Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting.
Beer, ice cream, and socializing; thighs, abs, and pecs-Japanese fitness clubs combine entertainment and exercise, reflecting the Japanese concept of fitness as encompassing a zest for life as well as physical health.
Immortal Wishes is a powerful ethnographic rendering of religious experiences of landscape, healing, and self-fashioning on a northern Japanese sacred mountain.
On the little-known and darker side of shamanism there exists an ancient form of sorcery called kanaima, a practice still observed among the Amerindians of the highlands of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil that involves the ritual stalking, mutilation, lingering death, and consumption of human victims.
Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursileria refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century.
Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "e;dot"e; paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors.
Based on her experiences as a stripper in a city she calls Laurelton-a southeastern city renowned for its strip clubs-anthropologist Katherine Frank provides a fascinating insider's account of the personal and cultural fantasies motivating male heterosexual strip club "e;regulars.
Consumption Intensified examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in Sao Paulo redefined their class during Brazil's economic crisis of 1981-1994.
Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars-from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies-whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers.
Judith Farquhar's innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure.
As the final installment of Public Culture's Millennial Quartet, Cosmopolitanism assesses the pasts and possible futures of cosmopolitanism-or ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one's particular society.
Silviano Santiago has been a pioneer in the development of concepts crucial to the discourse of contemporary critical and cultural theory, especially postcolonial theory.
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory.
Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization.
Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region.
Organized in the mid-1970s as a means of communal protection against livestock rustling and general thievery in Peru's rugged northern mountains, the rondas campesinas (peasants who make the rounds) grew into an entire system of peasant justice and one of the most significant Andean social movements of the late twentieth century.
Postmodernism may seem a particularly inappropriate term when used in conjunction with a region that is usually thought of as having only recently, and then unevenly, acceded to modernity.
Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture.
Logos, trademarks, national insignia, brand names, celebrity images, design patents, and advertising texts are vibrant signs in a consumer culture governed by a regime of intellectual property laws.
This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization-the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production.
Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment.
In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers.
Burdened with a heritage of both Spanish and British colonization and imperialism, Guyana is today caught between its colonial past, its efforts to achieve the consciousness of nationhood, and the need of its diverse subgroups to maintain their own identity.
Domination and Cultural Resistance examines the social life of the Yura, a Quechua-speaking Andean ethnic group of central Bolivia, and focuses especially on their indigenous authorities, the kuraqkuna or elders.
Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil examines the dynamic interplay between the Brazilian government and the Xavante Indians of central Brazil in the context of twentieth-century western frontier expansion and the state's indigenous policy.
Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin.
