University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Anthropology

University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Anthropology http://www.press.uchicago.edu/rss/newanthro.xml The latest new books in Anthropology en-us erg@press.uchicago.edu Turn of the Native http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=3793385 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Flávio Gordon, and Francisco Araújo <br><br><DIV>Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has been a vital force in anthropology for the past fifteen years. Here in <I>The Turn of the Native</I>, he and his students probe issues pertinent to the future of the discipline in a series of concise and sharp essays. They ask such questions as: Is identity a useful concept, or is it more like a contagious disease? Should we replace the traditional tactics of “othering” with something new? And is the objectification of culture simply cannibalism by another name? This hard-hitting pamphlet captures the fascinating debates emerging in the Brazilian school of “ethno-anthropology.”</DIV><br></div> Building the Devil's Empire http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5806997 Shannon Lee Dawdy <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><I>Building the Devil’s Empire</I> is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works.</P><P> </P><P>"[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—<I>Nation</I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>“A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Gardens http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5815522 Robert Pogue Harrison <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.</P><P>With <I>Gardens</I>, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history.  The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.</P><P> </P><P>Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, <I>Gardens</I> is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, <I>Forests</I> and <I>The Dominion of the Dead</I>. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.</P><P> </P><P>"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled <I>Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition</I>, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, <I>Chicago</I><I> Tribune</I></P><P> </P><P>"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, <I>Times Higher Education</I></P><P> </P><P>"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight.  Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic.  But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study <I>Forests: The Shadow of Civilization</I>, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it.</P><P> </P><P>“Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, <I>The Spectator</I></P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Remains of Ritual http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5997299 Steven M. Friedson <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><EM>Remains of Ritual</EM>, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Bulletproof http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6676834 Jennifer Wenzel <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in <I>Bulletproof</I>.</P><P>            Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Child http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6701936 Richard A. Shweder, Editor in Chief <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><EM>The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion</EM> offers both parents and professionals access to the best scholarship from all areas of child studies in a remarkable one-volume reference.</P><P> </P><P>Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and other related areas, <EM>The Child</EM> contains more than 500 articles—all written by experts in their fields and overseen by a panel of distinguished editors led by anthropologist Richard A. Shweder. Each entry provides a concise and accessible synopsis of the topic at hand. For example, the entry “Adoption” begins with a general definition, followed by a detailed look at adoption in different cultures and at different times, a summary of the associated mental and developmental issues that can arise, and an overview of applicable legal and public policy.</P><P> </P><P>While presenting certain universal facts about children’s development from birth through adolescence, the entries also address the many worlds of childhood both within the United States and around the globe. They consider the ways that in which race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and cultural traditions of child rearing can affect children’s experiences of physical and mental health, education, and family. Alongside the topical entries, <EM>The Child</EM> includes more than forty “Imagining Each Other” essays, which focus on the particular experiences of children in different cultures. In “Work before Play for Yucatec Maya Children,” for example, readers learn of the work responsibilities of some modern-day Mexican children, while in “A Hindu Brahman Boy Is Born Again,” they witness a coming-of-age ritual in contemporary India.</P><P> </P><P>Compiled by some of the most distinguished child development researchers in the world, <I>The Child</I> will broaden the current scope of knowledge on children and childhood. It is an unparalleled resource for parents, social workers, researchers, educators, and others who work with children.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Enabling Creative Chaos http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6797144 Katherine K. Chen <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun.</P><P> </P><P><I>Enabling Creative Chaos</I> tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man’s organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> How It Works http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6887675 Robert P. Fairbanks II <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. <I>How It Works</I> is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.</P><P> </P><P>To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Infanticide Controversy http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6925541 Amanda Rees <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Infanticide in the natural world might be a relatively rare event, but as Amanda Rees shows, it has enormously significant consequences. Identified in the 1960s as a phenomenon worthy of investigation, infanticide had, by the 1970s, become the focus of serious controversy. The suggestion, by Sarah Hrdy, that it might be the outcome of an evolved strategy intended to maximize an individual’s reproductive success sparked furious disputes between scientists, disagreements that have continued down to the present day. </P><P> </P><P>Meticulously tracing the history of the infanticide debates, and drawing on extensive interviews with field scientists, Rees investigates key theoretical and methodological themes that have characterized field studies of apes and monkeys in the twentieth century. As a detailed study of the scientific method and its application to field research, <I>The Infanticide Controversy</I> sheds new light on our understanding of scientific practice, focusing in particular on the challenges of working in “natural” environments, the relationship between objectivity and interpretation in an observational science, and the impact of the public profile of primatology on the development of primatological research. Most importantly, it also considers the wider significance that the study of field science has in a period when the ecological results of uncontrolled human interventions in natural systems are becoming ever more evident.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Gay Fatherhood http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6930945 Ellen Lewin <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Men are often thought to have less interest in parenting than women, and gay men are generally assumed to prefer pleasure over responsibility. The toxic combination of these two stereotypical views has led to a lack of serious attention being paid to the experiences of gay fathers. But the truth is that more and more gay men are setting out to become parents and succeeding—and <I>Gay Fatherhood</I> aims to tell their stories. </P><P>Ellen Lewin takes as her focus people who undertake the difficult process of becoming fathers as gay men, rather than having become fathers while married to women. These men face unique challenges in their quest for fatherhood, negotiating specific bureaucratic and financial conditions as they pursue adoption or surrogacy and juggling questions about their future child’s race, age, sex, and health. <I>Gay Fatherhood</I> chronicles the lives of these men, exploring how they cope with political attacks from both the "family values" right and the "radical queer" left—while also shedding light on the evolving meanings of family in twenty-first-century America.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Sinister Yogis http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7878005 David Gordon White <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old aged. Marketed as a clear path to self-realization, mind expansion, and taut abs, yoga is also perceived as an ancient and unchanging Indian tradition based on the revelations of benign and limber sages. But this modern conception of yoga derives from nineteenth-century European spirituality, <I>Sinister Yogis</I> reveals, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and much more entertaining.</P><P> </P><P>To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, money, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, <I>Sinister Yogis</I> tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Political Ethnography http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7995019 Edited by Edward Schatz <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, <I>Political Ethnography</I> makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, the contributors amply demonstrate in a wide range of original essays, is uniquely suited for illuminating the study of politics. </P><P> </P><P>Situating these pieces within the context of developments in political science, Edward Schatz provides an overarching introduction and substantive prefaces to each of the volume’s four sections. The first of these parts addresses the central ontological and epistemological issues raised by ethnographic work, while the second grapples with the reality that all research is conducted from a first-person perspective. The third section goes on to explore how ethnographic research can provide fresh perspectives on such perennial topics as opinion, causality, and power. Concluding that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field as a whole, the final chapters illuminate the many ways in which ethnographic approaches can enhance, improve, and, in some areas, transform the study of politics.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Moon, Come to Earth http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8195836 Philip Graham <br><br><DIV><P>A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness.</P><P> </P><P>In <I>The Moon, Come to Earth,</I> Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on <I>McSweeney’s</I>, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year’s sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he’s unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter’s challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school—but he also waxes loving about Portugal’s <I>saudade</I>-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can’t help but ache alongside them.</P><P> </P><P>A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one’s secret selves, <I>The Moon, Come to Earth</I> is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.</P></DIV><br></div>