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Fullness of Life: Male Potency and Loss in Contemporary China
Get PDFThis article reviews the book The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China, by Everett Yuehong Zhang, published by Duke University Press in 2015
Storytelling that Links the Present to the Past
No full textHopkins and Josserand provide a collection of stories told by the contemporary Maya of southern Mexico. Steeped in ancient history as well as colonial influences, these stories offer a unique perspective into the language and culture of the Chol Maya. As linguists, the authors pay special attention to the structure of the narrative form and how it reflects general features and values associated with the best storytelling. The folktales collected in this volume not only provide useful insights into Chol morality, knowledge, and values, but transports the reader into the homes and lives of the storytellers
Musical power and the East-West international diplomacy
Get PDFWithin this book, the editor establishes a dialogue between historians and musicologists bringing the idea that music is not only a musicological object but can even be a powerful tool for historians to understand and narrate the history of international relations in the 20th century. In this vein, contributors to the book were selected among both disciplines and according to their respective interests within the related sub-disciplines of history and musicology, but also for their attention to particular concepts and theories the editor decided to highlight – genres (musical), Cold War, manipulation, communication, and the state
Reorienting Archeological Research on the Maya: Toward a New Definition of Polity
No full textClassic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory. The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period. Contributors include Francisco Estrada Belli, James L. Fitzsimmons, Sarah E. Jackson, Caleb Kestle, Brigitte Kovacevich, Allan Maca, Damien B. Marken, James Meierhoff, Timothy Murtha, Cynthia Robin, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Andrew Wyatt
Anthropology of the Middle East: An Overview
Get PDFThis is a review of Soraya Altorki's edited volume, "A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East," 2015. This review assesses the chapters in this volume with respect to the past, present, and the future of the field
Tracing afterlives of ethnography: in pursuit of engagements and dialogues with publics
Get PDFBook Reviewed- If Truth Be Told: The Politics of Public Ethnography (2017), Didier Fassin (ed). Duke University Press. Price: $27.95 / £22.99 ISBN: 978-0-8223-6977-6
The postcolonial politics of post-national citizenship in Portugal
Get PDFCape Verde, Let's Go addresses the postcolonial politics of citizenship in Portugal through the lens of Creole rap. It examines how Creole challenges what it means to be Portuguese and shapes notions of identity and belonging. The unique historical interactions between Portugal and Cape Verdeans, as well as the subsequent creation of Creole identities, provides the central empirical framework for this book
Hidden Genoa
Get PDFIn the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people—educated, middle class—seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival.Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the 1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have