Anthropology

This examination of children of immigrants in New York and London asks, “Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in school? The author challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture—the clothing, music, and tough talk—to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, she analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors, finding that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.

This book examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. The book proposes an “ethical anthropology” that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. It discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human. The book begins to integrate theological narratives with scientific ones, looking for a compelling correlation between them where modern and religious sensibilities might both be affirmed.

Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. This book argues that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, this book includes chapters by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.

Over the last three decades, migration from Mexico to the United States has moved beyond the borderlands to diverse communities across the country, with the most striking transformations in American suburbs and small towns. This study explores the challenges encountered by Mexican families as they endeavor to find their place in the U.S. by focusing on Kennett Square, a small farming village in Pennsylvania known as the “Mushroom Capital of the World.” In an account based on extensive fieldwork among Mexican migrants and their American neighbors, this book explores the issues of belonging and displacement, central concerns for residents in communities that have become new destinations for Mexican settlement. It also completes the circle of migration by following migrant families as they return to their hometown in Mexico, providing an illuminating perspective of the tenuous lives of Mexicans residing in, but not fully part of, two worlds.

Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth—routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? This book is a second edition of the text. The new preface in this edition makes it clear that the issues surrounding childbirth remain as controversial as ever. The book analyzes the technocratic method of birth, its cultural variations and alternatives, and obstetric training and women's experiences in Western culture. It covers ritual and how it is used in obstetrics, and compares the technocratic and holistic paradigms of childbirth. The book demonstrates the linkages between American core values concerning technology and expertise, and prevailing obstetrical practices.

This ethnography probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. The book shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, the book traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. The book's analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.

This book chronicles the story of disability's emergence as an area of significant sociopolitical activity in contemporary China. Attentive to how bodies are embedded in discourse, history, and personal exigency, it details ways that disability became a fount for the production of institutions and identities across the Chinese landscape during the final decades of the twentieth century. The author looks closely at the creation of the China Disabled Persons' Federation and the lives of numerous individuals, among them Deng Pufang, son of China's Communist leader Deng Xiaoping.

This combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present. The creation and interpretation of texts, from sacred scriptures to administrative and legal contracts, are among the fundamental ways that authority is established and maintained in a complex state. Yet few scholars have explored this process and the ways in which it changes, especially outside the Western world. The book brings together intensive ethnography and textual analysis from a wealth of material: Islamic jurisprudence, Yemeni histories, local documents. In exploring the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen, it raises issues that are of comparative significance for understanding political life in other Muslim and nonwestern states as well.