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The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century
No full textLos Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. In the process, it has inspired controversy among critics and scholars, as well as among its residents. Seeking original perspectives rather than consensus, the editors of The City have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. Together the essays - by experts in urban planning, architecture, geography, and sociology - create a new kind of urban analysis, one that is open to diversity but strongly committed to collective theoretical and practical understanding
Male colors: the construction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
No full textTokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class structure and gender roles. Gary P. Leupp fills the gap with a dynamic examination of the origins and nature of the tradition. Based on a wealth of literary and historical documentation, this study places Tokugawa homosexuality in a global context, exploring its implications for contemporary debates on the historical construction of sexual desire.Combing through popular fiction, law codes, religious works, medical treatises, biographical material, and artistic treatments, Leupp traces the origins of pre-Tokugawa homosexual traditions among monks and samurai, then describes the emergence of homosexual practices among commoners in Tokugawa cities. He argues that it was "nurture" rather than "nature" that accounted for such conspicuous male/male sexuality and that bisexuality was more prevalent than homosexuality. Detailed, thorough, and very readable, this study is the first in English or Japanese to address so comprehensively one of the most complex and intriguing aspects of Japanese history
The Irish Ulysses
No full textIn a radical new reading of Ulysses , Maria Tymoczko argues that previous scholarship has distorted our understanding of Joyce's epic novel by focusing on its English and continental literary sources alone. Challenging conventional views that Joyce rejected Irish literature, Tymoczko demonstrates how he used Irish imagery, myth, genres, and literary modes. For the first time, Joyce emerges as an author caught between the English and Irish literary traditions, one who, like later postcolonial writers, remakes English language literature with his own country's rich literary heritage.The author's exacting scholarship makes this book required reading for Joyce scholars, while its theoretical implications - for such issues as canon formation, the role of criticism in literary reception, and the interface of literary cultures - make it an important work for literary theorists
University of California Press eScholarship editions in process
No full textWith his investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area. He shows that Northwest Coast servitude, relatively neglected by researchers in the past, fits an appropriate cross-cultural definition of slavery. Arguing that slaves and slavery were central to these hunting-fishing-gathering societies, he points out how important slaves were to the Northwest Coast economies for their labor and for their value as major items of exchange. Slavery also played a major role in more famous and frequently analyzed Northwest Coast cultural forms such as the potlatch and the spectacular art style and ritual systems of elite groups.The book includes detailed chapters on who owned slaves and the relations between masters and slaves; how slaves were procured; transactions in slaves; the nature, use, and value of slave labor; and the role of slaves in rituals. In addition to analyzing all the available data, ethnographic and historic, on slavery in traditional Northwest Coast cultures, Donald compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America
God's daughters: evangelical women and the power of submission
No full textIn recent decades, religious conservatives and secular liberals have battled over the "appropriate" role of women in society. In this absorbing exploration of Women's Aglow Fellowship, the largest women's evangelical organization in the world, R. Marie Griffith challenges the simple generalizations often made about charismatic or "spirit-filled" Christian women and uncovers important connections between Aglow members and the feminists to whom they so often seem opposed. Women's Aglow is an international, interdenominational group of "spirit-filled" women who meet outside the formal church structure for healing prayer, worship, and testimony. Aglow represents a wider evangelical culture that has gained recent media attention as women inspired by the Christian men's group, Promise Keepers, have initiated parallel groups such as Praise Keepers and Promise Reapers. These groups are generally newcomers to an institutional landscape that Aglow has occupied for thirty years, but their beliefs and commitments are very similar to Aglow's. While historians have examined earlier women's prayer groups, they've tended to ignore these modern-day evangelical groups because of their assumed connection to the "religious right." God's Daughters reveals a devotional world in which oral and written testimonies recount the afflictions of human life and the means for seeking relief and divine assistance. A relationship with God, envisioned as father, husband or lover, and friend, is a way to come to terms with pain, dysfunctional family relationships, and a desire for intimacy. Griffith's book is also valuable in showing the complex role that women play within Pentecostalism, a movement that has become one of the most important in twentieth-century world religions
No safe place: toxic waste, leukemia, and community action
No full textToxic waste, contaminated water, cancer clusters - these phrases suggest deception and irresponsibility. But more significantly, they are watchwords for a growing struggle between communities, corporations, and government. In No Safe Place , sociologists, public policy professionals, and activists will learn how residents of Woburn, Massachusetts discovered a childhood leukemia cluster and eventually sued two corporate giants. Their story gives rise to questions important to any concerned citizen: What kind of government regulatory action can control pollution? Just how effective can the recent upsurge of popular participation in science and technology be? Phil Brown, a medical sociologist, and Edwin Mikkelsen, psychiatric consultant to the plaintiffs, look at the Woburn experience in light of similar cases, such as Love Canal, in order to show that toxic waste contamination reveals fundamental flaws in the corporate, governmental, and scientific spheres.The authors strike a humane, constructive note amidst chilling odds, advocating extensive lay involvement based on the Woburn model of civic action. Finally, they propose a safe policy for toxic wastes and governmental/corporate responsibility. Woburn, the authors predict, will become a code word for environmental struggles
Passions of the tongue: language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970
No full textWhy would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language
Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture
No full textBringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City , the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies
Evolution of sickness and healing
No full textEvolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine.To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework
Changing the rules: the politics of liberalization and the urban informal economy in Tanzania
No full textHow are people in one of Africa's largest cities, Dar es Salaam, capable of surviving day to day when the downward decline of Tanzania's economy has become so pronounced that even high-ranking state employees receive among the lowest incomes in the country? In this impressively researched and highly original study, Aili Mari Tripp shows how the people of Dar es Salaam, through creativity and considerable ingenuity, supply for themselves the various goods and services that the government can no longer provide. With the growth of an informal economy, they have demonstrated resistance to state control, resulting in broad political, economic and social transformations within Tanzania. Moreover, the unprecedented participation of women in informal economic activities has had a profound effect on gender relations.Tripp incorporates in-depth interviews and a field survey conducted at the household and micro-enterprise level in examining the influence and impact of the urban informal economy on Tanzanian society. This informal sector encompasses the enterprises of masons, cooks, cobblers, and tailors; a dizzying myriad of market vendors; even educators and doctors. Tripp shows how the urban informal economy challenges state-defined bases of social justice with alternative notions of economic equity. Her work is an essential contribution to the study of African politics and state-society relations