Category: anthropology

John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula

Posted on by stephchun

Moving ImagesIn 1914–1915, Cambridge anthropologist John Layard worked in Malakula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu). This was one of the earliest periods of solitary, intensive fieldwork within the developing discipline of British social anthropology. Layard worked enthusiastically with his local assistants to document and understand the customary lives of the people, taking copious notes and over 450 photographs. His collection of objects and glass plate negatives are housed in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork, and Photography on Malakula since 1914, by Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle, contains over 300 of these evocative images, most previously unpublished, united for the first time with Layard’s field notes and captions. They provide an extraordinary record of the elaborate ritual and culture of Small Islanders and reveal photography’s role as an evidential and subjective medium vital to the practice of social anthropology.

February 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3503-3 / $90.00 (CLOTH)
254 duotones

New in Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory

Posted on by stephchun

Refiguring Women Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, by Chie Ikeya, presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala—“the woman of the times”—who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, “Burmese” and “Westernized,” she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyze both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who—whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles—unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernization, and nationalism.

“Refiguring Women not only marks a milestone in Burmese historiography but makes a significant contribution to our appreciation of how ‘being modern‘ was understood in colonized societies. Deftly integrating visual and literary representations of Burmese women with the experiences of a people living under colonial control, this pioneering study explores previously untapped sources to provide new insights on the entangled relations between gender, colonialism, and modernity.” —Barbara Andaya, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3461-6 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010 Announced

Posted on by stephchun

Each year Choice Magazine, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, compiles a distinguished list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The following UH Press book was recognized for 2010. A complete list of titles will be available in Choice’s January 2010 issue.

Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization in the Central Pacific
by Glenn Petersen

“This overview . . . is one of the most significant contributions to Pacific studies of the past decade. . . . [It] will become the standard by which future synthetic treatments of Micronesia are judged. . . . Essential.” —Choice —Choice (May 2010)

Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society

Posted on by stephchun

Modern Buddhist ConjuncturesFor centuries, Burmese have looked to the authority of their religious tradition, Theravada Buddhism, to negotiate social and political hierarchies. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society, by Juliane Schober, examines those moments in the modern history of this Southeast Asian country when religion, culture, and politics converge to chart new directions. Arguing against Max Weber’s characterization of Buddhism as other-worldly and divorced from politics, this study shows that Buddhist practice necessitates public validation within an economy of merit in which moral action earns future rewards. The intervention of colonial modernity in traditional Burmese Buddhist worldviews has created conjunctures at which public concerns critical to the nation’s future are reinterpreted in light of a Buddhist paradigm of power.

“Juliane Schober argues that Buddhist conceptions and practices are inevitably tied to conceptions of political power in social, economic, and political realms. In doing so she challenges as obsolete inherited categories of knowledge that define a normative view of Theravada Buddhism as otherworldly, nonpolitical, nonviolent, and ‘protestantized.’ Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar is essential reading for an understanding of the genealogies of hegemony and subjugation, patronage and resistance, and power and loss in contemporary Myanmar, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of Buddhism in Southeast Asia.” —Donald Swearer, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3382-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics Honored

Posted on by stephchun

GossipGossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, by Niko Besnier, received an honorable mention for this year’s Edward Sapir Prize. The prize was established by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in 2001 and is awarded in alternate years to a book that makes the most significant contribution to the understanding of language in society or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes.

Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga

Posted on by stephchun

Straight from the HeartManga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga, Jennifer S. Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga.

“Straight from the Heart is a wonderful book, one that is timely and important in terms of academic interest in the anthropology of popular culture. Its originality lies in the author’s solid ethnographic approach to the topic and in her detailed description of the interactions between editors, artists, and consumers. Certainly it is time for such an in-depth English-language study of shojo manga. Prough’s work makes an important contribution to a number of fields—anthropology, Japan studies, gender/women’s studies, and cultural studies—and the writing style, organization, and length all make it an extremely attractive book for undergraduate course adoption.” —Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3528-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF Wins Yim Suk Jay Prize

Posted on by stephchun

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMFShamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion, by Laurel Kendall, has been awarded the Yim Suk Jay Prize.

The prize is awarded by the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology to a Korean or foreign scholar who has contributed to the development of Korean cultural anthropology by authoring a book-length scholarly work of high quality and originality.

Waste, Environment, Japan

Posted on by stephchun

Troubled NaturesWhat does “environment” really mean in the complex, non-Western milieu of present-day Tokyo? How can anthropology contribute to the technical discussions and quantitative measures typically found in environmental studies? Author Peter Wynn Kirby explores these questions through a deep cultural analysis of waste in contemporary Japan. His parameters are intentionally broad—encompassing ideas of “nature,” attitudes toward hygiene, notions of health and illness, problems with vermin and toxic waste, processes of social exclusion, and reproductive threats. Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan concludes that how surroundings are conceived, invoked, and enacted is subjective, highly contextual, and under continual negotiation—with suggestive implications for anthropology, social science, and environmental studies generally.

“Kirby’s long-term ethnographic study takes the unlikely-sounding subject of waste (in all its forms) to a fascinating depth, demonstrating the sociocultural complexity of environmental issues, and the crucial contribution that an anthropological study such as this can make to the broader field. Here is a novel way to understand the changing nature of contemporary Japan, through insights into the lives of residents of its enormous capital city and their struggle to eliminate environmental pollution and maintain the purity on which Japan has long prided itself.” —Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3428-9 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters

Posted on by stephchun

Gods, Ghosts, and GangstersBased on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society, by Avron Boretz, offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

“This is a magnificent exposition of a social world that was heretofore inaccessible to outsiders. Boretz provides both vivid description and insightful analysis of religion among the marginally criminal element in backwater areas of Taiwan, as well as among villagers in rural Yunnan. His presentation is lively, his mastery of the material is thorough, and his agile blend of relevant findings from anthropological and sinological literature makes this a delightful read.” —John McRae, Hachioji, Tokyo

“Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters is among the best ethnographies of China I have ever read. It is a model of anthropological writing that is at once engaging as literature and theoretically sophisticated. The author’s deep and thorough engagement with the people whose experiences he analyzes has resulted in a fascinating study that contributes greatly to our understanding of Chinese society. The decision to undertake extensive—and difficult—field work in two remote regions of Taiwan and Yunnan suggests that the nexus of ritual, violence, and masculine identity extends through much of the Chinese cultural sphere. Riveting and pathbreaking, the ethnography is thick with detail that will be extremely important for scholars working on such diverse topics as ritual, martial arts history, the construction of masculinity, and Chinese father-son relations.” —Meir Shahar, Tel Aviv University, author of The Shaolin Monastery

October 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3491-3 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Commodification, Tourism, and Performance

Posted on by stephchun

Consuming KoreanContributors to Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance, edited by Laurel Kendall, explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” They describe the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume “tradition” in multiple forms.

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3393-0 / $46.00 (CLOTH)

Desire and Difference in Indonesia

Posted on by stephchun

Falling into the Lesbi WorldFalling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia, by Evelyn Blackwood, offers a compelling view of sexual and gender difference through the everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends (“femmes”) in the city of Padang, West Sumatra. While likening themselves to heterosexual couples, tombois and femmes contest and blur dominant constructions of gender and heterosexuality. Tombois are masculine females who identify as men and desire women; their girlfriends view themselves as normal women who desire men. Through rich, in-depth, and provocative stories, author Evelyn Blackwood shows how these same-sex Indonesian couples negotiate transgressive identities and desires and how their experiences speak to the struggles and desires of sexual and gender minorities everywhere.

“Falling into the Lesbi World sheds valuable light on the ways in which locally distinctive sensibilities articulate with regional, national, and transnational discourses bearing on the making of gender and sexual identities among Indonesia’s Minangkabau. This is a very sophisticated, nuanced, and theoretically provocative piece of work that is simultaneously lucid and compelling; it will be of great interest to Southeast Asianists and others committed to understanding gender diversity and sexual subjectivities in postcolonial contexts and beyond.” —Michael G. Peletz, Emory University

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3487-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics Wins the BAAL Book Prize

Posted on by stephchun

GossipGossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, by Niko Besnier, has been awarded the BAAL Book Prize for 2010. BAAL (the British Association for Applied Linguistics) is a professional association based in the United Kingdom, which provides a forum for people interested in language and the applications of linguistics. It offers the annual prize for an outstanding book in any field of applied linguistics.

MENU