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By providing descriptions of the experiences of thirty rural Minnesota women, often in their own words, this timely and topical book examines the expectations, beliefs and values of the women as they grow old in rural America. A lifecourse perspective fosters a better understanding of the aging process in terms of an individual's life experiences within the context of a cultural environment. To show how various elements shaped the women's lives in later years, and to give the fullest possible descriptions, the study combines both qualitative and quantitative research of the rural elderly in Minnesota. Through their stories, the women stress the cultural, familial and personal issues that continue to be important to them as they age. They explore the elements of continuity, as well as those of change, as a part of the lifecourse. Also detailed are their insights and experiences concerning interactions with different formal and informal support networks, as well as the more general topics.
Although the religions of the Caribbean have been a subject of popular media, there have been few ethnographic publications. This text is a much-needed and long overdue addition to Caribbean studies and the exploration of ideas, beliefs, and religious practices of Caribbean folk in diaspora and at home. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research in a variety of contexts and settings, the contributors to this volume explore the relationship between religious and social life. Whether practiced at home or abroad, the contributors contend that the religions of Caribbean folk are dynamic and creative endeavors that have mediated the ongoing and open-ended relation between local and global, historical and contemporary change.
In this second edition of his classic work, Joel Savishinsky expands and updates his highly acclaimed study of mobility and stress in a sub-Arctic community of Hare Indians. Since the publication of the first edition, the Hare have faced new challenges posed by clashes between aboriginal and contemporary values in the spheres of ecology, culture and politics - from the Hare's rising ethnic and political awareness as a "Fourth World" community to cultural disagreements over animal rights and environmental preservation. The second edition reframes the context of Savishinsky's original conclusions on human-animal relations, environmentalism and native-white encounters to accommodate these new developments as well as current trends in anthropology itself.
First Published in 1998. Volume 12 in the Library of Anthropology series. This text traces the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison, a brilliant classicist and one of the 'Cambridge Anthropologists' on Jams Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Decade of critical over-emphasis on Sir James Frazer's influence on modernism have obscured the more important contributions of Harrison, who explored the chthonic Greek matriarchal cults prior to patriarchal Olympianism and originated the 'ritual theory', finding the origins of Greek drama- and ultimately of all art, in religious ritual. Harrison's images of matriarchal divinity and the feminist principles they embodied inspired these modernist writers to envision the young artist reborn as creator through symbolic union with the semiotic body.
Anthropologist and filmmaker Chapman (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris) describes the distinctive tales and beliefs of a native people who have maintained their traditional life in the tropical forests of central Honduras, as related by one member. Accessible to general readers. Translated from Enfants de la Mort (1978). Paper edition (unseen), $17. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
First Published in 1985. One of the notable objectives of the Library of Anthropology is to provide a vehicle for the expression in print of new, controversial, and seemingly unorthodox theoretical, methodological, and philosophical approaches to anthropological data. This is a book about traditions that are changing, not languishing in a moribund state and not dead, as other scholars have suggested, but changing to fit present circumstances. Since many people think of traditions as static or immutable, the author’s assertion that traditions are changing may strike readers as paradoxical, but this book deals with a paradoxical people, the Irish of Southwest Donegal, who simultaneously guard and manipulate their traditions: guarding them against the encroachments of the modern world and manipulating them for their own advantage in that world.
This volume is a unique investigation of contemporary Jewish life in a Muslim country and the first ethnography of the Persian-Jewish diaspora, giving the reader a deep appreciation of this relatively unknown culture. The author describes in detail traditional Jewish life in the provincial city of Shiraz and the challenges of coexistence with a Muslim majority.
First Published in 2000. Throughout the nineteenth century, the study of geometry remained at the core of educational curricula in the United States, strongly affecting how educated Americans construed their world. This book examines how each of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romances presents a different geometric figure that becomes representative of the work's themes and narrative designs. These geometric figures, when approached from the perspective of Victor Turner's symbolic anthropology, server as cultural mediators, combining geometric symbology with a unique narrative perspective to offer metaphors of personal and cultural boundaries, Freidman presents the literary text as the point of intersection among such disciplines as cultural anthropology, history, mathematics and American literature.
Pedrito Maynard-Reid explores the multiethnic dimensions of worship by looking at African American, Caribbean and Hispanic contexts of worship.
Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive. Casillo argues that these films cannot be ...