In this important collection, prominent scholars who helped to establish medical anthropology as an area of study reflect on the field's past, present, and future. In doing so, they demonstrate that medical anthropology has developed dynamically, through its intersections with activism, with other subfields in anthropology, and with disciplines as varied as public health, the biosciences, and studies of race and ethnicity. Each of the contributors addresses one or more of these intersections. Some trace the evolution of medical anthropology in relation to fields including feminist technoscience, medical history, and international and area studies. Other contributors question the assumptions underlying mental health, global public health, and genetics and genomics, areas of inquiry now central to contemporary medical anthropology. Essays on the field's engagements with disability studies, public policy, and gender and sexuality studies illuminate the commitments of many medical anthropologists to public-health and human-rights activism. Essential reading for all those interested in medical anthropology, this collection offers productive insight into the field and its future, as viewed by some of the world's leading medical anthropologists.

Contributors. Lawrence Cohen, Didier Fassin, Faye Ginsburg, Marcia C. Inhorn, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Emily Martin, Lynn M. Morgan, Richard Parker, Rayna Rapp, Merrill Singer, Emily A. Wentzell

Medical Entanglements uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond “for or against” approaches to medical intervention. Using a series of case studies – sex-confirmation surgery, pharmaceutical treatments for sexual dissatisfaction, and weight loss interventions – the book argues that, because of systemic inequality, most mainstream medical interventions will simultaneously reinforce social inequality and alleviate some individual suffering. The book demonstrates that there is no way to think ourselves out of this conundrum as the contradictions are a product of unjust systems. Thus, Gupta argues that feminist activists and theorists should allow individuals to choose whether to use a particular intervention, while directing their social justice efforts at dismantling systems of oppression and at ensuring that all people, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability, have access to the basic resources required to flourish.
 

From practical to philosophical considerations, this succinct, clear presentation of medical malpractice issues is a valuable resource for the classroom and the reference shelf. Frank M. McClellan illustrates the multitude of considerations that impact the merit of each case, never losing sight of the importance of preserving human dignity in malpractice lawsuits.

Early chapters urge the evaluation of legal, medical, and ethical standards, especially the Standard of Care. Part II focuses on assessing and proving compensatory and punitive damages, Part III sets out guidelines for intelligence gathering, medical research, choosing expert witnesses, and preparing for trial.

Students of law, medicine, and public health, as well as lawyers and health care professionals, will find in Medical Malpractice a valuable text or reference book. "Problems" in twelve of the thirteen chapters illustrate the range of issues that can arise in malpractice suits. An appendix lists leading cases that have shaped medical malpractice law.

How the politics of “medical necessity” complicates American health care

The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance companies, and government agencies. In this book, Daniel Skinner constructs a comprehensive understanding of the politics of defining this concept, arguing that sustained political engagement with medical necessity is essential to developing a health care system that meets basic public health objectives.

From medical marijuana to mental health to reproductive politics, the concept of medical necessity underscores many of the most divisive and contentious debates in American health care. Skinner’s close reading of medical necessity’s production illuminates the divides between perceptions of medical need as well as how the gatekeeper concept of medical necessity tends to frame medical objectives. He questions the wisdom of continuing to use medical necessity when thinking critically about vexing health care challenges, exploring the possibility that contracts, rights, and technology may resolve the contentious politics of medical necessity.

Skinner ultimately contends that a major shift is needed, one in which health care administrators, doctors, and patients admit that medical necessity is, at its base, a contestable political concept.

When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, most social science gender scholarship focused on female or genderless bodies. The work on men, health, and medicine was scant and tended to depict masculinity as intrinsically damaging to men's health.

Medicalized Masculinities considers how these threads in scholarship failed to consider the male body adequately and presents cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine. Renowned health and gender studies experts examine medicalized conditions such as balding, aging, and other dimensions of the life cycle in the tradition of the sociology of health and gender.

In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.

Mothers often know very little about the drugs they receive during pregnancy and even less about the drugs they consume during childbirth. The adverse fetal effects of drugs—whether prescription or over-the-counter—and the information mothers receive from the drug and medical communities about those drugs are shown in this International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities monograph. The research for the study presented in Medication in Maternity included 602 mothers, and as such must be seen as a significant contribution to the field of neonatology in general and to learning disabilities specifically. The authors' findings indicate that many infants are exposed to prenatal and during-birth drugs that could cause learning difficulties or have other toxic effects, and that mothers are rarely told what drugs they are taking or how those drugs could harm their child.

In this encyclopedia of North American ethnobotany, thousands of native plants are organized by family, genus, use (illness), tribal culture, and common name. Foreword by Richard I. Ford.

In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations—between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations—that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.

We live in an era in which medicalization—the process of conceptualizing and treating a wide range of human experiences as medical problems in need of medical treatment—of mental health troubles has been settled for several decades. Yet little is known about how this biomedical framework affects practitioners’ experiences. Using interviews with forty-three practitioners in the New York City area, this book offers insight into how the medical model maintains its dominant role in mental health treatment. Smith explores how practitioners grapple with available treatment models, and make sense of a field that has shifted rapidly in just a few decades. This is a book about practitioners working in a medicalized field; for some practitioners this is a straightforward and relatively tension-free existence while for others, who believe in and practice in-depth talk therapy, the biomedical perspective is much more challenging and causes personal and professional strains.
 

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays—twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised—she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.

Uses historical and literary insights to consider crime and punishment in the Middle Ages.

Crime is a matter of interpretation, and never was this truer than in the Middle Ages, when societies faced with new ideas and pressures were continually forced to rethink what a crime was-and what was a crime. This collection undertakes a thorough exploration of shifting definitions of crime and changing attitudes toward social control in medieval Europe.

These essays-by leading specialists in European history and literature-reveal how various forces in medieval society interacted and competed in interpreting and influencing mechanisms for social control. They also demonstrate how well the different methods of history and literature combine to illuminate these developments.The essays show how the play with boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate actions took place not only in laws and courts, but also in the writing of social commentators such as John Fortescue and Jean Gerson, in the works of authors such as William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, and in popular literature such as sagas and romances. Drawing on a wide range of historical and literary sources-legal treatises, court cases, statutes, poems, romances, and comic tales-the contributors consider topics including fear of crime, rape and violence against women, revenge and condemnations of crime, learned dispute about crime and social control, and legal and political struggles over hunting rights. Their work shows how medieval society also defined its boundaries in contested spaces such as taverns and forests and in the different rules applying to the behavior and treatment of men and women.Contributors: Christopher Cannon, Oxford U; Elizabeth Fowler, Yale U; Louise O. Fradenburg, U of California, Santa Barbara; Claude Gauvard, Sorbonne; James H. Landman, U of North Texas; William Perry Marvin, Colorado State U; William Ian Miller, U of Michigan; Louise Mirrer, CUNY; Walter Prevenier, U of Ghent.ISBN 0-8166-3168-9 Cloth $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3169-7 Paper $19.95x268 pages 5 7/8 x 9 JanuaryMedieval Cultures Series, volume 16Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

"Ranging from questions of epic violence and heroic embodiments of manhood to constructions of bachelorhood, husbandry, and sainthood, Medieval Masculinities is the first synthesis of medieval and gender studies to focus on masculinities."

Harry Brod, editor of The Making of Masculinities"We should not be working [exclusively] on the subjected sex any more than a historian of class can focus exclusively on peasants."-Natalie Zemon Davis, 1975 In the years since Natalie Davis made this remark, men's studies, and gender studies along with it, has earned its place in scholarship. What is often missing from such studies, however, is the insight that the concept of gender in general, and that of masculinity in particular, can be understood only in relation to individual societies, examined at specific historical and cultural moments. A brilliant application of this insight, Medieval Masculinities is the first full-length collection to explore the issues of men's studies and contemporary theories of gender within the context of the Middle Ages. Interdisciplinary and multicultural, the essays range from matrimony in medieval Italy to bachelorhood in Renaissance Venice, from friars and saints to the male animal in the fables of Marie de France, from manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf, and the Roman d'Eneas to men as "other," whether Muslim or Jew, in medieval Castilian epic and ballad. The authors are especially concerned with cultural manifestations of masculinity that transcend this particular historical period-idealized gender roles, political and economic factors in structuring social institutions, and the impact of masculinist ideology in fostering and maintaining power. Together, their essays constitute an important reassessment of traditional assumptions within medieval studies as well as a major contribution to the evolving study of gender.ContributorsChristopher Baswell, Barnard CollegeVern L. Bullough, SUNY, BuffaloStanley Chojnacki, Michigan State UniversityJohn Coakley, New Brunswick Theological SeminaryThelma Fenster, Fordham UniversityClare Kinney, University of VirginiaClare A. Lees, University of PennsylvaniaJo Ann McNamara, Hunter CollegeLouise Mirrer, Fordham UniversityHarriet Spiegel, California State University, ChicoSusan Mosher Stuard, Haverford College

Interprets space and place in the medieval era.

Interprets space and place in the medieval era.

A glance at medieval maps tells us that cartographers of the Middle Ages divided space differently than we do today. In the great mappae mundi, for instance, Jerusalem takes center stage, with an image of the crucified Christ separating one place from another. The architects of medieval cathedrals manipulated space to clarify the roles and status of all who entered. Even in the most everyday context, space was allotted according to gender and class and was freighted with infinitely subtle meanings. The contributors to this volume cross disciplinary and theoretical boundaries to read the words, metaphors, images, signs, poetic illusions, and identities with which medieval men and women used space and place to add meaning to the world.Contributors: Kathleen Biddick, U of Notre Dame; Charles Burroughs, SUNY, Binghamton; Michael Camille, U of Chicago; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Donnalee Dox, U of Arizona; Jody Enders, U of California, Santa Barbara; Valerie K. J. Flint, U of Hull, UK; Andrzej Piotrowski, U of Minnesota; Daniel Lord Smail, Fordham U.Barbara A. Hanawalt is King George III Professor of British History at Ohio State University. Michal Kobialka is associate professor of theatre at University of Minnesota.

The cultural theorist Iain Chambers is known for his historically grounded, philosophically informed, and politically pointed inquiries into issues of identity, alterity, and migration, and the challenge postcolonial studies poses to conventional Western thought. With Mediterranean Crossings, he challenges insufficient prevailing characterizations of the Mediterranean by offering a vibrant interdisciplinary and intercultural interpretation of the region’s culture and history. The “Mediterranean” as a concept entered the European lexicon only in the early nineteenth century. As an object of study, it is the product of modern geographical, political, and historical classifications. Chambers contends that the region’s fundamentally fluid, hybrid nature has long been obscured by the categories and strictures imposed by European discourse and government.

In evocative and erudite prose, Chambers renders the Mediterranean a mutable space, profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures. He brings to light histories of Mediterranean crossings—of people, goods, melodies, thought—that are rarely part of orthodox understandings. Chambers writes in a style that reflects the fluidity of the exchanges that have formed the region; he segues between major historical events and local daily routines, backwards and forwards in time, and from one part of the Mediterranean to another. A sea of endlessly overlapping cultural and historical currents, the Mediterranean exceeds the immediate constraints of nationalism and inflexible identity. It offers scholars an opportunity to rethink the past and present and to imagine a future beyond the confines of Western humanistic thought.

In The Mediterranean Incarnate, anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the Naumachos for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years to show how the Mediterranean has reemerged as a modern transnational region. From Sicilian poaching in North African territory to the construction of the TransMediterranean gas pipeline, Ben-Yehoyada examines the transformation of political action, imaginaries, and relations in the central Mediterranean while detailing the remarkable bonds that have formed between the Sicilians and Tunisians who live on its waters.
           
The book centers on the town of Mazara del Vallo, located on the southwestern tip of Sicily some ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Ben-Yehoyada intertwines the town’s recent turbulent history—which has been fraught with conflicts over fishing rights, development projects, and how the Mediterranean should figure in Italian politics at large—with deep accounts of life aboard the Naumacho, linking ethnography with historical anthropology and political-economic analysis. Through this sophisticated approach, he crafts a new viewpoint on the historical processes of transnational region formation, one offered by these moving ships as they weave together new social and political constellations.
 

The Mediterranean is a diverse and volatile region, especially in its post—Cold War state, and it is entering a new phase of uncertainty. Twenty-two sovereign states surround this body of water: six are part of the Western alliance system, three have engaged in or supported terrorism, and others face serious internal tensions arising from territorial claims and ethnic strife. This special issue of Mediterranean Quarterly brings together scholars and policy makers representing a wide variety of interests and ideas to discuss this unique region and to explore its prospects for peace and stability.
The potential role of NATO is controversial but crucial to the future of the Mediterranean. Some contributors suggest that the southward expansion of NATO could be an important first step toward stability, while others argue that the Mediterranean should be treated as an integrated geostrategic region, with a central place in Western security considerations.
Highlighting this issue is a foreword by former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Schultz, and a piece focusing on NATO in the Mediterranean by Javier Solana, the Secretary General of NATO. Other essays discuss the comparative experience of UNPROFOR and IFOR in the former Yugoslavia; the role of Italy in the future of the Mediterranean; the economic challenges facing the Middle East; and the role of Israel and its relationship to its neighbors. Mediterranean Security at the Crossroads is one of the first in-depth looks at this region from a strictly post—Cold War perspective.

The fact that the mass media constitute such a ubiquitous presence in contemporary life often leads to the assumption that medium or media emerged as a specific issue only with the advent of mass media. The question of medium is today almost totally subsumed within discussions of the mass media. In this context, it is always regarded as plural. Yet the issue of the medium became a central concern of modernist art almost a century and a half ago. This collection of essays seeks to reopen this long history of exploration and engagement and to scrutinize the role of the medium in areas as diverse as modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde art, photography, cinema, and architecture, as well as in the more familiar guises of electronic media including television and computer games.

Contributors. Keith Broadfoot, Rex Butler, Patrick Crogan, Wolfgang Ernst, Gary Hall, Rosemary Hawker, Peter Krapp, Catherine Liu, John MacArthur, Andrew McNamara, Toni Ross, Lisa Trahair, Georg Stanitzek, Georg Christoph Tholen, Lisa Trahair, Samuel Weber, Simon Morgan Wortham

In his position of secretary to Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan Territory, C. C. Trowbridge negotiated treaties, served as interpreter, and wrote reports on the customs of the Miami, Menominee, Shawnee, and Wyandot tribes. He wrote the manuscript entitled Meearmeear Traditions (meearmeear being a transliteration of “Miami”) in the early 1820s; the University of Michigan published it in 1938. Contains 1 b&w plate.

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II.

In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

America is facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, with troubling effects on our mental and physical health. We live in one of the most divisive times in our history, one in which we tend to work, play, and associate only with people who think as we do. How do we create spaces for people to come together—to open our minds, understand our differences, and exchange ideas?
 
Shamichael Hallman argues that the public library may be our best hope for bridging these divides and creating strong, inclusive communities. While public libraries have long been thought of as a place for a select few, increasingly they are playing an essential role in building social cohesion, promoting civic renewal, and advancing the ideals of a healthy democracy. Many are reimagining themselves in new and innovative ways, actively reaching out to the communities they serve. Today, libraries are becoming essential institutions for repairing society.
 
Libraries have a unique opportunity to bridge socioeconomic divides and rebuild trust. But in order to do so, they must be truly welcoming to all. They and their communities must work collaboratively to bridge socioeconomic divides through innovative and productive partnerships.
 
Drawing from his experience at the Memphis Public Library and his extensive research and interviews across the country, Hallman presents a rich argument for seeing libraries as one of the nation’s greatest assets.  He includes examples from libraries large and small--such as the Iowa’s North Liberty Library’s Lighthouse in the Library program to bring people together to discuss important topics in a safe and supportive space, to Cambridge Cooks, an initiative of the Cambridge MA Public Library that fosters social connection by bringing people together over shared interest in food.
 
As an institution that is increasingly under attack for creating a place where diverse audiences can see themselves, public libraries are under more scrutiny than ever. Meet Me at the Library offers us a revealing look at one of our most important civic institutions and the social and civic impact they must play if we are to heal our divided nation.
 

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Environmental conditions clearly influenced the cultural development of societies in the Intermountain West, but how did interactions with neighbors living along the region’s borders affect a society’s growth and advancement, its cultural integrity, and its long-term survival? Relationships among different societies are, of course, crucial to the spread of information, innovation, and belief systems; to the maintenance of exchange and mating networks; and to the forging of ethnic identity. In these ways and others, intergroup relationships can be as strong a force in shaping a society’s identity and future as are local social and economic dynamics.

Meetings at the Margins focuses on the ways in which different ­societies in the Intermountain West profoundly influenced each other’s histories throughout the more than fourteen millennia of prehistoric occupation. Historically, inhabitants of this region frequently interacted with more than forty different groups—neighbors who spoke some two dozen different languages and maintained diverse economies. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that in the prehistoric Intermountain West, as elsewhere throughout the world, intergroup interactions were pivotal for the dynamic processes of cultural cohesion, differentiation, and change, and they affirm the value of a long-term, large-scale view of prehistory.
 

Considers the Native American abandonment of the South Carolina coast
 
A prevailing enigma in American archaeology is why vast swaths of land in the Southeast and Southwest were abandoned between AD 1200 and 1500. The most well-known abandonments occurred in the Four Corners and Mimbres areas of the Southwest and the central Mississippi valley in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in southern Arizona and the Ohio Valley during the fifteenth century. In Megadrought in the Carolinas: The Archaeology of Mississippian Collapse, Abandonment, and Coalescence, John S. Cable demonstrates through the application of innovative ceramic analysis that yet another fifteenth-century abandonment event took place across an area of some 34.5 million acres centered on the South Carolina coast.
 
Most would agree that these sweeping changes were at least in part the consequence of prolonged droughts associated with a period of global warming known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Cable strengthens this inference by showing that these events correspond exactly with the timing of two different geographic patterns of megadrought as defined by modern climate models.
 
Cable extends his study by testing the proposition that the former residents of the coastal zone migrated to surrounding interior regions where the effects of drought were less severe. Abundant support for this expectation is found in the archaeology of these regions, including evidence of accelerated population growth, crowding, and increased regional hostilities. Another important implication of immigration is the eventual coalescence of ethnic and/or culturally different social groups and the ultimate transformation of societies into new cultural syntheses. Evidence for this process is not yet well documented in the Southeast, but Cable draws on his familiarity with the drought-related Puebloan intrusions into the Hohokam Core Area of southern Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to suggest strategies for examining coalescence in the Southeast. The narrative concludes by addressing the broad implications of late prehistoric societal collapse for today’s human-propelled global warming era that portends similar but much more long-lasting consequences.
 

Thomas Gregor sees the Mehinaku Indians of central Brazil as performers of roles, engaged in an ongoing improvisational drama of community life. The layout of the village and the architecture of the houses make the community a natural theater in the round, rendering the villagers' actions highly visible and audible. Lacking privacy, the Mehinaku have become masters of stagecraft and impression management, enthusiastically publicizing their good citizenship while ingeniously covering up such embarrassments as extramarital affairs and theft.

Ma offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. Focusing on the highly stylized and nonlinear configurations of time in each director’s films, she argues that these directors have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema in amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, absence and ephemeral poetics. Hou, Tsai, and Wong all insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity. Ma argues that their films collectively foreground the central place of contemporary Chinese films in a transnational culture of memory, characterized by a distinctive melancholy that highlights the difficulty of binding together past and present into a meaningful narrative.

People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called "Malay", or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of a kebangsaan Melayu (Malay as nationality) as the basis of membership within an aspiring postcolonial nation-state, a political rather than a cultural community embracing all residents of the Malay states, including the immigrant Chinese and Indian population.


In Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, the contributors examine the checkered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu by considering hitherto unexplored case studies dealing with use of the term in connection with origins, nations, minority-majority politics, Filipino Malays, Riau Malays, Orang Asli, Straits Chinese literature, women's veiling, vernacular television, social dissent, literary women, and modern Sufism. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a creative approach to the study of Malayness while providing new perspectives to the studies of identity formation and politics of ethnicity that have wider implications beyond the Southeast Asian region.

The Mellah Society is a compact yet detailed and fascinating account of Jewish life in precolonial Morocco, based on the voluminous but rarely studied writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Judeo-Moroccan sages.

Shlomo Deshen, author of several books on North African Jewish immigrants to Israel, here turns his attention to the past. Taking as his focus the tension between individualism and communal authority—symbolized by the walls of the mellahs, the Jewish quarters—he applies to traditional Moroccan Jewish society questions of concern to sociologists everywhere regarding political organization, economic activity, religion, and the family.

From such documents as private correspondence, archival photographs, and the legal commentaries of rabbis who served in the Jewish community courts, Deshen draws out details of daily life: disputes between spouses, businessmen, craftsmen, and inheritors; the ramifications of marriage contracts; and claims involving community taxes and extortions by Muslim potentates. Linking this material with recent historical and anthropological studies of the Maghreb, Deshen reconstructs a community about which little has been known and places it squarely within the context of traditional Moroccan society.

Individual chapters deal with relations between Muslims and Jews, the material conditions of Jewish life, and the nature of politics within the mellah. Deshen devotes particular attention to the nature of the Moroccan rabbinate, the sociology of the mellah synagogue, lay community leadership, and the historic role of the Sephardic heritage in Morocco after the expulsion from medieval Spain. His close study of the nature of the extended family in traditional Morocco corrects popular misconceptions.

Originally published in Israel in 1983, now translated and expanded by its author, The Mellah Society draws upon Middle Eastern and Jewish history, textual Judaic studies, and social anthropology to make an original contribution that will interest scholars of the Middle East and North Africa as well as anyone concerned with Jewish history and ethnicity.

In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that “There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose.” Yet in the ensuing months, a series of crises disturbed that fragile sense of peace, ultimately setting the stage for Reagan’s decisive victory in 1980 and ushering in the final phase of the Cold War. 
 
Meltdown Expected tells the story of the power shifts from late 1978 through 1979 whose repercussions are still being felt. Iran’s revolution led to a hostage crisis while neighbouring Afghanistan became the site of a proxy war between the USSR and the US, who supplied aid to Islamic mujahideen fighters that would later form the Taliban. Meanwhile, as tragedies like the Jonestown mass suicide and the assassination of Harvey Milk captured the nation’s attention, the government quietly reasserted and expanded the FBI’s intelligence powers. Drawing from recently declassified government documents and covering everything from Three Mile Island to the rise of punk rock, Aaron J. Leonard paints a vivid portrait of a tumultuous yet pivotal time in American history. 
 

Mema's house is in the poor barrio Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbors, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young, homosexual men who meet to do what they can't do openly at home. They chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a mustache.

Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and to conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities—at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos—on visits with their families and even in prisons, a fascinating story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit.

She analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, ultimately asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society—the very society from which the term machismo stems. Expertly weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men.

A riveting account of heroes and moral dilemmas, community gossip and intrigue, Mema's House, Mexico's City offers a rich story of a hitherto unfamiliar culture and lifestyle.

Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented—in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming—Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.

Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it means to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate–as well as urges to forget–in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask: How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other in a world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what’s at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard?

From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions?

In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways.

In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.
 

Honorable Mention for Best Book Award from the Historia Reciente y Memoria Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)​

Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.
 

Memories of Earth and Sea recounts the history of more than two dozen islands clustered along the Patagonian flank of South America. Settled over the centuries by nomadic seafarers, indigenous farmers, and Spanish explorers, southern Chile’s Archipelago of Chiloé remained until recently a rural outpost resistant to cultural pressures from the mainland. Islanders developed a way of life heavily dependent on marine resources, native crops like the potato, and the cooperative labor practice known as the minga.
 
Staring in the 1980s, Chiloé was thrust into the global economy when major companies moved into the region to extract wild stocks of fish and to grow salmon and shellfish for export. The archipelago’s economy shifted abruptly from one of subsistence farming and fishing to wage labor in export industries. Local knowledge, traditions, memories, and identities similarly shifted, with young islanders expressing a more critical view of the rural past than their elders.
 
This book highlights the region’s unique past, emphasizing the generational tensions, disconnects, and continuities of the last half century. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and historical documents, Anton Daughters brings to life one of South America’s most culturally distinct regions.

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.

Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.

By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.

In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences—about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian’s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to conversational and transnational practices, refusing epistemological claims that privilege any one voice, language, or point of view.

Fabian returns to his landmark book Time and the Other to consider how the role of the other in anthropological inquiry has been transformed over the past two decades. He explores the place of linguistics in contemporary language-centered anthropology, and he ponders how studies of material culture imbue objects with “otherness.” Meditating on the place of memory and forgetting in ethnography, he draws from his own ethnographic work in the Congo to ask why Africa, the site of so much early anthropological study, continues to be forgotten in the wake of colonization. Arguing for the importance of remembering Africa, Fabian focuses on the relationship between thought and memory in the Swahili language. In so doing, he suggests new methods for investigating memory practices across cultures. Turning to the practice of ethnography, he examines the role of the Internet and the place of field notes and other memoranda in ethnographic writing. At once wide-ranging and incisive, Memory against Culture is a significant reflection on the state of the field by one of its most thoughtful and engaged practitioners.

Eber and Neal address some of the theoretical issues connected with symbolic constructions of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. Linkages between what we remember and how we represent it give humans their distinctive characteristics. We construct our reality from how we perceive the events in our lives and, from that reality, we create a symbol system to describe our world. It is through such symbolic constructions that we are provided with a usable backdrop for shaping our memories and organizing them into meaningful lines of action.
          These case studies present a new and creative synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of contemporary perceptions of truth.

Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have been integrated into society at different moments in time.

These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to Joseph Cornell’s “boxed relic” sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present, Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used.

Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew, Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Swiss

Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future.

Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic. Memory, migration and (de)colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of decolonisation. The chapters in this book range across disciplines and time periods to present a vibrant understanding of the ever-changing interactions between Caribbean peoples and colonialism as they migrated within and between colonial contexts. At the heart of this book are the voices of Caribbean migrants themselves, whose critical reflections on their experiences of migration and decolonisation are interwoven with the essays of academics and activists.

The Memory of Trade is an ethnographic study of the people of Aru, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. Central to Patricia Spyer’s study is the fraught identification of Aruese people with two imaginary elsewheres—the ‘Aru’ and the ‘Malay’—and the fissured construction of community that has ensued from centuries of active international trade and more recent encroachments of modernity.
Drawing on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research, Spyer examines the dynamics of contact with the Dutch and Europeans, Suharto’s postcolonial regime, and with the competing religions of Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the context of the recent conversion of pagan Aruese. While arguing that Aru identity and community are defined largely in terms of absence, longing, memory, and desire, she also incorporates present-day realities—such as the ecological destruction wrought by the Aru trade in such luxury goods as pearls and shark fins—without overlooking the mystique and ritual surrounding these activities. Imprinted on the one hand by the archipelago’s long engagement with extended networks of commerce and communication and, on the other, by modernity’s characteristic repressions and displacements, Aruese make and manage their lives somewhat precariously within what they often seem to construe as a dangerously expanding—if still enticing—world. By documenting not only the particular expectations and strategies Aruese have developed in dealing with this larger world but also the price they pay for participation therein, The Memory of Trade speaks to problems commonly faced elsewhere in the frontier spaces of modern nation-states.
Balancing particularly astute analysis with classic ethnography, The Memory of Trade will appeal not only to anthropologists and historians but also to students and specialists of Southeast Asia, modernity, and globalization.

In Memory Traces, art historians and archaeologists come together to examine the nature of sacred space in Mesoamerica. Through five well-known and important centers of political power and artistic invention in Mesoamerica—Tetitla at Teotihuacan, Tula Grande, the Mound of the Building Columns at El Tajín, the House of the Phalli at Chichén Itzá, and Tonina—contributors explore the process of recognizing and defining sacred space, how sacred spaces were viewed and used both physically and symbolically, and what theoretical approaches are most useful for art historians and archaeologists seeking to understand these places.

Memory Traces acknowledges that the creation, use, abandonment, and reuse of sacred space have a strongly recursive relation to collective memory and meanings linked to the places in question and reconciles issues of continuity and discontinuity of memory in ancient Mesoamerican sacred spaces. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican studies and material culture, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists.

Contributors: Laura M. Amrhein, Nicholas P. Dunning, Rex Koontz, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Matthew G. Looper, Travis Nygard, Keith M. Prufer, Matthew H. Robb, Patricia J. Sarro, Kaylee Spencer, Eric Weaver, Linnea Wren

Memphis Hoops tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player-turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

As a black Appalachian woman, Memphis Tennessee Garrison belonged to a demographic category triply ignored by historians.

The daughter of former slaves, she moved to McDowell County, West Virginia, at an early age and died at ninety-eight in Huntington. The coalfields of McDowell County were among the richest seams in the nation. As Garrison makes clear, the backbone of the early mining work force—those who laid the railroad tracks, manned the coke ovens, and dug the coal—were black miners. These miners and their families created communities that became the centers of the struggle for unions, better education, and expanded civil rights. Memphis Tennessee Garrison, an innovative teacher, administrative worker at U.S. Steel, and vice president of the National Board of the NAACP at the height of the civil rights struggle (1963-66), was involved with all of these struggles.

In many ways, this oral history, based on interview transcripts, is the untold and multidimensional story of African American life in West Virginia, as seen through the eyes of a remarkable woman. She portrays a courageous people who organize to improve their working conditions, send their children to school and then to college, own land, and support a wide range of cultural and political activities.

Fatherhood is evolving in America. Stay at home dads are becoming more commonplace; men are becoming more visible in domestic, caregiving activities. In Men Can, writer, teacher, and father Donald Unger uses his personal experiences, stories of real-life families, as well as representations of fathers in film, on television, and in advertising, to illuminate the role of men in the increasingly fluid domestic sphere.

In thoughtful interviews, Don Unger tells the stories of a half dozen families—of varied ethnicities, geographical locations, and philosophical orientations—in which fathers are either primary or equally sharing parents, personalizing what is changing in how Americans care for their children. These stories are complemented by a discussion of how the language of parenting has evolved and how media representations of fathers have shifted over several decades.   

Men Can shows how real change can take place when families divide up domestic labor on a gender-neutral basis.  The families whose stories he tells offer insights into the struggles of—and opportunities for—men caring for children. When it comes to taking up the responsibility of parenting, his argument, ultimately, is in favor of respecting personal choices and individual differences, crediting and supporting functional families, rather than trying to force every household into a one-size-fits-all mold. 

Mr. Pink:
"Why can't we pick out our own color?"

Joe:
"I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black."

—Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs

Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been successive expansions in the wearing of black—from the Church to the Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by several currents in Europe's history—in politics, asceticism, religious warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with which European society regimented itself.

Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.

Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors, black has retained its authority as well as its associations with strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion keeps returning to black. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.

Mr. Pink:
"Why can't we pick out our own color?"

Joe:
"I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black."

—Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs

Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been successive expansions in the wearing of black—from the Church to the Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by several currents in Europe's history—in politics, asceticism, religious warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with which European society regimented itself.

Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.

Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors, black has retained its authority as well as its associations with strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion keeps returning to black. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.

While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne.

In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man.

We don't usually associate thriving queer culture with rural America, but John Howard's unparalleled history of queer life in the South persuasively debunks the myth that same-sex desires can't find expression outside the big city. In fact, this book shows that the nominally conservative institutions of small-town life—home, church, school, and workplace—were the very sites where queer sexuality flourished. As Howard recounts the life stories of the ordinary and the famous, often in their own words, he also locates the material traces of queer sexuality in the landscape: from the farmhouse to the church social, from sports facilities to roadside rest areas.

Spanning four decades, Men Like That complicates traditional notions of a post-WWII conformist wave in America. Howard argues that the 1950s, for example, were a period of vibrant queer networking in Mississippi, while during the so-called "free love" 1960s homosexuals faced aggressive oppression. When queer sex was linked to racial agitation and when key civil rights leaders were implicated in homosexual acts, authorities cracked down and literally ran the accused out of town.

In addition to firsthand accounts, Men Like That finds representations of homosexuality in regional pulp fiction and artwork, as well as in the number one pop song about a suicidal youth who jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge. And Howard offers frank, unprecedented assessments of outrageous public scandals: a conservative U.S. congressman caught in the act in Washington, and a white candidate for governor accused of patronizing black transgender sex workers.

The first book-length history of the queer South, Men Like That completely reorients our presuppositions about gay identity and about the dynamics of country life.

"Men Like That goes a long way towards redressing the urban bias in American lesbian and gay-history writing. . . . Howard's rigorous scholarship, which is based both on oral history and traditional historical documents . . . is enhanced by a disarmingly personal touch. . . . His insights into queerness and the mentality of the American South should be of great interest both to the professional gay historian and the general reader."—Madeleine Minson, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Howard creates a history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture. At long last an intimate and full vision of queer lives in America that did not unfold in San Francisco's discos."—Kirkus Reviews

"In this groundbreaking and engrossing analysis of gay male life in postwar Mississippi, Howard . . . boldly demonstrates that gay culture and sex not only existed but flourished in small towns."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Originally published in 1968, this classic work by renowned archaeologist Neil M. Judd is a compilation of recollections and memories of his extensive career in archaeology. The stories told are truly those of “Men Met Along the Trail,” of the archaeologists, Mormons, Indians, prospectors, ranchers, and settlers that Judd encountered in his lifelong travels and work throughout the southwestern United States and beyond. There are meetings with leading American archaeologists such as “Dean” Byron Cummings, W. H. Holmes, and Charles D. Wallace, and famous Southwestern figures including Cass Hite, Dave Rust, and John Wetherill. Throughout are tales of early field work and typical camp life, from flooded canyons, run-ins with rattlesnakes, cumbersome pack trains, and early Model T Fords, to camp pranks, food shortages, and Zuñi dance celebrations.

Written at the request of young associates who felt Judd’s lifetime of experiences in the field could be both instructive and amusing, Men Met Along the Trail provides a glimpse of archaeology when it was an emerging field of study, evolving from simple curio collecting to technologically advanced radiocarbon dating and pollen analysis. Featuring more than thirty original photographs and a new foreword by Don D. Fowler, this book is entertaining and informative, offering readers a vibrant and colorful picture of the adventures to be found in early Southwestern archaeology.

Saturated in patriotic colors, Superman and Wonder Woman are about as American as baseball and apple pie. Superman, created in 1938, materialized as the brawny answer to the Great Depression, and when Wonder Woman arrived three years later, she supported her adopted country by fighting alongside Allied troops in World War II. As the proverbial mother and father of the superhero genre, these icons appeared to a society in crisis as unwavering beacons of national morality, a quality that lent them success on the battlefield—and on the newsstand.

As new crises arise our comic-book champions continue to be called into action. They adapt and evolve but remain the same potent, if flawed, symbols of the American way. The artists in Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, wrestle with Wonder Woman’s standing as a feminist icon, position Superman as a Soviet-era weapon, and question the immigration status of both characters. Featuring more than seventy artworks that range from loving endorsements to brutal critiques of American culture, this exhibition catalog reveals the enduring presence of these characters and the diverse ways artists employ them.

Women’s labor—producing both crops and children—has long been the linchpin of male status and power throughout Africa. This book lucidly interprets the intricate relations of gender to state-building in Africa by looking historically at control over production and reproduction, from the nineteenth century to the present. Miriam Goheen examines struggles over power within the Nso chiefdom in the highlands of Western Cameroon, between the chiefdom and the state, and between men and women, as the women increasingly reject traditional marriages.
    Based on a decade of fieldwork, this work tracks the negotiations between chiefs and subchiefs and women and men over ritual power, economic power, and administrative power. Though Nso men obviously dominate their society at both the local level and nationally, women have had power of their own by virtue of their status as women. Men may own the land, for example, but women control the crops through their labor . Goheen explains clearly the place of gender in very complex historical processes, such as land tenure systems, title societies, chieftancy, marriage systems, changing ideas of symbolic capital, and internal and external politics.
    In examining women’s resistance to traditional patterns of marriage, Goheen raises the question of whether such actions truly change the balance of power between the sexes, or whether resistance to marriage is instead fostering the formation of a new elite class, since it is only the better-educated women of wealthier families who can change the dynamic of power and labor within the household.
    The issues raised in this book are not unique to Nso but apply throughout the African subcontinent. Written in a straightforward way with much of the theoretical argument in footnotes, Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops marshals important arguments of wide relevance in present-day Africa.

While much is known about prostitution and sex work from studies of female sex workers and their customers, relatively little is known about men who sell sex, either to women or other men. Particularly poorly understood are their motivations for doing so, the circumstances in which the sale of sex occurs, the meanings attached to the acts by both sex worker and client, and the HIV-related risks involved.

Each chapter, written by a national expert, is based on months and even years of interviews with male sex workers, including young boys and elderly men in some countries. The workers discuss why they do the work, what it is like, and what their behavior means to them. For example, those who have regular sex with men often strenuously affirm their heterosexuality, though there is considerable variety in their attitudes.

Each chapter relates the experiences of the male sex workers to the political economy of their neighborhood and assesses the implications of their work for HIV transmission and the AIDS epidemic. The researchers and the sex workers discuss the value of different kinds of health promotion interventions.

In Men without Maps, John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after World War II who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural maps—provided by nearly every engine of social and popular culture—gay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades, organizations, and publications for queer persons. Surveying the years from shortly before the war up to the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ibson considers male couples, who balanced domestic contentment with exterior repression, as well as single men, whose solitary lives illuminate unexplored aspects of the queer experience. Men without Maps shows how, in spite of the obstacles they faced, midcentury gay men found ways to assemble their lives and senses of self at a time of limited acceptance.

In Men without Women Eliot Borenstein examines the literature of the early Soviet period to shed new light on the iconic Russian concept of comradeship. By analyzing a variety of Russian writers who span the ideological spectrum, Borenstein provides an illuminating reading of the construction of masculinity in Soviet culture. In each example he identifies the replacement of blood ties with ideology and the creation of a social order in which the family has been supplanted by the collective.
In such works as Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel, Envy by Yuri Olesha, and Chevengur by Andrei Platonov women are either absent or transformed into bodiless abstractions. Their absence, claims Borenstein, reflects the masculine values that are hallmarks of the post-revolutionary era: production rather than reproduction, participation in history rather than domestic ahistoricity, heavy industry, construction, and struggle. He identifies in this literature groups of “men without women” replacing the family, even while the metaphor of family is used as an organizing feature of their recurring revolutionary missions. With the passage of time, these characters’ relationships—just as those in the Soviet culture of the time—begin to resemble the family structure that was originally rejected and destroyed, with one important exception: the new “families” had no place for women. According to Borenstein, this masculinist myth found its most congenial audience during the early period of communism, but its hostility to women and family ties could not survive into the Stalinist era when women, home, and family were no longer seen as antithetical to socialism.
Drawing on the theory and writings of Levi-Strauss, Girard, Sedgwick, and others, Men Without Women will be of interest to students and scholars of Slavic literature and history as well as specialists in literary theory and gender studies.

In 1986, Barry Seal—pilot, smuggler, and federal informant—was gunned down when he appeared at the time and place a federal judge had ordered him to. His assassination was blamed on members of a Colombian drug cartel intent on keeping him quiet. But questions about Seal’s relationships with drug cartels as well as high-ranking American officials have mounted since his death, inspiring conspiracy theories, books, and Hollywood thrillers.

Inquiries into Seal’s activities, including some by congressional committees, led nowhere. Many of the police files about him were reported lost; others were almost totally redacted. Nevertheless, hundreds of records have survived regarding this backwater of the Iran-Contra saga, pointing to government complicity in Seal’s shipments of cocaine into the United States and the powerful measures taken to obscure that involvement.

In brisk and meticulously footnoted order, The Mena File guides readers from the airstrip in the mountains of rural Arkansas (where Seal based his operation) to Nicaraguan jungles and then to courtrooms across the American South, culminating in a pivotal meeting in the nation’s capital. Menace lurks throughout the tale and, just as darkly, in the evidence of how law-enforcement agents who labored to bring Seal to justice found themselves undermined—and ultimately betrayed—by elected and appointed officials.