Anthropology

While many have studied China's recent rise as an economic power, China itself does not exist solely in the economic realm. Ordinary Chinese still place intense value on moral obligations and the nature of the social ties that connect them to others. This study explores the moral sphere as a key to understanding how rural Chinese experience and talk about their lives in this period of rapid economic transformation. The author, who spent time in a village in southeast China's Guangdong Province over the course of a decade and a half, examines both continuities and changes in the local culture. Although some have suggested that the reform period in China has been characterized by moral cynicism, this book finds that villagers appeal to a vibrant array of moral discourses when choosing a path of personal action or evaluating the behavior of others.

Sociocultural anthropologists have taken increasing interest in the global communities established by Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, but the many streams of Eastern Christianity have so far been neglected. This book fills this gap in the literature. The chapters in this collection examine the primary distinguishing features of the Eastern traditions—iconography, hymnology, ritual, and pilgrimage—through ethnographic analysis. Particular attention is paid to the revitalization of Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches that were repressed under Marxist–Leninist regimes.

This book brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The chapters reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality, linking them to deeper understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation around the globe. They map areas that are currently at the cutting edge of social science writing on sexuality, as well as the complex interface between theory and practice. The book highlights the extent to which populations and communities that once were the object of scientific scrutiny have increasingly demanded the right to speak on their own behalf, as subjects of their own sexualities and agents of their own sexual histories.

Ancestral Pueblo farmersexpanded into the deep, productive, well-watered soils of the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado around AD 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the American Southwest. But only one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most of the people had gone. This cycle repeated itself, though with many more people, from the mid-AD 1000s until1280, when Pueblo farmers left the entire northern Southwestpermanently. Our interdisciplinary team examines how climate change, population size, conflict, resource depression, and changing social and ceremonial organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Our conclusions depend in part on comparing the output from a series of agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area. People visiting or living inthe Southwest, archaeologists working in Neolithic societies anywhere in the world, and researchers applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape and are shaped by the environments we inhabit will read this book with interest.

This book explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. It uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, the book argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a disease-like state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. The study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an entrée to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. This cross-cultural perspective gives us a new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? This book identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through its unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, it ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: “picturesque” rural and natural landscapes, “hip” urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. The book shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as “staged authenticity.” Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, it shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world.

Life on the frontier suggests excitement, danger, and backbreaking labor. In this book, the frontier is the Highlands region of what is now Papua New Guinea—a part of the world largely unexplored by Westerners as late as 1950. In the next five years, a dozen pioneering anthropologists followed closely on the heels of “first contact” patrols. Their innovative fieldwork is well documented, and now, in this intimate and detailed autobiographical collection, we learn what being on the frontier was like for the ethnographers themselves. The concluding chapter to this book points out that early work among the peoples of the Central Highlands not only influenced all subsequent understanding of Highland cultures, but also had a profound impact on the field of anthropology.

Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, receives its due in these essays by a group of anthropologists and literary scholars. The essays move beyond the simple rubric of “literacy” in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that, in certain Western contexts, reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation. The collection is filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality.

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? This book takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. The book's sweeping interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces—in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico—the book links ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.

Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. This book traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As it explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, the book finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.