Anthropology

Urban poverty, along with all of its poignant manifestations, is moving from city centers to working-class and industrial suburbs in contemporary America, and nowhere is this more evident than in East St. Louis, Illinois. Once a thriving manufacturing and transportation center, East St. Louis is now known for its unemployment, crime, and collapsing infrastructure. This book takes us into the lives of East St. Louis's predominantly African American residents to find out what has happened since industry abandoned the city, and jobs, quality schools, and city services disappeared, leaving people isolated and imperiled. It introduces men who search for meaning and opportunity in dead-end jobs, women who often take on caretaking responsibilities until well into old age, and parents who have the impossible task of protecting their children in this dangerous, and literally toxic, environment. Illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs showing how the city has changed over time, the book, full of stories of courage and fortitude, offers a vision of the transformed circumstances of life in one American suburb.

This investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America contributes to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area, and 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, the book 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, it compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America.

This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. The author of this book gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. The text weaves together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world. As the book explores the culture of the kazoku, it places each subject in its historical context, and analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders. But the book is not simply about the elite, but about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema, who, over the course of a fifty-year career, completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Rouch's practical filmmaking methods, which he developed while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvization by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, the author reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch's pioneering career, the author examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch's cinematographic legacy.

The evolution of American spirituality over the past fifty years is the subject of this book. The book uses in-depth interviews and a broad range of resource materials to show how Americans, from teenagers to senior citizens, define their spiritual journeys. The findings are a telling reflection of the changes in beliefs and lifestyles that have occurred throughout the United States in recent decades. The book reconstructs the social and cultural reasons for an emphasis on a spirituality of dwelling (houses of worship, denominations, neighborhoods) during the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, a spirituality of seeking began to emerge, leading individuals to go beyond established religious institutions. In subsequent chapters, the book examines attempts to reassert spiritual discipline, encounters with the sacred (such as angels and near-death experiences), and the development of the “inner self.” The final chapter discusses a spirituality of practice, an alternative for people who are uncomfortable within a single religious community and who want more than a spirituality of endless seeking. The diversity of contemporary American spirituality comes through in the voices of the interviewees. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans are included, as are followers of occult practices, New Age religions, and other eclectic groups. The book also notes how politicized spirituality, evangelical movements, and resources such as Twelve-Step programs and mental health therapy influence definitions of religious life today. The book explains the changes in personal spirituality that have come to shape our religious life.

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, this book focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers lived. The book explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. It highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The book brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.

This book argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, the author shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, he likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, the author suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society.

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period—a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. It focuses on what it calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies, and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. The book casts its net widely. It not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, the book argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic “misshaping” of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this book explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The scholars in this multidisciplinary book bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance.

What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care? These and many other questions are examined in this book, which fully explores the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities—physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative “New Pathway” curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment—it demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, the book shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.