When E. Franklin Frazier was elected the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, he was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations. By 1948 his lengthy list of publications included over fifty articles and four major books, including the acclaimed Negro Family in the United States. Frazier was known for his thorough scholarship and his mastery of skills in both history and sociology.

With the publication of Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955 (translated in 1957 as Black Bourgeoisie), Frazier apparently set out on a different track, one in which he employed his skills in a critical analysis of the black middle class. The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe. While Frazier published four additional books after 1948, Black Bourgeoisie remained by far his most controversial.

Given his status in American sociology, there has been surprisingly little study of Frazier's work. In E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie, a group of distinguished scholars remedies that lack, focusing on his often-scorned Black Bourgeoisie.

This in-depth look at Frazier's controversial publication is relevant to the growing concerns about racism, problems in our cities, the limitations of affirmative action, and the promise of self-help.

The political involvement of earlier waves of immigrants and their children was essential in shaping the American political climate in the first half of the twentieth century. Immigrant votes built industrial trade unions, fought for social protections and religious tolerance, and helped bring the Democratic Party to dominance in large cities throughout the country. In contrast, many scholars find that today's immigrants, whose numbers are fast approaching those of the last great wave, are politically apathetic and unlikely to assume a similar voice in their chosen country. E Pluribus Unum? delves into the wealth of research by historians of the Ellis Island era and by social scientists studying today's immigrants and poses a crucial question: What can the nation's past experience teach us about the political path modern immigrants and their children will take as Americans? E Pluribus Unum? explores key issues about the incorporation of immigrants into American public life, examining the ways that institutional processes, civic ideals, and cultural identities have shaped the political aspirations of immigrants. The volume presents some surprising re-assessments of the past as it assesses what may happen in the near future. An examination of party bosses and the party machine concludes that they were less influential political mobilizers than is commonly believed. Thus their absence from today's political scene may not be decisive. Some contributors argue that the contemporary political system tends to exclude immigrants, while others remind us that past immigrants suffered similar exclusions, achieving political power only after long and difficult struggles. Will the strong home country ties of today's immigrants inhibit their political interest here? Chapters on this topic reveal that transnationalism has always been prominent in the immigrant experience, and that today's immigrants may be even freer to act as dual citizens. E Pluribus Unum? theorizes about the fate of America's civic ethos—has it devolved from an ideal of liberal individualism to a fractured multiculturalism, or have we always had a culture of racial and ethnic fragmentation? Research in this volume shows that today's immigrant schoolchildren are often less concerned with ideals of civic responsibility than with forging their own identity and finding their own niche within the American system of racial and ethnic distinction. Incorporating the significant influx immigrants into American society is a central challenge for our civic and political institutions—one that cuts to the core of who we are as a people and as a nation. E Pluribus Unum? shows that while today's immigrants and their children are in some ways particularly vulnerable to political alienation, the process of assimilation was equally complex for earlier waves of immigrants. This past has much to teach us about the way immigration is again reshaping the nation.

This book is the first of its kind to bring transparency to the FBI’s attempts to destroy the incipient Chicano Movement of the 1960s. While the activities of the deep state are current research topics, this has not always been the case. The role of the U.S. government in suppressing marginalized racial and ethnic minorities began to be documented with the advent of the Freedom of Information Act and most recently by disclosures of whistle blowers. This book utilizes declassified files from the FBI to investigate the agency’s role in thwarting Cesar E. Chavez’s efforts to build a labor union for farm workers and documents the roles of the FBI, California state police, and local police in assisting those who opposed Chavez. Ultimately, The Eagle Has Eyes is a must-read for academics and activists alike.

Eagles on Their Buttons is a fascinating examination of the Fifth Regiment of Infantry, United States Colored Troops—the Union Army's first black regiment from Ohio. Although the Fifth USCT was one of more than 150 regiments of black troops making up more than 10 percent of the Union Army at the end of the war, it was unique. The majority of USCT regiments were made up of freed men who viewed the army as an escape from slavery and a chance to take up arms against their former masters. The men serving in the 5th USCT, however, were freemen who were raised in a northern state and saw serving in the army both as a way to gain equal rights under the law and as an opportunity to prove their worth as men.

Because historians have written little on this subject, many Americans believe that African Americans simply received their freedom with the Emancipation Proclamation. They know nothing about the struggles these courageous people endured to gain their independence. Now, by incorporating personal documents, letters, diaries, and official records, Eagles on Their Buttons sheds important new light on this unfamiliar aspect of the Civil War. Versalle Washington shows what caused the soldiers in the Fifth USCT to join their regiment, what sort of men they were, and how they fought and lived as African American soldiers under white officers. He discusses the regiment's service, addressing its role in the siege of Petersburg, the battle of Chapin's Farm, and the capture of Fort Fisher and the port of Wilmington. Washington also looks at what effects the soldiers' service had in terms of societal changes following the Civil War.

Eagles on Their Buttons is a fresh contribution to Civil War scholarship and will be welcomed by professional historians and amateur Civil War buffs alike.

This book is part of the University of Missouri Press' Shades of Blue and Gray series.

The ancient Romans' story down to 264 B.C. can be made credible by stripping away their later myths and inventions to show how their national character shaped their destiny.

After many generations of scholarly study, consensus is clear: the account in writers like Livy is not to be trusted because their aims were different from ours in history-writing. They wanted their work to be both improving and diverting. It should grow out of the real past, yes, but if that reality couldn't be recovered, or was uncertain, their art did not forbid invention. It more than tolerated dramatic incidents, passions, heroes, heroines, and villains. If, however, all this resulting ancient fiction and adornment are pruned away, a national character can be seen in the remaining bits and pieces of credible information, to explain the familiar story at least in its outlines.

To doubt the written sources has long been acceptable, but this or that detail or narrative section must always be left for salvage by special pleading. To press home the logic of doubt is new. To reach beyond the written sources for a better support in excavated evidence is no novelty; but it is a novelty, to find in archeology the principal substance of the narrative—which is the choice in this book. To use this in turn for the discovery of an ethnic personality, a Roman national character, is key and also novel.

What is repeatedly illustrated and emphasized here is the distance traveled by the art or craft of understanding the past—"history" in that sense—over the course of the last couple of centuries. The art cannot be learned, because it cannot be found, through studying Livy and Company. Readers who care about either of the two disciplines contrasted, Classics and History, may find this argument of interest.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African and pseudo-African performers were displayed as curiosities throughout Europe and America. Appearing in circuses, ethnographic exhibitions, and traveling shows, these individuals and troupes drew large crowds. As Bernth Lindfors shows, the showmen, impresarios, and even scientists who brought supposedly representative inhabitants of the "Dark Continent" to a gaping public often selected the performers for their sensational impact. Spotlighting and exaggerating physical, mental, or cultural differences, the resulting displays reinforced pernicious racial stereotypes and left a disturbing legacy.
            Using period illustrations and texts, Early African Entertainments Abroad illuminates the mindset of the era's largely white audiences as they viewed wax models of Africans with tails and watched athletic competitions showcasing hungry cannibals. White spectators were thus assured of their racial superiority. And blacks were made to appear less than fully human precisely at the time when abolitionists were fighting to end slavery and establish equality.

The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I.
M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians in
this survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East,
Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and his
colleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxist
historiographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessible
synthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings of
agriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greek
colonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas.

Besides discussing features of Soviet historical
scholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat the
history of early Mesopotamia and the course of Pharaonic
Egyptian civilization and developments in ancient India and
China from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C.
Additional chapters are concerned with the early history of
Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization,
the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenician
and Greek colonization.

This volume offers a unified perspective on early
antiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations of
production. Of immense value to specialists, the book will
also appeal to general readers.

I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancient
history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad
Academy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor of
anthropology at Wellesley College.

With the publication in 1937 of his first book, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons (1902-79) established himself as one of America's most important social theorists. Yet Parsons's essays from the decade preceding 1937 are virtually unknown to theorists and historians of sociology. By gathering the majority of Parsons's articles and book reviews published between 1923 and 1937, Charles Camic supplies the first comprehensive selection of the writings of the "early Parsons."

In his superb introductory essay, Camic situates Parsons's early writings in their sociointellectual and biographical context. Drawing upon extensive historical research, he identifies three overlapping but relatively distinct thematic phases in the early development of Paron's ideas: that on capitalist society and its origins, that one the historical development of the theory of action, and that on the foundations of analytical sociology. Camic correlates the emergence of these phases to Parsons's experiences at Amherst College in the early 1920s, in London and Heidelberg during the mid-1920s, and at Harvard University in the important period from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. Reproducing in full each of twenty-one selections, this volume charts the changes and continues in the early development of some of Parsons's most fundamental ideas.

This volume presents the multiyear archaeological investigations of Cerro Juanaqueña and related sites in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. These remarkable terraced hilltop settlements represent a series of watershed developments, including substantial dependence on agriculture and early experiments with village living, fortified settlements, collective labor, and communal architecture. Part of a larger, regional development, they parallel changes in northern Sonora and southern Arizona. The emergence of large fortified agricultural villages at 1300 BC—before the use of ceramics—was an unexpected discovery that changed how archaeologists view early agriculture in this region.
 
The authors place their work in a regional and theoretical context, providing detailed analyses of radiocarbon dates, structures, features, and artifacts. Authors Hard and Roney, and their contributors, present innovative analyses of plant and animal remains, ground stone, chipped stone, and landscape evolution. Through comparisons with a global cross-cultural probe of hilltop sites and a detailed examination of the features and artifacts of Cerro Juanaqueña, Hard and Roney argue that these cerros de trincheras sites are the earliest fortified defensive sites in the region. Readers with interests in ancient agriculture, warfare, village formation, and material culture will find this to be a foundational volume.

Using more than 300 illustrations, the authors present an encyclopedic analysis of the many types of pottery found in the Oaxaca Valley in the Early Formative period. From details of sherd profiles and tempers to discussions of the growth of various villages, this volume is an exhaustively thorough treatment of the topic and represents decades of archaeological fieldwork in the region.

 An introduction to the multidisciplinary field of hominin paleoecology for advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students, Early Hominin Paleoecology offers an up-to-date review of the relevant literature, exploring new research and synthesizing old and new ideas.

Recent advances in the field and the laboratory are not only improving our understanding of human evolution but are also transforming it. Given the increasing specialization of the individual fields of study in hominin paleontology, communicating research results and data is difficult, especially to a broad audience of graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and the interested public. Early Hominin Paleoecology provides a good working knowledge of the subject while also presenting a solid grounding in the sundry ways this knowledge has been constructed. The book is divided into three sections—climate and environment (with a particular focus on the latter), adaptation and behavior, and modern analogs and models—and features contributors from various fields of study, including archaeology, primatology, paleoclimatology, sedimentology, and geochemistry.

Early Hominin Paleoecology is an accessible introduction into this fascinating and ever-evolving field and will be essential to any student interested in pursuing research in human paleoecology.

Additional Contributors:
David Braun
Beth Christensen
David J. Daegling
Crag Feibel
Fred E. Grine
Clifford Jolly
Naomi E. Levin
Mark A. Maslin
John Mitani
Jay Quade
Amy L. Rector
Jeanne Sept
Lillian M. Spencer
Mark Teaford
Carol V. Ward
Katy E. Wilson

Contributions from anthropology, history, political science, literature, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse influences America had on Europe. Topics covered include the impact of early botanical and geographic studies on Europe and on the scientific revolution, the structure of indigenous and colonial cultures, and the ideology and ethics of conquest and enslavement. Together, these essays constitute a reevaluation of the images held by the first colonists via new ways of understanding some of the main figures, processes, and events of that era.

The site of Olszanica, in southeastern Poland, contains remains of a large Early Neolithic settlement of the Linear Pottery culture. This monograph presents the results of the archaeological excavations conducted from 1967 to 1973.

Charles H. McNutt reports on excavations at the Tesuque By-Pass site in the northern Rio Grande Valley, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He found three Puebloan components and two pithouse occupations, spanning the period from about AD 900 to 1300. He includes detailed discussions of pottery and related ceramic complexes, as well as comparisons to other occupations in the area. Appendix on faunal remains by Arthur J. Jelinek.

The Deh Luran Plain is a microcosm of Mesopotamia and important for the study of a variety of processes in cultural evolution. In this volume (the first of three planned on this project), the authors present a detailed archaeological survey covering periods from the earliest occupation of the plain up to the mid-third millennium BC.

Distant Madagascar, the island at the end of the world, has many lessons to teach. The ancestors of the Malagasy people established themselves at least 1500 years ago. Again and again since their arrival, the Malagasy have created new kinds of political communities. This study concerns archaeological survey and excavations in the indigenous state of Imerina in the central highlands.

Ethnographic observations and experiences on the Tongan Islands up to 1810—just prior to intensive Christian missionary activities—provide an early historic baseline of culture for those interested in alter culture change in Tonga, the only Polynesian island group that has never been ruled by outsiders. Ferdon has drawn on a variety of records to provide a well-documented and highly readable account of major aspects of Tongan life—material culture, government, food and drink, recreation, customs, trade, and warfare—at the time when European influences were only beginning to modify traditional island patterns.

The ethnohistorical approach to early Tongan culture offers not only a fascinating glimpse into a world long past but also a basis for the comparative study of European acculturation throughout Polynesia.

Edwin N. Ferdon first became interested in early Polynesia while serving as an archaeologist with Thor Heyerdahl’s 1955 expedition to Easter Island. He is also the author of Early Tahiti As the Explorers Saw It, 1767–1797.

The site of Tepe Farukhabad, in southwestern Iran, dates to the fourth millenium BC. In this monograph, editor Henry T. Wright presents archaeological data from the Tepe Farukhabad excavations. For each phase of the site, the authors give detailed descriptions of the structures and artifacts, including ceramics, stone, bone, metal, textile, and faunal remains. With his interpretation of this data, Wright advances our understanding of early exchange in southwest Asia and of development of early states.

This special issue of Camera Obscura, which gathers work from leading feminists in film studies, takes a fresh look at early film and the creative ventures of women performers. While much of the existing scholarship of the silent era focuses on film form and industrial organization, the essays collected here aim to recover women’s roles in the early decades of cinema. They do so in part by considering the ways in which social and ideological economies of the industry contributed to the complex semiotics of film stardom of the period.
Essays focus on figures across the wide international lexicon of stardom, including stunt star Pearl White, iconic French performer Musidora, imported European vamp Pola Negri, pixie heroine Colleen Moore, and Chinese star Xuan Jinglin. Other articles revisit figures, such as Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo, whose stardom appears to be self-evident but proves more complex than previous accounts have suggested. In this collection, early female stars function as a medium through which authors reconceptualize feminist film history and historiography.

Contributors. Jennifer M. Bean, Vicki Callahan, Lucy Fischer, Amelie Hastie, Diane Negra, Gaylyn Studlar, Zhen Zhang

The Schultz site is an Early Woodland site on the Tittabawassee River in Saginaw County, Michigan. In this volume, author Doreen Ozker describes the site: its stratigraphy and plant and faunal remains, as well as ceramics and lithics. She also situates the site in the context of the Early Woodland community. She distinguishes Late Archaic and Early Woodland from each other, and as a result, redefines Early Woodland culture.

The half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges.Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and gender-balanced American cities. Moreover, its accelerated urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region’s history as political and social players, employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles’s economy, as well as about the ways women participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women’s work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics.

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not abide by binary logics—reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work.

 

Earth Politics focuses on the lives of four indigenous activist-intellectuals in Bolivia, key leaders in the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP), a movement established to claim rights for indigenous education and reclaim indigenous lands from hacienda owners. The AMP leaders invented a discourse of decolonization, rooted in part in native religion, and used it to counter structures of internal colonialism, including the existing racial systems. Waskar Ari calls their social movement, practices, and discourse earth politics, both because the AMP emphasized the idea of the earth and the place of Indians on it, and because of the political meaning that the AMP gave to the worship of the Aymara gods. Depicting the social worlds and life work of the activists, Ari traverses Bolivia's political and social landscape from the 1920s into the early 1970s. He reveals the AMP 's extensive geographic reach, genuine grassroots quality, and vibrant regional diversity. Ari had access to the private archives of indigenous families, and he collected oral histories, speaking with men and women who knew the AMP leaders. The resulting examination of Bolivian indigenous activism is one of unparalleled nuance and depth.

In this book, Mwenda Ntarangwi analyzes how young hip hop artists in the East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania showcase the opportunities and challenges brought by the globalization of music. Combining local popular music traditions with American and Jamaican styles of rap, East African hip hop culture reflects the difficulty of creating commercially accessible music while honoring tradition and East African culture. Ntarangwi pays special attention to growing cross-border exchanges within East African hip hop, collaborations in recording music and performances, and themes and messages that transcend local geographic boundaries.

In using hip hop as a medium for discussing changes in East African political, economic, and social conditions, artists vocalize their concerns about economic policies, African identity, and political establishments, as well as important issues of health (such as HIV/AIDS), education, and poverty. Through three years of fieldwork, rich interviews with artists, and analysis of live performances and more than 140 songs, Ntarangwi finds that hip hop provides youth an important platform for social commentary and cultural critique and calls attention to the liberating youth music culture in East Africa.

During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.

Between 1919-1938,   contact between Asia and America forced a reassessment of the normative boundaries of race, sex, gender, class, home, and nation. Karen Kuo’s provocative East Is West and West Is East looks closely at these global shifts to modernity.

In her analysis of five forgotten texts—the 1930 film East Is West, Frank Capra’s 1937 version of Lost Horizon and its 1973 remake, Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West, and Baroness Ishimoto’s memoir/manifesto, Facing Both Ways—Kuo elucidates how “Asia” played a role in shaping American gender and racial identities and how Asian authors understood modern America and its social, political, and cultural influence on Asia.

Kuo asserts that while notions of white and Asian racial difference remain salient, sexual and gendered constructions of Asians and whites were at times about similarity and intersections as much as they were about establishing differences. 
 

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars. 
 
 

This volume presents the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokees during the nineteenth century. This group – the tribal remnant in North Carolina that escaped removal in the 1830’s – found their fortitude and resilience continually tested as they struggled with a variety of problems, including the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction, internal divisiveness, white encroachment on their lands, and a poorly defined relationship with the state and federal governments. Yet despite such stresses and a selective adaptation in the face of social and economic changes, the Eastern Cherokees retained a sense of tribal identity as they stood at the threshold of the twentieth century.

How did Americans come to believe that working at home is feasible, productive, and desirable? Easy Living examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of national magazines and newspapers, television and film, and marketing and advertising materials from the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries, Easy Living traces changing concepts about what it meant to work in the home. These ideas reflected larger social, political-economic, and technological trends of the times. Elizabeth A. Patton reveals that the notion of the home as a space that exists solely in the private sphere is a myth, as the social meaning of the home and its market value in relation to the public sphere are intricately linked.

Hailed as a classic when initially published in 1961, Eat Not This Flesh was the first book that explored, from a historical and cultural perspective, taboos against eating certain kinds of flesh. Frederick J. Simoons's research remains original and invaluable, the only attempt of its kind to reconstruct the origin and spread of food avoidances while challenging current Western explanations. In this expanded and updated edition, Simoons integrates new research as he examines the use and avoidance of flesh foods—including beef, pork, chicken, and eggs, camel, dog, horse, and fish—from antiquity to the present day.
    Simoons suggests that Westerners are too ready, even in the absence of supporting evidence, to cite contemporary thinking about disease and environmental factors to explain why certain cultures avoid particular kinds of meat. He demonstrates how historical and archaeological evidence fails to support such explanations. He examines the origin of pork rejection in the Near East, explores the concept of the sacred cow in India and the ensuing ban on beef, and reveals how some African women abstain from chicken and eggs, fearing infertility. 
    While no single explanation exists for food taboos, Simoons finds that the powerful, recurrent theme of maintaining ritual purity, good health, and well-being underlies diet habits. He emphasizes that only a full range of factors can explain eating patterns, and he stresses the interplay of religious, moral, hygienic, ecological, and economic factors in the context of human culture. Maps, drawings, and photos highlighting food avoidance patterns in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific provide additional information throughout the book.

Eating Right in America is a powerful critique of dietary reform in the United States from the late nineteenth-century emergence of nutritional science through the contemporary alternative food movement and campaign against obesity. Charlotte Biltekoff analyzes the discourses of dietary reform, including the writings of reformers, as well as the materials they created to bring their messages to the public. She shows that while the primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people to "eat right" in the U.S. inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-threatened American middle class. Without discounting the pleasures of food or the value of wellness, Biltekoff advocates a critical reappraisal of our obsession with diet as a proxy for health. Based on her understanding of the history of dietary reform, she argues that talk about "eating right" in America too often obscures structural and environmental stresses and constraints, while naturalizing the dubious redefinition of health as an individual responsibility and imperative.

In Eating the Ocean Elspeth Probyn investigates the profound importance of the ocean and the future of fish and human entanglement. On her ethnographic journey around the world's oceans and fisheries, she finds that the ocean is being simplified in a food politics that is overwhelmingly land based and preoccupied with buzzwords like "local" and "sustainable." Developing a conceptual tack that combines critical analysis and embodied ethnography, she dives into the lucrative and endangered bluefin tuna market, the gendered politics of "sustainability," the ghoulish business of producing fish meal and fish oil for animals and humans, and the long history of encounters between humans and oysters. Seeing the ocean as the site of the entanglement of multiple species—which are all implicated in the interactions of technology, culture, politics, and the market—enables us to think about ways to develop a reflexive ethics of taste and place based in the realization that we cannot escape the food politics of the human-fish relationship. 

 

An insightful map of the landscape of social meals, Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality argues that the ways in which Americans eat together play a central role in social life in the United States. Delving into a wide range of research, Alice P. Julier analyzes etiquette and entertaining books from the past century and conducts interviews and observations of dozens of hosts and guests at dinner parties, potlucks, and buffets. She finds that when people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to share meals within their households, social inequalities involving race, economics, and gender reveal themselves in interesting ways: relationships are defined, boundaries of intimacy or distance are set, and people find themselves either excluded or included.

From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.

E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.

Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.

Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon’s paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines—including religious studies, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and film theory—Ecce Homo explores the complex, ambiguous meanings of the enduring figure of the male-body-in-pain.

The Echo of Things is a compelling ethnographic study of what photography means to the people of Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands. Christopher Wright examines the contemporary uses of photography and expectations of the medium in Roviana, as well as people's reactions to photographs made by colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Roviana people, photographs are unique objects; they are not reproducible, as they are in Euro-American understandings of the medium. Their status as singular objects contributes to their ability to channel ancestral power, and that ability is a key to understanding the links between photography, memory, and history in Roviana. Filled with the voices of Roviana people, The Echo of Things is both a nuanced study of the lives of photographs in a particular cultural setting and a provocative inquiry into our own understandings of photography.

This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China's War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. By presenting women's remembrances of the war, this study examines the interplay between oral history and traditional historical narrative, public discourse, and private memories. The women interviewed came from differing social, economic, and educational backgrounds and experienced the war in a variety of ways, some of them active in the communist resistance and others trying to support families or pursue educations in the face of wartime upheaval. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. The accounts of how women coped, worked, and lived during the war years in the Chongqing region recast historical understanding of the roles played by ordinary people in wartime and give women a public voice and face that, until now, have been missing from scholarship on the war.

This volume presents a broad overview of the work of seven of Africa’s leading poets. Five of them have received international recognition: Niyi Osundare and Chinua Achebe, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Osundare and Antonio Jacinto, the Noma Prize; and Jose Craveirinha, the Camoes Prize. The poems concern political, personal, and social themes and are written with aesthetic simplicity and lyricism. The contributors believe that poets, rather than being exiles from their communities, are prophets, seers, and singers and have a place in everyday life. Most of the poems have been published previously. Several, however, are new, and their appearance in this volume along with an introductory essay written by each poet, makes this anthology important, original, and fresh.

Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf, Wagner’s Valkyrie Brünnhilde, Marvel’s superhero the Mighty Thor, the warrior heading for Valhalla in Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” and Donald Crisp’s portrayal of Leif Eriksson in the classic film The Viking—these are just a few examples of how Icelandic medieval literature has shaped human imagination during the past 150 years. Echoes of Valhalla is a unique look at modern adaptations of the Icelandic eddas (poems of Norse mythology) and sagas (ancient prose accounts of Viking history, voyages, and battles) across an astonishing breadth of art forms.

Jón Karl Helgason looks at comic books, plays, travel books, music, and films in order to explore the reincarnations of a range of legendary characters, from the Nordic gods Thor and Odin to the saga characters Hallgerd Long-legs, Gunnar of Hlidarendi, and Leif the Lucky. Roaming the globe, Helgason unearths echoes of Nordic lore in Scandinavia, Britain, America, Germany, Italy, and Japan. He examines the comic work of Jack Kirby and cartoon work of Peter Madsen; reads the plays of Henrik Ibsen and Gordon Bottomley; engages thought travelogues by Frederick Metcalfe and Poul Vad; listens to the music of Richard Wagner, Edward Elgar, and the metal band Manowar; and watches films by directors such as Roy William Neill and Richard Fleischer, outlining the presence of the eddas and sagas in these nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.  

Altogether, Echoes of Valhalla tells the remarkable story of how disparate, age-old poetry and prose originally recorded in remote areas of medieval Iceland have come to be a part of our shared cultural experience today—how Nordic gods and saga heroes have survived and how their colorful cast of characters and adventures they went on are as vibrant as ever.
 

Drawing on the insights of ecology, feminism, and socialism, ecofeminism's basic premise is that the ideology that authorizes oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology that sanctions the oppression of nature. In this collection of essays, feminist scholars and activists discuss the relationships among human begins, the natural environment, and nonhuman animals. They reject the nature/culture dualism of patriarchal thought and locate animals and humans within nature. The goal of these twelve articles is to contribute to the evolving dialogue among feminists, ecofeminists, animal liberationists, deep ecologists, and social ecologists in an effort to create a sustainable lifestyle for all inhabitants of the earth.

Among the issues addressed are the conflicts between Green politics and ecofeminism, various applications of ecofeminist theory, the relationship of animal liberation to ecofeminism, harmful implications of the romanticized woman-nature association in Western culture, and cultural limitations of ecofeminism.

In the series Ethics and Action, edited by Tom Regan.

Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, “In order to secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture.” In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how Mumford’s conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford’s mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture―through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines. 

Cohen explores Mumford’s important vision of ecohumanism—a synthesis of natural systems ecology with the myriad dimensions of human systems, or human ecology―and how McHarg actually formulated and made that vision happen. He considers the emergence of alternative energy systems and new approaches to planning and community development to achieve these goals.

The ecohumanism graduate curriculum should become the basis to train the next generation of planners and designers to lead us into the ecological culture, thereby securing the educational legacy of both Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance.

This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy.

By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.
 

Environmental practices among Mexican American woman have spurred a reconsideration of ecofeminism among Chicana feminists. Christina Holmes examines ecological themes across the arts, Chicana activism, and direct action groups to reveal how Chicanas can craft alternative models for ecofeminist processes. Holmes revisits key debates to analyze issues surrounding embodiment, women's connections to nature, and spirituality's role in ecofeminist philosophy and practice. By doing so, she challenges Chicanas to escape the narrow frameworks of the past in favor of an inclusive model of environmental feminism that alleviates Western biases. Holmes uses readings of theory, elaborations of ecological narratives in Chicana cultural productions, histories of human and environmental rights struggles in the Southwest, and a description of an activist exemplar to underscore the importance of living with decolonializing feminist commitment in body, nature, and spirit.

In the 1980s, ecofeminism and the U.S. Green movement seemed to offer some of this country's most powerful and promising solutions to problems of social and environmental justice. A decade later, ecofeminism has become more a perspective than a movement, and divisions within the Greens have deepened as its  national focus has shifted from issue-based politics to party building. Why have these movements faltered?

A member of both movements, Greta Gaard bases her analysis on her personal experience as well as extensive secondary sources and interviews with key theorists, activists, and speakers across the United States. By allowing each movement's members to speak for themselves, she traces the separate origins and development of each movement, explains their  connections, and reveals the light that each can cast upon the other and on the difficulties facing social action in general.

Beginning with the ecofeminists, Gaard describes the paths -- environmental causes, the feminist peace movement, the feminist spirituality movement, the animal liberation movement, and the anti-toxics movements, as well as experiences of interconnectedness -- that have led women (and a few men) to articulate an ecofeminist perspective. Tracing the movement from the 1980s to the present, she defines its present strands as liberal ecofeminism, radical ecofeminism, socialist ecofeminism, and social ecofeminism.

Gaard illustrates the development of the U.S. Greens from a national movement into a political party. She defines the various factions -- the Left Greens, the Youth Greens, and the Green Politics Network -- that influenced the movement's direction and underlay the debates during Ralph Nadar's 1996 presidential campaign. She shows how the history of these three groups can be seen as stages in the transition from a leftist and sometimes anarchist action that places the Green movement squarely within the pattern of other social movements around the world.

Despite the significant influence that ecofeminists have had in shaping the Greens as a national movement, many have chosen to withdraw from the Greens. Gaard looks at the reasons for member disaffection and draws disturbing conclusions about the compatibility between liberal feminism and cultural ecofeminism and patriarchal politics. She also presents the divisions within the Greens as ongoing battles within the new left, the radical ecology movement, and  various social justice movements. She focuses on three general areas -- conflicts over philosophy, conflicts  over representation, and conflicts over strategy -- to make suggestions for how to bring about the kind of social transformation envisioned by both the Greens and the ecofeminists. Arguing that the Concord Principles represent a populist form of liberal democracy that fundamentally betrays both ecofeminism and Green philosophy, she uses the 1996 Nadar campaign as a departure point to developing an ecofeminist theory of radical democracy and to speculate on future directions for Green politics and for ecofeminism. Her analysis illuminates the nature and direction of each of these important movements and the pressures and conflicts experienced by all social movements at the end of the twentieth century.

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.

In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.

A rich ethnography of ecopolitics in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, as the region shifted to Chinese sovereignty, Ecologies of Comparison describes how ecological concepts of uniqueness and scale resonated among environmentalists, including those seeking to preserve a species of white dolphin, to protect an aging fishing village from redevelopment, and to legitimize air quality as an object of political and medical concern. During his research, Tim Choy became increasingly interested in the power of the notion of specificity. While documenting the expert and lay production of Hong Kong’s biological, cultural, and political specificities, he began comparing the logics and narrative forms that made different types of specificity—such as species, culture, locality, and state autonomy—possible and meaningful. He came to understand these logics and forms as “ecologies of comparison,” conceptual practices through which an event or form of life comes to matter in environmentalist and other political terms. Choy’s ethnography is about environmentalism, Hong Kong, and the ways that we think about environmentalism in Hong Kong and other places. It is also about how politics, freedom, culture, expertise, and other concepts figure in comparison-based knowledge practices.

The Ecology of Others presents a compelling challenge to anthropologists, ecologists, and environmental studies scholars to rethink the way we conceive of humans, objects, and the environment. Thought-provoking and engagingly written, it will be required reading for all those interested in moving beyond the moving beyond the confines of this fascinating debate.