Hardcover. New York, Smithsonian Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 253 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, inside and out. Tight binding, sharp corners, illustrations in bw, a nice copy.
Softcover. Tucson, AZ, Southwest Parks , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 88 pages. Softcover. Yellowing to front and back covers. An otherwise clean, unmarked copy with minor edgewear. Color photographs throughout.
Hardcover. Hoboken NJ, Wiley, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 508 pages.Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong-railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators-and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail-as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 485 pages, b&w illust. How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another?In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world.
Softcover. London, Cassell, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. This book unravels the secrets and workings of the English parish and its effect on English society. There are 13,000 parishes in England, each with its parish church, covering the country in a network which gives identities to local communities. Two-thirds of English parishes are ancient, probably a thousand years old; one-third have been founded in the last 150 years, largely to meet the enormously increased numbers of people in big towns. One of the major themes of the book is the changing social fabric. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 322 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. This book examines the issue of racial stereotyping and with the issue of skin color as seen by such radio show broadcasts as Amos 'N' Andy. Some Blacks did not like the show when released, while others saw it as a humane portrayal of African-American Life. Overall, the show became the most popular radio show of all time. Later, it was touted by the Civil Rights Movement as offensive and racist.
Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 707 pages, b&w illustrations. Born in poverty, and self-educated while working in a print shop, William Lloyd Garrison was one of the United States' greatest crusading editors, putting out a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, for 35 years, beginning in 1831. A product of the rough and tumble political journalism of the day, Garrison wrote with extreme passion and from an uncompromising point of view. Yet the man who emerges from the pages of All on Fire is a deeply thoughtful person who, despite barely escaping lynch mobs himself, had a great sense of humor and a very polite demeanor. Historians have tended to minimize Garrison's impact on America, and some consider him a fringe character. But Henry Meyer, in this hefty biography, places Garrison at the center of his century, noting that Garrison's thought and tactics influenced not only the country's changing view of slavery, but also inspired the incipient feminist movement. The Lincoln administration noted Garrison's influence by inviting him to help raise the flag over the recaptured Fort Sumter. All on Fire goes into great detail on Garrison's life and work, providing the close and copious examination this activist's life fully deserves. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 129 pages. The 'upper class' in America might also be called the hidden class. To be born into wealth in America is to belong to a world apart, a world most of us never glimpse. This group -- whose wealth is several generations old -- has been envied, castigated, and mythologized, but rarely documented or photographed. Barbara Norfleet, photographer and sociologist, depicts this hidden world through a series of candid images at once fascinating and unsettling, combined with interviews. Norfleet captures her subjects in context: at social gatherings, athletic events, in their exclusive clubs and vast private estates. Dust jacket has some sun-fade along spine edge otherwise clean, very good.
Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 336 pages. Author offers in-depth look at American made forms of Christianity from Church of Christ to Mormon to Pentecostal. Excellent reference material. Clean copy
Softcover. Singapore, Donald Moore, 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 77 pages plus six plates in rear. A background to the Chinese secret societies, or triads, including the history, rituals, disciplinary code, secret signs and language. Smallink name on cover, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages. Analyzes the expression and repression of desire in Western culture and tells how to avoid fascism in one's life. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 327 pages, clean copy. Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria--from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the "vaporous" salon women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this fascinating and authoritative book, Mark Micale surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this ever-growing body of literature: Why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn from the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical "cultures of hysteria." He reconstructs in detail the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various nonmedical domains, including poetry, fiction, theater, social thought, political criticism, and the arts. His book is a pioneering attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future.
Softcover. London/NY, Routledge, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages. Clean copy. mell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket. 288 pages. A detailed study of how industrialized farming is changing America's rural communities and small farm families. Circa post WW2. Sticker on spine of dj, otherwise clean, no markings.
Softcover. London, Bloomsbury, reprint, 2008, Book: Very Good, Softcover, 692 pages. Coursing through Austerity Britain is an astonishing variety of voices - vivid, unselfconscious, and unaware of what the future holds. A Chingford housewife endures the tribulations of rationing; a retired schoolteacher observes during a royal visit how well-fed the Queen looks; a pernickety civil servant in Bristol is oblivious to anyone's troubles but his own. An array of working-class witnesses describe how life in post-war Britain is, with little regard for liberal niceties or the feelings of their 'betters'. Many of these voices will stay with the reader in future volumes, jostling alongside well-known figures like John Arlott (here making his first radio broadcast, still in police uniform), Glenda Jackson (taking the 11+) and Doris Lessing, newly arrived from Africa, struck by the levelling poverty of postwar Britain. David Kynaston weaves a sophisticated narrative of how the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped the political, economic and social landscape for the next three decades.Deeply researched, often amusing and always intensely entertaining and readable, the first volume of David Kynaston's ambitious history offers an entirely fresh perspective on Britain during those six momentous years. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, New York Academy of Sciences, 2nd pr., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorated light beige cloth covers, 277 pages. A classic work on Bali, profusely illustrated with field photographs by Bateson, Margaret Mead's husband. The 100 b&w plates were taken 1936 to 1937. A pioneering work in which the two celebrated anthropologists, with the assistance of Belo, Mershon, McPhee, Spies, Goris and others, analyse the character of the Balinese through their expressions and interactions, demonstrated in a series of photographs. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Saturday Review Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a chipped, worn dust jacket, 252 pages. An account of the glitzy New York charity ball that attracts over 1000 debutantes, society dowagers, European aristocrats, oil-rich Texans and other assorted social climbers - all for a good cause. Clean copy, large chip from rear dj panel.
Hardcover. Santa Fe NM, Twin Palms Publishers, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Photographically illustrated paper-covered boards, no dust jacket as issued. 48 pages with 23 four-color plates (printed one to a sheet), beautifully printed on heavy-stock uncoated paper. 13-5/8 x 17-3/4 inches. Photographs by Phillip Toledano. Includes several reproduced "anonymous" brief corporate memos. Designed by Jack Woody. This edition was limited to 1000 hardbound copies.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 232 pages. "Professor DeNora's achievement in placing Beethoven, and the reception of Beethoven's music, in social context is all the more impressive because it goes so much against the grain of conventional habits of thought. In illuminating how changing social institutions created opportunities for Beethoven to gain contemporary and posthumous recognition, and, in so doing, created new forms for thinking and talking about musical achievement-the author at once provides fresh insights into the institutional origins of 'classical' music and offers an exemplary contribution to the sociological study of the arts." Clean copy.
Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 382 pages. In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own.Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterers ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Traces the history of bells and their use by different civilizations, examines their connection with Christian churches, and discusses the use of bells to make music, mark time, and signal events
Softcover. Mount Vernon NY, Consumers Union, 1st wraps, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 218 pages, numerous b&w photo-illustrations. Pictorial stiff wrappers. A very good copy with a corner crease to the rear cover.. The author/photographer recorded his visits to the poor in: South Dakota, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Tennessee, Illinois, Wyoming, New York City, Arkansas, Boston, California. Includes interviews and commentary by Richards; edited by Christine Bird; story researcher by Janine Altongy. Winner of the 1987 International Center of Photography Journalism Award. Richards is often overlooked as one of America's best photojouralists.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Small ink notation on front fly leaf otherwise clean. 320 pages with extensive notes and index. This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting politicalagenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly soiled. unclipped dust jacket. 325 pages including index. The author explores Sunday's career as the product and expression of his era. A lively account of the famous revivalist's life and the inner workings of mass revivalism. Name stamp on front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Softcover. Oxford UK, James Currey, 1st pbk, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. This book explores the style and values of youth gangs in the Soweto area from the 1930s until the 1976 student-led uprising. It also tells the story of how the ANC, PAC, and Black Consciousness movement tried, and ultimately failed, to draw the volatile gangs into disciplined political activity. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.
hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 105 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Black & white photos by Klich. Review-slip laid-in. Essays by Cornell Capa and Bengt Borjeson. By combining his intimate and disturbing photographs with police and hospital records, handwritten notes left behind by Beth, and other texts, author Ken Klich searches for a rationale -what could cause this intelligent child to end up as a prostitute and drug addict?
Hardcover. New York, Umbrage Editions, 2nd pr., 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Non-paginated. Full color and black & white photographs. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 188 pages, b&w photos. Red cloth covers with gilt lettering and rules. End papers soil, internally very good. Interviews with 66 Boston boys who were members of gangs are the basis for this study of gang life. Frontispiece photo plate + 3 more photo plate pages with two small photos on each.
Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 343 pages. This is an anthropological study of boyhood in a group of related Igbo villages called Afikpo, in souteastern Nigeria. About half of the book is taken up with the description and analysis of adolescent initiation rites, providing a close and detailed view of rituals that for the most part have only been touched upon in literature. The work makes use of psychoanalytic theory, with a logic that is grounded in data, blended with traditional cultural anthropological analysis. Ottenberg's understanding of the dynamics of the symbols and their unstated meanings contributes to the study of ritual process in any society. The data on ritual initiation alo0ne make this a major contribution to African ethnography, and Ottenberg's descriptive material on male secrecy and related gender distinctions provides a background fora more general understanding of West African secret societies.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket. SIGNED BY WATSON on title page. A history of the winter of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts that began when thousands of workers stormed out of the massive textile mills that lined the Merrimack River north of Boston. After receiving their paychecks that morning, they were protesting a pay cut, but were really on strike for their lives. Black and white photographs. Remainder line bottom edge, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth stamped in dark green, 290 pages with index. Includes six life-histories of Chinese gentry families by Yung-teh Chow. Illustrations based on drawings by Hames K. Y. Kuo. Studies the social role of the scholar-gentry in imperial and modern China. Clean copy, no dust jacket.
Softcover. London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, stiff orange paper wrappers. 249 pages. An interesting and comprehensive exploration of Chinese families in Singapore. Maurice Freedman (1920-1975) was a British scholar who was one of the world's leading experts on Chinese anthropology. Includes chapters on 'The Social Background', 'The Household', 'The Kinship System', and many more. Frontispiece photograph of a Chinese Mass Wedding. There are also an appendix of tables, another on Chinese characters for Hokkien words used in the text and an index. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London ; Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 226 pages. Maroon cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, previous owner's signature in front, faint foxing to top edge, else a very neat, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 2nd pr., 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in publisher's black cloth ruled in blind with faded gilt title on the spine. Top edge stained black. Stated second printing, October 1930 on the copyright page. Translated by Alice Riviere. Ownership signature in pencil by Gertrude Franchot Tone, women's rights activist with her pencil marking in text. Owner's small embossed stamp on front fly leaf.
Softcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 297 pages. Softcover. In very good condition, clean and bright inside. Wrapper has a slight yellowing at top edge, barely visable. Binding tight.
Softcover. London/NY, Routledge, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 236 pages. "Colonial Desire is a controversial study that breaks new ground in analysing how concepts of culture get formed, and how racialized assumptions continue to pervade them." In this study, the author argues that today's theories on post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the 19th century. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 196 pages. investigates the intersection between post-colonial and feminist criticism, via the Western fascination with veiled women of the Orient. Her original and compelling argument calls into question dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East masculinist assumptions of Orientalism, and Western feminist discourses that seek to 'liberate' the veiled woman. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 318 pages. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Americans underwent a dramatic transformation in self-conception: having formerly lived as individuals or members of small communities, they now found themselves living in networks, which arose out of scientific and technological innovations. There were transportation and communication networks. There was the network of the globalized marketplace, which brought into the American home exotic goods previously affordable to only a few. There was the network of standard time, which bound together all but the most rural Americans. There was the public health movement, which joined individuals to their fellow citizens by making everyone responsible for the health of everyone else. There were social networks that joined individuals to their fellows at the municipal, state, national, and global levels. Previous histories of this era focus on alienation and dislocation that new technologies caused. This book shows that American individuals in this era were more connected to their fellow citizens than ever-but by bonds that were distinctly modern.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, Wendy A. Woloson takes seriously the history of objects that are often cynically-made and easy to dismiss: things not made to last; things we don't really need; things we often don't even really want. Woloson does not mock these ordinary, everyday possessions but seeks to understand them as a way to understand aspects of ourselves, socially, culturally, and economically: Why do we--as individuals and as a culture--possess these things? Where do they come from? Why do we want them? And what is the true cost of owning them? Woloson tells the history of crap from the late eighteenth century up through today, exploring its many categories: gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, giftware, variety store merchandise. As Woloson shows, not all crap is crappy in the same way--bric-a-brac is crappy in a different way from, say, advertising giveaways, which are differently crappy from commemorative plates. Taking on the full brilliant and depressing array of crappy material goods, the book explores the overlooked corners of the American market and mindset, revealing the complexity of our relationship with commodity culture over time.
Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 306 pages, b&w illustrations. In Creating Country Music, Richard Peterson traces the development of country music and its institutionalization from Fiddlin' John Carson's pioneering recordings in Atlanta in 1923 to the posthumous success of Hank Williams. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1st, 1923, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, gray wrappers with purple titles. With front endpaper map of "All Protestant Mission Stations in Japan, Korea, and Formosa". 248 pages, b&w plates. Details early Christian Japanese collaboration on social challenges and reforms. Related newspaper clippings laid in. Covers worn interior clean.
Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Credit-card debt is choking American prosperity off at the neck. In Credit Card Nation, Robert D. Manning tells a fascinating story about the present and future consequences of credit dependence across all strata of U.S. society. Through extensive interviews with consumers, Manning talks to debtors, and to average Americans, affected by what Manning describes as our "credit card nation": an American juggernaut of indebtedness that spans personal, corporate, and governmental debt. 406 pages, clean copy.
Hardcover. London ; New York, Routledge, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 270 pages. Light foxing to top edge. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Minor wear to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 198 pages, bibliography, index. Mild fade to part of cover wrapper, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 547 pages, b&w illustrations. The product of years of research and debate, Customs in Common describes the complex culture from which working class institutions emerged in England - a panoply of traditions and customs that the new working class fought to preserve well into Victorian times. In a text marked by both empathy and erudition, Thompson investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. Name on front fly leaf, 20 pages with light pencil notations.
Softcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 235 pages, b&w illustrations. Focusing on the porkpacking industry in Iowa, Fink investigates the experience of the rural working class and highlights its significance in shaping the state's economic, political, and social contours. Fink draws both on interviews and on her own firsthand experience working on the production floor of a pork-processing plant. She weaves a fascinating account of the meatpacking industry's history in Iowa--a history, she notes, that has been experienced differently by male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and black workers. Like new.
UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 233 pages. Anthropologists, in studying other cultures, are often tempted to offer their own explanations of strange customs when they feel that the people involved have not given a good enough reason for these customs. The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs through this book. The book focuses on the various interpretations that have been offered by anthropologists of ritual and symbolism. It offers a critical discussion of theories in this field in general, identifying their strengths and weaknesses when applied to the particular case of puberty rituals in a West Sepik village in Papua New Guinea. It then goes on to suggest an alternative approach, which draws on aesthetic as well as anthropological theory, and pays particular attention to the emotional and aesthetic experiences of people as they perform the rites. Pencil marking to about 25 pages, name on inside front cover.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 614 pages, b&w illustrations. When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages. How do dictators stay in power? When, and how, do they use repression to do so? Dictators and their Secret Police explores the role of the coercive apparatus under authoritarian rule in Asia - how these secret organizations originated, how they operated, and how their violence affected ordinary citizens. Greitens argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to create internal security forces designed to manage popular mobilization, or defend against potential coup. Violence against civilians, she suggests, is a byproduct of their attempt to resolve this dilemma. Drawing on a wealth of new historical evidence, this book challenges conventional wisdom on dictatorship: what autocrats are threatened by, how they respond, and how this affects the lives and security of the millions under their rule. It offers an unprecedented view into the use of surveillance, coercion, and violence, and sheds new light on the institutional and social foundations of authoritarian power. ^ pages with dog earred crease, otherwise clean.