working through philosophical, anthropological, and socioeconomically grounded interpretations of art, literature, crafts, media, and other forms of expression toward his conclusion that globalization is, in important ways, a collection of heterogeneous narratives. García Canclini advocates global imaginaries that generate new strategies for dealing with contingency and produce new forms of citizenship oriented toward multiple social configurations rather than homogenization. This edition of Imagined Globalization includes a significant new introduction by George Yúdice and an interview in which the cultural theorist Toby Miller and García Canclini touch on events including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.
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.
This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.
In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.
Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.
Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.
Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.
During the early Colonial Period in the Americas, as an ancient way of life ended and the modern world began, indigenous peoples and European invaders confronted, resisted, and compromised with one another. Yet archaeological investigations of this complex era are rare. Magdalena de Cao is an exception: the first in-depth and heavily illustrated examination of what life was like at one culturally mixed town and church complex during the early Colonial Period in Peru.
The field research reported in this volume took place at the site of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, a town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean whose 150-year lifespan ran from the Late Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. For a decade, an interdisciplinary team of researchers conducted archaeological and historical research in Peru, Spain, and the United States. Their analysis of documentary sources and recovered artifacts—including metals, textiles, beads, and fragmentary paper documents—opens new doors to understanding daily life in Magdalena de Cao during a turbulent time. Touching on themes of colonialism, cultural hybridity, resistance, and assimilation, Magdalena de Cao provides a comprehensive overview of the project itself and a rich body of data that will be of interest to researchers for years to come.
This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893.
Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment.
Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.
Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a richly textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Drum ballad texts (guci) evoke one of the most popular performance traditions of their day, a practice that flourished in North China. Study of these narratives opens up surprising new perspectives on vital topics in Chinese literature and history: the creation of regional cultural identities and their relation to a central “Chinese culture”; the relationship between oral and written cultures; the transmission of legal knowledge and popular ideals of justice; and the impact of the changing technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the reproduction and dissemination of popular texts.
Margaret B. Wan maps the dissemination over time and space of two legends of wise judges; their journey through oral, written, and visual media reveals a fascinating but overlooked world of “popular” literature. While drum ballads form a distinctively regional literature, lithography in early twentieth-century Shanghai drew them into national markets. The new paradigm this book offers will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, book culture, legal history, and popular culture.
Histories of ancient Rome have long emphasized the ways in which the empire assimilated the societies it conquered, bringing civilization to the supposed barbarians. Yet interpretations of this “Romanization” of Western Europe tend to erase local identities and traditions from the historical picture, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the diverse cultures that flourished in the provinces far from Rome.
The Sons of Remus recaptures the experiences, memories, and discourses of the societies that made up the variegated patchwork fabric of the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Focusing on Gaul and Spain, Andrew Johnston explores how the inhabitants of these provinces, though they willingly adopted certain Roman customs and recognized imperial authority, never became exclusively Roman. Their self-representations in literature, inscriptions, and visual art reflect identities rooted in a sense of belonging to indigenous communities. Provincials performed shifting roles for different audiences, rehearsing traditions at home while subverting Roman stereotypes of druids and rustics abroad.
Deriving keen insights from ancient sources—travelers’ records, myths and hero cults, timekeeping systems, genealogies, monuments—Johnston shows how the communities of Gaul and Spain balanced their local identities with their status as Roman subjects, as they preserved a cultural memory of their pre-Roman past and wove their own narratives into Roman mythology. The Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Romulus, the legendary founder of the eternal city; from the other brother, the provincials of the west received a complicated inheritance, which shaped the history of the sons of Remus.
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