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In Dolor y Alegría (Sorrow and Joy), fifteen mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca speak about the dramatic effects that urbanization and rapid social change have had on their lives. Sarah LeVine deftly combines these autobiographical vignettes with ethnographic material, survey findings, and her own observations. The result is a vivid picture of contrast and continuity. While many earlier publications have focused on the poor of Latin America who live at the margins of urban life, Dolor y Alegría explores the experiences of ordinary working and lower-middle class women, most of them transplants from villages and small towns to a densely populated ...
Women's schooling is strongly related to child survival and other outcomes beneficial to children throughout the developing world, but the reasons behind these statistical connections have been unclear. In Literacy and Mothering, the authors show, for the first time, how communicative change plays a key role: Girls acquire academic literacy skills, even in low-quality schools, which enable them, as mothers, to understand public health messages in the mass media and to navigate bureaucratic health services effectively, reducing risks to their children's health. With the acquisition of academic literacy, their health literacy and health navigation skills are enhanced, thereby reducing risks to...
This book constitutes the first time in the field of developmental psychology that cross-cultural roots of minority child development have been studied in their ancestral societies in a systematic way--and by an international group of researchers. Most child development and child psychology texts take cultural diversity in development into account only as an addendum or as a special case--it is not integrated into a comprehensive theory or model of development. The purpose of this text is to redress this situation by enlisting insiders' and outsiders' perspectives on socialization and development in a diverse sampling of the world's cultures, including developing regions that often lack the ...
This is the first book to examine the high-pressure lives of teenagers born under China's one-child family policy. Based on a survey of 2,273 students and 27 months of participant-observation in Chinese homes and schools, it explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the one-child policy.
Roger and Patricia Jeffery are well known for their work on religion and gender in South Asia. In their latest book, a study of the demographic processes of two castes in rural north India, they ask why fertility levels are higher among the Muslim Sheikhs than the Hindu Jats. They conclude that explanations can only partially be attributed to gender relationships and religion, and it is the economic and political interests of both groups which are the defining factors. Their marginal economic position provides little incentive for the Sheikhs to raise small families, while the Jats, who are locally dominant, are encouraged to use birth control and educate their children. The authors go on to demonstrate the significance of this analysis for a wider understanding of the problems of population and politics in India generally. The book will be invaluable for students of South Asia and for anyone interested in the demography of developing countries.
The world's 58 poorest countries are diverse in many respects, but they share the characteristic of a labor force overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture. Challenging the assumption that mass poverty and chronic hunger are insoluble problems, this book systematically explores the multiple aspects of economic development in these countries, which are home to 60 percent of the world's population. The authors offer a broad-based development strategy to raise incomes through agricultural productivity growth and expanded rural employment. They present rich new information on the rural informal sector and on agriculture-industry interactions, and they analyze the impact of macroeconomic and social...
Presenting Mayan history from the perspective of Mayan women--whose voices until now have not been documented--David Carey allows these women to present their worldviews in their native language, adding a rich layer to recent Latin American historiography, and increasing our comprehension of indigenous perspectives of the past. Drawing on years of research among the Maya that specifically documents women's oral histories, Carey gives Mayan women a platform to discuss their views on education, migrant labor, work in the home, female leadership, and globalization. These oral histories present an ideal opportunity to understand indigenous women's approach to history, the apparent contradictions in gender roles in Mayan communities, and provide a distinct conceptual framework for analyzing Guatamalan, Mayan, and Latin American history.
Environmental justice is the subtext of this collection of anxieties around the need for a sustainable future on Planet Earth. Thinkers and scholars from a diversity of backgrounds reflect on what it means and how cultures must change to greet this future. From Romania to Mexico, Bosnia to Canada, Sweden to California authors analyze and recount community experiences and expectations leading to justice for land, sea, air and wildlife. The kind of ethical weltanschauung for a society in which this kind of justice is achievable is suggested. The collection points to the myriad of single instance decisions that we must all make in living our daily lives whether in our homes, workplaces or leisure time. From good policies to sound management, governments, corporations and community-based organizations will find prudent praxis from cover to cover.
This book examines, in comparative perspective, the different ideals about family and society and how they have impacted on real family life across a number of countries in the Middle East.
Eloquence in Trouble captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigor of discourse analysis with the interpretive depth of psychological anthropology. Its careful transcriptions of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some readers and move others--beyond past academic discussion of personhood in South Asia.