bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Race and Ethnicity in America
Authors: Iceland John
Published: September 2017

Race and Ethnicity in America examines patterns and trends in racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. Drawing upon information collected in surveys such as the decennial census and the American Community Survey, it documents levels of inequality in educational attainment, income, poverty, wealth, residential conditions, and health among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and the multiracial population. It illustrate the main findings with in-depth stories gathered from ethnographic work and in topical news stories, and includes international comparisons as well. A recurrent theme in the book is that race and ethnicity are social constructions, as exemplified by how racial and ethnic group definitions and divisions vary over time and place, both within the United States and in other countries. The overarching conclusion is that color lines have generally softened over time in the United States, as there has been some narrowing of differences across many indicators for most groups over the past 60 years. Nevertheless, some deep-seated inequalities remain, especially between blacks and whites. Thus, despite some progress over many decades, illustrated by the substantial growth of the black middle class, African Americans are still more likely to be poor, unemployed, incarcerated, and suffer from worse health than whites. The books evaluates a number of theories that have been used to explain patterns of racial ethnic inequality, including human capital, social capital, culture, assimilation, and racism and discrimination. All play a role, though to a differing extent depending on the groups being considered.
Conversations about Race
Authors: Iceland John
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces themes covered in the book. It highlights patterns of racial and ethnic inequality, briefly introduces theories used to explain these patterns, and discusses the importance of changing patterns of racial and ethnic identification. It ends with an overview of the book.
Hispanics and Asians
Authors: Iceland John
Published: September 2017

This chapter offer brief histories of Hispanics and Asians in the United States and examine patterns of socioeconomic achievement among them. It makes broad generalizations about these panethnic groups, while also describing the variation by country of origin where possible. It then reflects back on the theories discussed in chapter 2. The chapter provides considerable evidence that both Asians and Hispanics have experienced upward mobility across generations, indicative of some measure of incorporation in the United States. Asians have achieved parity, or even an advantage, when compared to whites in terms of education, income, and other outcomes. Among Hispanics there is evidence of educational and income improvements from the first generation to the second, and to some extent beyond, but a gap in achievement between Hispanics and whites persists. Whether this gap will narrow in the future remains to be seen.
American Indians
Authors: Iceland John
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of American Indians in the United States, an examination of patterns of identification among people with American Indian heritage, a description of this group’s socioeconomic profile, and a discussion of the factors that help explain this profile. Overall, American Indians continue to experience, on average, low levels of educational attainment and income and high levels of poverty. A legacy of past racism, contemporary discrimination, and continued spatial and economic social isolation especially on and around reservations likely explain the disadvantaged position of many American Indians today.
The Multiracial Population
Authors: Iceland John
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines trends in intermarriage, discusses how the estimates of the multiracial population are sensitive to how we define and measure this group, describes how views about racial identity have changed over time, and provides measures of well being, such as education and income, among the multiracial population. The chapter also documents differences among multiracial Americans, such as between people who are black and white and Asian and white. The chapter shows that the socioeconomic status of multiracial individuals tends to be in between that of the constituent race groups. The median household income of black-white individuals, for example, is between that of single-race black and white individuals. The chapter ends by noting that we need to learn much more about the growing multiracial population and the factors that affect their health and well being.
American Religion and the Rise of Internal Security
Authors: Lum Kathryn Gin , Martin Lerone A.
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, Kathryn Gin Lum and Lerone Martin sketch the decades leading up to the formation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908—later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This chapter offers readers a summary of the cultural and institutional context that led to the Bureau’s creation and the nature of American religion during that period. The chapter sets the stage for readers to understand the initial historical and cultural milieu in which the long history of the FBI’s relationship with religion took root.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the Religious Cold War
Authors: Kirby Dianne
Published: September 2017

Despite Hoover's efforts to develop an alliance with the American Catholic Church, other Christian communities came under suspicion during the Cold War. This chapter by Dianne Kirby examines the surveillance of communities during the Cold War period that had transatlantic links and supported the continuation of the alliance with the Soviet Union or developed other contacts beyond the Iron Curtain. Her case studies include surveillance of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, which in the course of the war sought to transfer allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate, a move that was stymied in the post-war period by deteriorating US-Soviet relations and Roman Catholic opposition.
The FBI and the Catholic Church
Authors: Schmidt Regin
Published: September 2017

The relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Catholic Church was complex and changed over time. It is well-known that the bureau and the hierarchy of the church cooperated and supported each other during the early part of the Cold War. However, there is more to the story than that. This chapter explains how the bureau, for a number of reasons, pursued a relationship with Catholics during the late 1930s and World War II. As the author explains, however, the Catholic Church was never a monolithic entity, and the bureau maintained surveillance of progressive and radical Catholics who questioned the Cold War consensus. This chapter will focus on a little-known event at the end of World War II when the bureau played an important role in influencing the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to abandon its traditional liberal (or positive) anticommunism for a conservative (or negative) anticommunism.
Policing Public Morality
Authors: Charles Douglas M.
Published: September 2017

Most Americans are familiar with the bromides of the so-called culture wars, particularly as public religious figures of the 1960s and 1970s decried the perceived decline of sexual decency and morality. In this chapter, Charles Douglas examines a lesser-known dimension of this topic: the FBI’s decades-long campaign against obscenity. Charles explains how as obscenity’s legal definition constantly evolved after 1957, leading to the growth and proliferation of both obscenity and pornography, the FBI perceived the two as fundamental threats to American morality and culture. Consequently J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI devoted substantial resources to counter these social changes through an educational campaign spearheaded through its Crime Records Division — the bureau’s public relations machinery. This chapter amplifies attention to how the moralism of the Hoover period motivated efforts to police public morality well into the 1970s and 1980s.
The FBI and the Nation of Islam
Authors: Evanzz Karl
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the FBI’s repression of the Nation of Islam. The FBI placed several of its own operatives into leading positions in this religious community, forging along the way a unique relationship with New York City’s police department. The essay explains how Bureau's efforts to destroy the Nation of Islam produced what is arguably its most violent repression of religious groups at the time. The author Karl Evanzz focuses on Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, both of whom targeted by the FBI for years. By explaining the bureau’s efforts to disrupt the best known organization of African American Muslims, the chapter interprets for readers a pivotal episode in the nation's history of religion and the security state.
A Vast Infiltration
Authors: Bowman Matthew
Published: September 2017

From the work of acclaimed authors like the noir novelist James Ellroy to movies like Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, the close connection between Mormons and the Federal Bureau of Investigation became a pop culture trope in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that this connection was most celebrated by an oddly dissonant collection of Americans. The first were Mormons themselves, who believed that the very real presence of FBI recruiters at Brigham Young University indicated that their peculiarities—a command of foreign languages due to missionary service, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and a general reputation for being clean cut—indicated that American culture had finally accepted them. The second group, however, were artists, conspiracy theorists, and evangelicals suspicious of Mormons who used the presence of Mormons in the FBI to validate broader narratives of government conspiracy, smooth, faceless bureaucracy, and lack of accountability that became popular in post-Vietnam America. The conflict between these two narratives has relevance for the cultural between left and right as the culture wars heated up, but also illustrates the ways in which Americans talked about legitimate and illegitimate religion in the late twentieth century.
The FBI’s “Cult War” against the Branch Davidians
Authors: Wessinger Catherine
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the FBI’s engagement of the Branch Davidians and the eventual bombing of the group at their Waco compound. The author explains how the cult essentialist perspective, which places all blame on “cultists” for violent outcomes in conflicts, was promoted by FBI agents during and after the siege and prepared the majority of Americans to view the assault as reasonable. In this essay, Catherine Wessinger, a leading scholar of new religious movements and active in engaging with the FBI in the early years after the Branch Davidian siege, questions this understanding in light of evidence including internal FBI memos reporting on agents’ interviews with people who knew the Branch Davidians and FBI summary documents and evaluations in the Lee Hancock Collection at Texas State University, San Marcos.
The FBI and American Muslims after September 11
Authors: Barkun Michael
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the situation that has developed since September 11. The author demonstrates that these changes broadened the scope of unsupervised investigations and, in particular, to permitted potentially intrusive monitoring of religious activities. At a time when many thought religious believers and some religious organizations might pose threats to national security and public order, the Bureau’s post-9/11 practices raised questions about (1) the best ways to secure intelligence about such threats; and (2) the limits to state interference in religious practice where national security is involved.
Allies against Armageddon?
Authors: Weitzman Steven
Published: September 2017

The FBI standoff with the Branch Davidians proved an important turning point, a great tragedy in FBI history that called into question key premises and tactics that it had relied on in dealing with religious groups in the past. Beginning with the aftermath of the Branch Davidian standoff, this chapter will focus on efforts to develop a consultative relationship between the FBI and scholars of religion in order to avoid similar tragedies in the future. Do scholars have anything to teach the FBI about religion? Have their insights made any positive difference? This chapter will address such questions by tracing the FBI’s engagement with academia between 1993-2001 and broaching the situation since 9/11.
Excerpt from “The Place of Grace in Anthropology”
Authors: Pitt-Rivers Julian A.
Published: September 2017

Julian Pitt-Rivers’s masterful essay was originally published in 1992 as the culminating piece in Honor and Grace in Anthropology, a volume that this renowned ethnographer of the Spanish Mediterranean and student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford edited with his colleague J. G. Peristiany, almost a decade before his death in 2001. The essay reveals the erudition and breadth of his ethnographic vision. Why, asks Pitt-Rivers, despite its implied presence in wide-ranging ethnographic contexts, have anthropologists ignored the concept of grace? “Grace is a whole,” he argues, a socially constituted concept that we cannot understand outside of social interaction and principles of exchange and reciprocity. Unlike Mauss’s classic explanation of the gift within an economy of return, however, grace is a kind of “nonreciprocity” or gratitude. Pitt-Rivers observes that grace is much older than Christianity, yet he roots all current forms of the idea of grace in the Christian concept and its etymological roots in Latin (gratia, or favor, or a gift freely given), tying it with individual salvation. Grace, therefore, is “a free gift of God” that implies no obligation on the part of the receiver. God bestows grace, “the friendship of God,” on humankind out of his free benevolence, for their eternal salvation. Pitt-Rivers’s insistence on understanding grace as exemplary of a “reciprocity of the heart” (versus the law of contract) and the “affective side of life” echoes recent scholarly awareness of modes of being and ethics—even religiosities—that cannot be explained through recourse to rational, economic models. It pertains to a consciousness of life as that which binds us together, modes of conviviality, commensality, and interrelatedness that underpin Catholicism as a living form.
Inasmuch as grace as a concept constitutes an otherworldly force or originary substance that sets things in motion, it bears a family resemblance to ethnographic concepts like manaor hau.
1 Although Pitt-Rivers’s discussion of grace was never an explicit attempt to generate conversation with other scholars of Christianity, his framing of grace as a proto-Christian version of mana began a process that would eventually make Christianity a “legitimate topic” for mainstream anthropological theorizing.
The Rosary as a Meditation on Death at a Marian Apparition Shrine
Authors: Badone Ellen
Published: September 2017

Based on an ethnography of a Marian shrine in northwestern France, this chapter explores the symbols and metaphors of mortality that permeate ritual at the shrine.  Through the presentation of narratives about the experiences of pilgrims to the site, it poses larger reflexive questions concerning Roman Catholicism and death.  Do Catholic rituals emphasizing the transience of life empower participants by providing them with an opportunity to confront their own mortality, or do such rituals merely reinforce the psychological experience of anxiety and depression?
A Catholic Body?
Authors: Mitchell Jon P.
Published: September 2017

Josh Brahinsky (2012) has recently argued that Protestant Pentecostals engage in processes of cultivating the body to generate a ‘modern sensorium’. This chapter considers what a modern Catholic sensorium might consist of. The chapter looks at Catholic bodies in Southern Italy and Malta, examining the relationship between bodies of saints and bodies of persons. It focuses on the contexts of health and healing, miracles, and visions/locutions (contexts in which saints are seen, heard, felt). The chapter takes as its point of departure Baldacchino’s (2011) discussion of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), and argues for the persistence, in modern Catholicism, of ‘porous’ selves – for whom the boundaries between natural and supernatural, material and immaterial, body and soul are indistinct. This contrasts with a ‘buffered’ self, seen to characterise secular modernity. Focusing on the sensualities of Latin Mediterranean Catholicism, the chapter concludes by suggesting that in this context distinctions such as modern – traditional, secular – non-secular, even Protestant – Catholic, need to be reconsidered.
Experiments of Inculturation in a Catholic Charismatic Movement in Cameroon
Authors: Lado Ludovic
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at a particular instance of the local production of Catholicism in Cameroon by focusing on the agency of a ritual specialist and promoter of inculturation, Father Hebga, a Jesuit charismatic priest, who negotiates the related contradictions through ambiguous processes of religious and cultural hybridization. The leading pastoral concern at the heart of his praxis is the satisfaction of the needs of the faithful searching for healing in the framework of the catholic charismatic renewal. As one of the pioneers of Catholic charismatic renewal in Sub-Saharan Africa, Hebga’s agency mediates between the institutional constraints of the church hierarchy and the religious needs of the masses. The wider ideological framework is the discourse of Inculturation which has dominated theological debates in Africa Catholicism since the 1970s. In this context we see how Father Hebga operates as a cultural broker of postcolonial discourses, vying to restore the dignity of Africans violated by symbolic violence associated with the slave trade, colonization and Christian missionization.
Possession and Psychopathology, Faith and Reason
Authors: Csordas Thomas J.
Published: September 2017

The early 21st century has seen a resurgence in the performance of exorcism in the Catholic Church.  Exorcism is a solemn rite that must be performed by a priest with the express consent of the bishop with jurisdiction in the area where the exorcism takes place.  Both a form of healing for afflicted individuals and a discourse on evil at large in the contemporary world, exorcism lies at the intersection of therapy and cosmology in the world's largest religious institution.  Its social and cultural significance is therefore worthy of analysis. This chapter takes a step in that direction through consideration of ethnographic material from exorcists, mental health professionals who assist and consult with them, and the afflicted people who seek their help.
Pathways and Intersecting Inequality
Authors: Owen Barbara , Wells James , Pollock Joycelyn
Published: September 2017

Chapter 2 describes women’s pathways to incarceration, focusing on the significance of gender and other inequalities in women’s lives within the free world. An extension of expansion of pathways emphasizes intersectional inequities and the historical and structural trauma that propel them into prison. This focus on cumulative and structural disadvantage moves beyond an individualized and blaming explanation of women’s crimes in setting out the context of constrained choice. This chapter also includes sections on prison policy and its impact on women; shared characteristics of imprisoned women; and enhancing the pathways approach through the inclusion of structural and historical inequalities.
Inequalities and Contextual Conflict
Authors: Owen Barbara , Wells James , Pollock Joycelyn
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 explores the contextual context of the inequality of women’s imprisonment as it creates and sustains conflict. Individualized vulnerabilities and components of prison capital combine to create this gendered context for trouble. Forms of gendered violence are connected to economic, social, and cultural demands of prison life. Troubled relationships inside often reproduce patterns of interpersonal violence reflect women’s pathways. Much of the violence in prison is embedded in these conflicted relationships in the form of interpersonal or domestic violence.
Intersections of Inequality with Correctional Staff
Authors: Owen Barbara , Wells James , Pollock Joycelyn
Published: September 2017

Chapter 6 expands on the consequences of the obvious inequality between correctional worker and prisoner. Much of this inequality is routinely expressed in disrespectful and derogatory comments made by staff about women prisoners. Narrative and survey data is used to describe how staff sexual harassment, misconduct, and physical violence are relatively rare, but are a serious concern to most members of the women’s prison community. The problem of staff sexual misconduct is not one of magnitude. Rather, the fact that any number of staff employed to provide care and custody of women prisoners harm women through sexually-based actions should be troubling to all of us.
The Relatively Liberal Views of People from Catholic-Majority Countries
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

The fifth chapter focuses on Spain, Italy, and Brazil. These nations all have strong Catholic histories, but they vary in the extent to which residents find religion important. The Catholic Church cannot be described as particularly tolerant of homosexuality, but Catholic-majority nations tend to have more liberal residents than mixed Protestant and Muslim-majority societies. This chapter provides the rationale for why residents living in many Catholic societies tend to be more tolerant. The answer is related, in part, to a decline in religious belief, even as residents continue to affiliate as Catholic; a focus on the faith’s emphasis on social justice over strict adherence to religious precepts; and the type of relationship the church has had with these nations’ recent dictators.
Investigating Public Opinion in Confucian Nations
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

A substantial portion of the world’s people reside in countries where Buddhism, Taoism, and systems of ancestral belief dominate. To understand the factors shaping attitudes in these places, this chapter (and the next) examines Confucian nations. These societies (i.e., China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Hong Kong) are more tolerant than many Islamic, Middle Eastern, and African nations, but they are less supportive than countries in the Global North. Using data from the World Values Survey, this chapter shows that Confucianism has created a culture in which family stability and kinship ties are particularly valued. As a result, concerns about keeping the family intact and the importance of blood relationships are particularly important in shaping residents’ views about homosexuality.
The Places of Disorder
Authors: Caimari Lila
Published: September 2017

This chapter delves into the construction of a symbolic opposition between Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Like the city's outskirts themselves, the contrast was born of large-scale demographic and urban changes that were reinforced by a diverse body of documents—expert analysis, fictional narratives, mass media articles, and classified reports. Within this corpus, the analysis focuses on one strand of meaning: that which organized the symbolic location of legality and illegality, safety and danger, order and disorder. Unlike other works on the urban imaginary, here technical, artistic, and literary writings will take a backseat to more widely disseminated discourses: police press releases about security in Buenos Aires, and the stories and images that circulated in both the popular and the “serious” press.
Cultural Expressions
Authors: Markarian Vania
Published: September 2017

This chapter offers a more nuanced portrait of the movement, considering the cultural ramifications of activism and the many different ways politicization was experienced by this new generation of Uruguayan leftists. First, it suggests that diverse understandings of leftist activism tended to both encourage and blur the meanings of heroism as expressed in the image of Che Guevara, among other icons of the time. It also traces the individual trajectories of a handful of young people who took part of the mobilizations to show how many of them came to politics only after participating in the era’s countercultural undertakings, such as fanzines, beat festivals, and poetry concerts, which picked up on the main themes and gestures of the global counterculture. In addition, the chapter uses class and gender as lenses through which to understand the meanings of political engagement and cultural participation.
Chokepoints
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

On January 18, 2012, millions of people participated in the now-infamous “Internet blackout” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the rights it would have given intellectual property holders to shape how people use the Internet. SOPA’s withdrawal was heralded as a victory for an open Internet. However, as Natasha Tusikov documents in Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet, rather than accept defeat, a small group of corporations, tacitly backed by the U.S. and other governments, have implemented much of SOPA via a series of secret, handshake agreements among powerful corporations, including Google, PayPal, and Microsoft. This book is the first to explore these agreements. Drawing on extensive interviews with corporate and government officials, Tusikov details the emergence of a new realm of global governance, in which large Internet firms act as global regulators for powerful intellectual property owners like Nike, and raises questions about the threat these new global regimes pose to democratic accountability itself. The book argues that these global regulators are significantly altering the ways in which governments and corporations regulate content and information on the Internet.
Secret Handshake Deals
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by describing the emergence of non-legally binding enforcement agreements among large Internet firms through a series of closed-door meetings. It introduces the key actors: mostly U.S.-based Internet firms, multinational rights holders, influential industry associations, and policymakers and politicians from the U.S., U.K., and European Commission. Together these actors form a private transnational regime with the goal of suppressing the trafficking of counterfeit goods on the Internet. To provide context, the chapter explains the importance of regulating intellectual property rights to rights holders and governments, as well as the many challenges involved in identifying and policing the distribution of counterfeit goods. The chapter introduces the concept of ‘macro-intermediaries’ (which are globally operating, powerful Internet firms) and explains how these major Internet firms regulate through technology (termed ‘techno-regulation’) to remove content from and disable websites selling counterfeit goods. It describes the focus on five types of Internet sectors (search, advertising, payment, domain name, and marketplace). Companies providing these services can enact different types of regulatory ‘chokepoints’ to target the distribution of counterfeit goods.
Revenue Chokepoints
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

The chapter examines how payment providers (PayPal, Visa and MasterCard) and advertising intermediaries (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) police websites selling or advertising counterfeit goods through non-legally binding agreements. These agreements essentially institute controversial provisions from the failed Stop Online Piracy Act. Payment and advertising intermediaries withdraw their services from websites selling counterfeit goods (termed ‘infringing websites’), thereby throttling the sites’ revenue. Major payment providers are especially powerful regulators as they can starve sites of revenue by terminating their payment services, which can be difficult to replace given the significant market share controlled by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. Macro-intermediaries’ latitude in designating certain content or behavior as ‘inappropriate’ for their platforms raises serious questions about unfair regulatory behavior that may inadvertently – or, more troublingly, deliberating – target lawfully operating sites. The chapter’s case studies examine a U.S. payment-termination program and programs (one in the U.S. and the other in the U.K.) to terminate digital advertising services to infringing sites.
The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture
Authors: Iwamura Jane Naomi
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyzes the history of representation that has contributed to the current image of the Dalai Lama. We “know” the Dalai Lama, not simply because of the fact that we may understand his views and admire his actions, but also because we are familiar with the particular role he plays in the popular consciousness of the United States—the type of icon he has become—the icon of the “Oriental Monk.” To get a sense of what makes the Dalai Lama so popular, we need to get a sense of the history of this icon and how it has been used to express and manage our sense of Asian religions. The chapter asks: How did the Dalai Lama come to represent all that he does for Americans? Indeed, what exactly does he represent? How have we come to “know” him? Is our ability to embrace someone and something (Tibetan Buddhism) once considered so foreign, anything other than a testimony to a newfound openness and progressive understanding?
Adventure Time and Sacred History
Authors: Siegler Elijah
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at how even a form like cartoons for children seeks to establish an imaginative world that rests on a reliable system of mythology. It asks what we mean by myth in popular and scholarly usage and considers why the term has been important in religious and cultural studies. It makes a case for increased attention to myth within television programs as an expression of religion in popular culture. In particular, it argues that to fully understand the role of mythology in popular culture we must take kids' cartoon series of the 2010s seriously. One in particular, Adventure Time, best represents a particular way of thinking about mythology.
The Weight of the World
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2017

Heavy metal, in all its varieties, has been consistently intertwined with religions. This chapter presents four cases that exemplify key moments in metal's development. The first examines metal's early fascination with religious themes and symbolism, marking the simultaneous ubiquity and elusiveness of religion. The second case reads metal's public controversies as indices of changing expectations about religio-moral content in music. The third explores the contrast between “black metal” and “white metal” since the 1990s, one explicitly Satanic and the other openly, if complicatedly, Christian. The fourth and final case maps newly emergent ecological and pagan sensibilities proliferating since the early 2000s. Together, they mark the significance of metal for the study of religion and popular culture, while also suggesting some possible future developments.
Mipsterz
Authors: Peterson Kristin M. , Echchaibi Nabil
Published: September 2017

In a two-and-a-half-minute-long video released on YouTube in November 2013, a series of short clips featured a group of self-confident young Muslim women hanging out in various urban landscapes in the United States, as Jay-Z's song “Somewhere in America” played in the background. The viral video, entitled “Somewhere in America #MIPSTERZ,” quickly became controversial, amid heated accusations that a “misguided” group of hipster Muslim women had gone “too far” in reappropriating modesty and staking out an edgy religious and gendered identity. This chapter focuses on how the women behind the Mipsterz video engaged with visuals, urban styles, fashion, fun, and other forms of popular culture to liberate themselves from a relentless framing that portrays them as either covered and oppressed by Islam or uncovered and sexually liberated by Western secular culture. It argues that popular culture and religion intersect in productive ways, breaking free of the discourse of victimization and exoticism and helping us understand the complex, multiple frames of reference that define American Muslims' everyday lives.
Meditation on the Go
Authors: Grieve Gregory Price
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores how people use smartphones in popular culture to practice religion, focusing on the app, buddhify. It argues that buddhify is authentically religious because it communicates an experience of mindfulness through a procedural spirituality that poaches from video game play. Like other digital devices, buddhify can best be described through “user experience” and “user interface.” User experience defines a person's emotions and attitudes toward an application. Buddhify is designed to promote “mindfulness,” an active state of open nonjudgmental awareness of one's thoughts and emotions. User interface indicates the junction between a person and digital devices and includes the screen elements, such as menus and commands, that lead users through an application. The app's user interface cultivates an experience of mindfulness through ritualization, a way of performing certain activities that differentiates them from more conventional ones and ties this difference into a group's ultimate reality.
It’s About Faith In Our Future
Authors: Jindra Michael
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the fandom that has grown up around the Star Trek movies and television series, arguing that the entertainment industry also creates meanings that begin to function in religious ways for consumers of popular culture. Popular culture has become an independent producer of mythical narratives, a reflection of cultural themes and a producer of new ones. Though often using indirect religious themes and imagery (as in Star Wars or Harry Potter), the narratives and messages have been formally cut off from the religious traditions that have dominated Western culture over the centuries. In other words, parts of popular culture have taken their place alongside the mainstream religious traditions, ideologies, and narratives that have guided people's lives.
Shopping, Religion, and the Sacred “Buyosphere”
Authors: Taylor Sarah Mcfarland
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the way in which consumption itself has come to be seen as a center of meaning and value in the United States today, and looks at shopping malls as places that are potentially sacred centers for this activity. It suggests that to use the language of “religion” or the “sacred” to represent shopping and consumer culture is to assert a kind of “common sense” ideology about both the nature of religion and the nature of shopping. The fact that popular culture has become the primary site for “naturalizing” the conflation of religion, markets, and consumption, while also a key site for critiquing this convergence, speaks to the central role popular culture plays in the contested power and politics that both reinforce hegemony and call for social change.
Losing Their Way to Salvation
Authors: Lelwica Michelle M.
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the ways in which religion can be a form of social control. In particular, it looks at the societal pressures which encourage women to embrace a so-called religion of thinness. This concept is not meant to suggest that the pursuit of slenderness is, in fact, a religion. Rather, it aims to illuminate how this pursuit has become a profound source of meaning for many people today—especially women. The idea of the religion of thinness brings into focus aspects of our culture's devotion to slenderness that functionally resemble certain features of traditional religion, especially Christianity, which has had the most power to influence Western norms and attitudes regarding appetite and body size.
Celebrity Worship as Parareligion
Authors: Ward Pete
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents a study of celebrity worship in an attempt to clarify how popular culture can be like religion, although both remain categorically different. Most approaches to religion involve at least one of the following ideas: a belief in a supernatural power, the significance of religion to generate community life or some kind of church, or a divine power's influence on people's lives. Celebrity culture in almost all of these respects falls significantly short of what is required of a formal religion. Yet rather than dismissing celebrity worship as not religiously significant, it might be possible to cast new light on how, through the action of the media, and through the agency of audiences and fans, something like (and not like) religion is starting to emerge. The term for this is “parareligion.” Parareligion is based on the premise that celebrity worship is not a religion but has religious parallels. Parareligion suggests that religious elements are present but that they are presented ambiguously. These religious elements are often contradictory and open to a variety of different understandings.
Yoga in Popular Culture
Authors: Gandhi Shreena Niketa
Published: September 2017

Yoga has historically been understood as a spiritual practice, a form of embodied prayer, and it came to United States as part of the nation's fascination with the East. Today, it is often practiced as a form of exercise and mindfulness in settings ranging from Christian churches to gymnasiums. Americans imagine yoga as a secular practice, which has been gendered, racially categorized, and socially classed in a particular way, free from the entanglements of any religious traditions or beliefs. This categorization involves both buy-in and push-back, and this chapter examines three examples of this buy-in and push-back, and the ensuing conflicts and dialogues that arise. It looks at the phenomenon of yoga pants, the practice of Christian Yoga, and the protests of the Hindu American Foundation to show how popular culture and religion interact and create pockets of cooperation and conflict.
Rap Music and Its Message
Authors: Pinn Anthony
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a methodology for exploring and understanding the connections between religion and popular culture, labeled as “nitty-gritty hermeneutics.” Nitty-gritty hermeneutics exhibits a sense of nonconformity. It ridicules interpretations and interpreters who seek to inhibit or restrict liberative movement and hard inquiries into the problems of life. The chapter then discusses nitty-gritty hermeneutics in the blues and rap music. In particular, it argues that rap music is an implicit critique of the black church, an accusation that the church has been consumed with a moralism that fails to take seriously the realities of African American suffering. Though rap has been criticized by some religious voices, it fills a spiritual void and engages in a needed dialogue about the situation of many black lives.
Other California
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This book documents the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor on the peninsula from 1850 to 1954, as governments, foreign investors, and local communities shaped a vibrant and dynamic borderland alongside the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia. Migration and intermarriage between Mexican women and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States transformed Baja California into a multicultural society. Mixed-race families extended across national borders, forging new local communities, labor relations, and border politics.
Building the Mexican Borderlands
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the migrations of Diegueño and Californio families from the United States to Baja California, a migration previously unknown to U.S. historians. It delves into the tumultuous aftermath of the Mexican–American War, especially how indigenous peoples living on the banks of the Colorado River dealt with U.S. expansion into northern Mexico. Writing about indigenous people was challenging since they left almost no written documents. Moreover, the cyclical destruction of Baja's Catholic missions meant that only a few church records survived. The author spent three years piecing together small vignettes of indigenous people from scattered government and company minutes located in three countries.
The Making of Baja California’s Multicultural Society
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter tells the story of how migration and intermarriage changed Baja California's social and racial landscape at the turn of the century. It draws heavily from census records and company reports written by managers and administrators who kept a close eye on the workers' health and productivity and, to a greater extent, their personal lives. The Compagnie du Boleo kept detailed records of European managerial workers who married Mexican women. Baja Californian historian Pablo Martínez published birth, marriage, and census records of different municipalities in Baja California that allowed me to trace marriages and families into the twentieth century.
Revolution, Labor Unions, and Land Reform in Baja California
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the formation of labor organizations of Mexican and Asian workers, and their influence on both the labor movement and the movement for land reform. Following the decade of revolutionary upheaval, the population of Baja California increased from 23,537 in 1921 to 48,327 in 1930. During the same time frame, the Colorado River Land Company abandoned large tracts of uncultivated land, which led to an increase in unemployment and stiffer competition between Asian and Mexican workers. Unemployment, combined with the housing shortage caused by a new wave of Mexican migrant workers from the United States, led to the formation of labor unions where indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans demanded access to farmland and called for restrictions on Chinese immigration. Chinese workers formed Chinese associations in the face of repression and forced deportations. While these struggles reveal how workers dealt with hard financial times, they also show how race, gender, and ethnic affiliations shaped activism and early land reform movements in the Mexicali Valley in the 1920s.
The Twilight of Cutting
Authors: Hodzic Saida
Published: September 2017

Departing from common treatment of female genital cutting as an African problem to be debated within Western moral and critical publics, this book examines how Ghanaians problematize and materialize cutting as an African concern in which Western reason and governmentality have been implicated since colonialism. It examines the genealogies of activist and governmental efforts to end cutting (including feminist, public health, and legal interventions and cultural reforms) and the forms of rule, subjectivity, and positioning they produce. It attends to the social concerns and ethical dilemmas of women and men who have been most engaged in and affected by them. Ghanaian opposition to NGOs does not take the shape in the continuation of the practice, as they accommodate NGO platforms, but critique what they leave unaddressed. They question extractive governance that takes without giving and disidentify with the legal rationality of sovereign violence that punishes without caring. They desire governance based on ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.
This ethnography challenges and reinvigorates anthropological and feminist theories about neoliberal punitive rationality and feminist love of law, efficacy and unintended consequences of NGO interventions, minimalist biopolitics of saving lives, and postcolonial abandonment in the postcolonial world. It also charts a path for working against the analytical and political common sense by cultivating sensibilities on the basis of disidentification and immanent critique.
When Cutting Did and Did Not End
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

Chapter 3, When Cutting Did and Did Not End, examines how it is that the discourse of FGM lives on, despite the demise of cutting. Although cutting is on the wane in Ghana, the discourse of its “intractability” is used to produce suspect citizens and to legitimate punitive rationality and “Zero Tolerance” campaigns and legislation. This chapter shows how social science “evidence” is mobilized to support truth claims that rural communities “resist” anti-cutting campaigns and continue to practice cutting “underground.” It also refracts the endings of cutting through the lens of nostalgia: former circumcisers long for the ancestral benevolence that cutting secured for them, and uncut Ghanaians bemoan the disappearance of the traditional patriarchal values they believe cutting upheld.
The Feminist Fetish
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

In the wake of the Constitution of 1992, Ghana criminalized cutting not once, but twice. In chapters 6 and 7, which should be read in conjunction, I investigate the intimate relationship between violence and law by analyzing, respectively the associated efforts to reform and enforce the law against cutting. Chapter 6, The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy illuminates how GAWW’s advocacy for more severe legislation functions as an early instantiation of “zero tolerance to FGM” logic. I attend to Ghanaian advocates’ reckoning with both the power of law and the tensions within feminist liberalism, namely, those between protection and punishment, and freedom and violence.
Setting the Context
Authors: Imoagene Onoso
Published: September 2017

It is a sociological truism that context matters. After all, identity is not created in a vacuum. Instead, people develop their identities as they interact with other groups while navigating the social, political, and economic milieu of the country they live in—a milieu greatly influenced by the country’s specific racial history. Chapter 1 presents a succinct discussion of the social, political, and racial contexts in which the black second generation in the United States and Britain form their identities. The chapter also provides more information on the African diaspora in both countries and the Nigerian communities in particular. And it briefly sketches the history of Nigeria and provides a socio-demographic profile of Nigerians. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the socio-demographic profile of the parents and second generation involved in this study.
“You Are Not Like Me!”
Authors: Imoagene Onoso
Published: September 2017

Chapter 2 shows how the proximal host is a crucial actor influencing how the second generation of Nigerian ancestry identify. How the presence of the proximal host affects identity formation among the black second generation is generally overlooked in segmented assimilation theory and is a key factor emphasized in beyond racialization theory. The chapter details how relations with the proximal host in childhood, particularly feelings of rejection and exclusion based on perceived physical and cultural differences, laid the foundation for developing a distinct ethnicity in adulthood. I discuss the responses of the proximal hosts in the United States and Britain to the Nigerian second generation when they were young. What was viewed as discriminatory responses by members of the proximal host by the Nigerian second generation fostered a feeling of being black but different among the Nigerian second generation. The tense relations between proximal hosts and the African second generation required the young Nigerian second generation to start the process of defining what being black meant to them and defining a diasporic ethnic identity differentiating them from their proximal hosts.