bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shaping Attitudes in Taiwan
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

Chapter 7 contextualizes the quantitative findings presented in the previous chapter by presenting a case study of Taiwan, which is a prosperous and relatively democratic society. This chapter draws on field research that includes twenty-six interviews that were conducted with journalists, nonprofit organizations, and religious and political figures. The chapter shows that same-sex behaviors are a problem in Taiwan in part because of concerns related to the importance of kinship ties and bloodlines. Additionally, many Taiwanese do not personally know someone who is gay or lesbian; many seem relatively tolerant until they consider the possibility of a gay or lesbian family member. The chapter ends by revealing the surprisingly powerful role that Christianity and the Unification Church, which include less than 10 percent of the Taiwanese population, have had in organizing the movement against homosexuality.
While the City Sleeps
Authors: Caimari Lila
Published: September 2017

This book is an extraordinary work of scholarship from one of Argentina's leading historians of modern Buenos Aires society and culture. In the late nineteenth century, the city saw a massive population boom and large-scale urban development. With these changes came rampant crime, a chaotic environment in the streets, and intense class conflict. In response, the state expanded institutions that were intended to bring about social order and control. This book mines both police records and true crime reporting to bring to life the underworld pistoleros, the policemen who fought them, and the crime journalists who brought the conflicts to light. In the process, the book crafts a new portrait of the rise of one of the world's greatest cities.
Uruguay, 1968
Authors: Markarian Vania , Zolov Eric , Carrara Laura Pérez
Published: September 2017

This book examines the creation of new conceptions of youth and politics during the Cold War era by focusing on the case of Uruguay in the 1960s. In this decade, a generation of Latin American youth entered political life inspired by a heroic view of activism that coincided, often contentiously, with the spread of new cultural trends from youth movements in Europe and United States. The Uruguayan case shows a series of distinctive features which can help us rethink the significance of similar Cold War processes in the region and across the globe. This study analyzes the Uruguayan student movement of 1968 through a close examination of the intellectual debates, ideological schisms, and social representations that shaped the positions of leftist groups and fueby building on earlier discussions about how to achieve revolutionary change in Uruguay and the region as a whole. By exploring the intersection of activism, political violence, and youth culture, this book opens new insights on categories such as the 哲‎ew
Mobilizations
Authors: Markarian Vania
Published: September 2017

This chapter profiles the irruption and development of the 1968 student movement in Montevideo. It considers both politics in high schools (which were the first ones to mobilize around demands for cheaper transportation) and in the national university (where students initially asked for more government funding and then promoted radical changes to their institution and beyond). Through an almost day-by-day description of the movement, it shows the gradual taking of streets and remaking of the urban landscape as well as the innovative repertoires of contention within the mobilized groups. It situates the violent actions and rhetoric of students in relation to the increasing authoritarianism of the government, examining new police tactics and the influence of training programs conducted by the United States. The killing of three students by police forces, the first such incidents in Uruguayan history, are analyzed within this broader context.
Discussions
Authors: Markarian Vania
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the range of responses to the student’s innovative protests and the ensuing efforts of social and political actors to interpret the new repertoires of contention. In secondary schools, this meant emphasizing horizontal exchanges and mechanisms of direct democracy; at the national university, the student federation struggled to maintain control over those who advocated “spontaneous” action. In addition, the sudden irruption of student mobilization led the various groups and parties of the Left to reconsider the concept of “generation” in conjunction with more traditional class analysis and the role of political violence and direct action in producing revolutionary social change. The analysis advances some conclusions about the impact of the student movement on both the old and new Left, since none of the sectors anticipated the power of the student protests to politically “activate” young people and to attract thousands of new activists into their ranks.
Changing the Enforcement Paradigm
Authors: Tusikov Natasha
Published: September 2017

This chapter reflects upon the case studies in the three preceding chapters to examine the inter-dependencies and varying interests among corporate and state actors in the regulation of online infringement. It considers how the private transnational regime regulates through technology and concludes major intermediaries have the capacity to act as private arbiters of the legality of goods, services, and technologies. The agreements are designed to streamline, simplify and accelerate enforcement processes to enable regulation to occur globally, rapidly and over a mass population. Principles of due process and accountability, however, are generally incompatible with the shift toward rapid mass policing. The non-binding agreements are intended to push intermediaries to exceed their legal responsibilities voluntarily, in the absence of legislation and court orders, in a form of compliance-plus regulation. The goal is also to enable U.S. and European rights holders to set rules regarding the protection of intellectual property that are then exported worldwide, especially to China.
Introduction
Authors: Forbes Bruce David
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter explores the connections between popular culture and religion. Looking at the various ways in which these two subject areas interact provides a way to reflect on religion that is quite different from studying religious institutions, their scriptures, and their formal theologians. Approaching the study of religion through popular culture can help us learn more about the role religion plays in people's everyday lives and about widespread perceptions of it. The analysis of popular culture also can provide insights into how religions change and are changed by the cultures in which they are embedded. To help frame the discussion of such avenues of inquiry, the chapter defines popular culture, summarizes some of the basic terminology and strategies of popular culture analysis, and introduces four ways that popular culture and religion relate to one another.
The Origin(s) of Superman
Authors: Clanton Dan W.
Published: September 2017

This chapter shows that cultural artifacts like “Superman” can be religiously multivalent, that is, different interpreters find various kinds of symbols and themes when examining the same aesthetic product. To do so, it examines some possibly religious elements within the Richard Donner film Superman: The Movie (1978) in order to demonstrate how some readers/viewers can see Superman as another in a long line of Jewish heroes, while others see him as an obvious Christ figure. It argues that meaning emerges in the complex interaction between interpreter and text, so that meaning is negotiated between certain clues in, and information about, a text, and the experiences and interpretive expertise of the interpreter. Neither the text nor the reader/hearer/viewer is totally responsible for what a given story means.
Megachurches, Celebrity Pastors, and the Evangelical Industrial Complex
Authors: Johnson Jessica
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the accelerated ascendency of megachurch celebrity pastors is best examined and understood in terms of marketing strategy and commodification processes specific to a digital age in which social media and interactive technologies are impacting the identity formation of Christians and non-Christians alike. It demonstrates how relationships between celebrity pastors and their congregants are mediated by cultural and technological shifts as church branding has become integral to evangelical purpose. It compares two campaigns to market books by celebrity pastors—Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage (2012) and Judah Smith's Jesus Is (2013). It considers how pastors have managed to gain celebrity and inspire congregational growth in what is considered one of the least churched cities in the United States—Seattle.
People of the Picture Book
Authors: Gross Rachel B.
Published: September 2017

Since 2005, a philanthropic organization, PJ Books, has set out to influence American Jews by reaching them in one of their most tender, intimate family moments: parents reading to children. The program uses children's books to influence Jewish families' values and practices. This chapter argues that PJ Library demonstrates the burden that American Jewish institutions place on popular culture to shape their communities. Though staff members deny that PJ Library is engaged in religious activity, the organization does, in fact, use children's books as a tool to shape American Jewish religion. It uses children's books to introduce families to or reinforce their connection with sacred rituals and Jewish customs. More broadly, PJ Library seeks to persuade American Jewish families to make Judaism an important part of their lives and to connect them, one illustrated book at a time, to networks that will help them do so.
Mirror, Mirror on Ourselves
Authors: Brehm Stephanie , Rees Myev
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyzes Disney films and theme parks, which are taken as “texts” that can be examined or “read.” The analysis challenges the view that religion and popular culture are top-down power structures inflicting their agendas on passive individuals. Instead, it imagines Disney “texts” as places where that dialogue might be taking place. It focuses on two significant tensions revealed in Disney texts. The first tension is between the sacralization of futuristic technological progress and the idealized return to nature religion. The second tension is between initiatives to empower girls and women and the ambivalences and anxieties caused by dismantling “traditional” gender norms and systems.
Broadswords and Face Paint
Authors: Coats Curtis D. , Hoover Stewart M.
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the use that evangelical pastors and men's groups have made of the Mel Gibson film Braveheart (1995) in their dialogue about masculinity, the roles and assumed responsibilities of men. It looks at how the film provides language and images through which these men imagine and articulate what it means for them to be evangelical husbands and fathers. Implicit here is an argument that popular culture provides language and images that more adequately or honestly get at the struggles of particular communities. The chapter focuses on the way some white men who remain within the church find its language and images inadequate, and turn to a particular example of popular culture to explore their roles and responsibilities.
Conclusion
Authors: Castillo-Muñoz Verónica
Published: September 2017

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Looking back at how Baja California was transformed from a backwater to one of the most productive regions in northern Mexico, one could easily conclude that foreign investment was a catalyst for Baja California's dramatic economic success. But this is only part of the story. This book demonstrates that intermarriage, land reform, and migration were vital to the development of the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican borderlands. Without Asian, mestizo, and indigenous workers, it would have been impossible for the Compagnie du Boleo and the the Colorado River Land Company to become some of the most productive enterprises in Latin America. In the post NAFTA era, Baja California continues to be a strategic place for commerce and migration. The boom of maquilas (assembly plants) and agribusinesses persist in attracting migrant workers from different parts of Mexico.
Mistaken by Design
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

Turning to practices of persuasion as techniques of governance, Chapter 4, Mistaken by Design: Biopolitics in Practice, examines how RHI addresses rural publics in the Upper East region. Through an ethnography of public health educational film screenings, I try to understand how RHI’s work is persuasive even though it eschews translation and mobilizes misrepresentations. Rather than interpreting these as indicators of a lack of knowledge or tying them to failure, I suggest that they constitute deliberate, tactical refusals of translation. Medical anthropologists tend to emphasize and critique what is said in public health and development interventions, and how it is said, but I want suggest that what is done and how power is materialized matters much more. My analysis of the place of knowledge in NGO interventions shows that NGOs like RHI know how to make knowledge matter, but also recognize that more than knowledge is needed for the production of authority. Claims about the harms of cutting become “true” when presented in visual spectacles that materialize governmental power and set the conditions and constraints on which knowledge about reproduction, health, and society is socially productive.
Blood Loss and Slow Harm in Times of Scarcity
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2017

For women who have stopped cutting, the success of interventions against cutting in northern Ghana is also an index of a troubled economy and consequent bodily vulnerability and precarity. Chapter 5, Cutting in Times in Scarcity: Blood Loss and Slow Harm after NGOs, recasts the aftermath of governmental achievements in light of the perspectives of rural women in the Bongo district targeted by NGO and state interventions. Taking their concerns about lack of blood as a starting point, I explore how they problematize harm and make sense of the end of cutting. Cutting is now seen as unworthy of blood loss, and as a critical event that generates a lifelong susceptibility to illness. Cutting had to stop, they say, given how the struggles of the contemporary moment have meant that women can no longer afford to lose blood. Furthermore, while NGOs and the state seek to isolate cutting in a hermetically-sealed world of rural northern Ghanaians who resist change, these women link the end of cutting to national and pan-African concerns and idioms, joining a chorus of voices that criticize national blood shortages and emphasize the associated failures of biopolitical care.
Beyond Expectations
Authors: Imoagene Onoso
Published: September 2017

More Than Just Black delves into the experiences of second generation Nigerian adults in the United States and Britain, examining how race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect their identities and assimilation trajectories. I pay particular attention to how their relations with their proximal hosts, African Americans in the United States and Black Caribbeans in Britain, affect how they identify. I conclude that the Nigerian second generation have more in common with fellow immigrants than they do with their proximal hosts.
OR
Focusing on questions of identity, More Than Just Black examines the nature of second generation Nigerians incorporation in the United States and Britain. I investigate how, in combination, race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect the identity formation process and assimilation trajectories of the adult second generation of Nigerian ancestry in both countries. I find that despite living in countries where people are categorized by race and where race and racial categorization still hold great social and political power, the Nigerian second generation in both countries are not defined through the prism of race. They have formed a nuanced identity that balances race, a Nigerian ethnicity (which includes an achievement orientation akin to “model minority” groups), a pan-African identity, and, depending on structure of national identity and perceptions of thoroughness in redressing past ethnoracial traumas, identification with the country of destination.
La Nueva California
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

Since late 2001 more than fifty percent of the babies born in California have been Latino. When these babies reach adulthood, they will, by sheer force of numbers, influence the course of the Golden State. This essential study, based on decades of data, paints a vivid and energetic portrait of Latino society in California by providing a wealth of details about work ethic, family strengths, business establishments, and the surprisingly robust health profile that yields an average life expectancy for Latinos five years longer than that of the general population. Spanning one hundred years, this complex, fascinating analysis suggests that the future of Latinos in California will be neither complete assimilation nor unyielding separatism. Instead, the development of a distinctive regional identity will be based on Latino definitions of what it means to be American. This updated edition now provides trend lines through the 2010 Census, as well as information on the 1849 California Constitutional Convention and the ethnogenesis of how Latinos created the society of “Latinos de Estados Unidos” (Latinos in the United States). In addition, two new chapters focus on Latino post-millennials—the first focusing on what it’s like to grow up in a digital world, and the second describing the contestation of Latinos at a national level and the dynamics that transnational relationships have on Latino post-millennials in Mexico and Central America.
Latinos Define “American”
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

Non-Hispanic white focus-group participants rejected their parents’ Anglo-Saxon nativist definition of American and used the new nativist definition, one based on work ethic, rejection of welfare, strong families, and patriotism. In the aftermath of the pro-Proposition 187 messaging, they felt that Latinos were poor because they lacked ambition and were unpatriotic because they spoke Spanish—and hence might not be truly American. Both US-born and immigrant Latino focus-group participants felt that they were fully American, but they were aware that many non-Latinos did not think that they were, indeed, fully American.
Latino Post-Millennials
Authors: Hayes-Bautista David E.
Published: September 2017

Latinos make up over fifty percent of the post-millennial generation in California. Their formative experience is very different from that of non-Hispanic white post-millennials, who are the highly educated children of the highly educated baby boom and generation X parents. Latino post-millennials may be characterized as being largely the US-born, highly educated, bilingual children of immigrant parents, who have lived all their lives constantly targeted by nativist, anti-Latino rhetoric. These young Latinos are flocking to college campuses, and as they enter the labor force, their productivity will drive the state’s economy.
Prologue
Authors: Berger Karol
Published: September 2017

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Authors: Berger Karol
Published: September 2017

For those unwilling to follow the erotic utopia of Tristan, a new answer had to be found to the political and ethical questions raised in the Ring. And this is precisely what Wagner provided in his last two projects. Die Meistersinger (1861-67) as an attempt, partly inspired by the nationalism of Fichte, to see whether something of the political optimism of the Ring might still be salvageable after the pessimistic discoveries of Tristan. The answer the opera gives to this question is affirmative, but the specific content of this answer is profoundly disturbing, a utopia of post-political aestheticized metapolitics pregnant with sinister implications for the future.
Germ Wars
Authors: Armstrong Melanie
Published: September 2017

The United States government has spent billions of dollars this century to prepare the nation for bioterrorism, despite the extremely rare occurrence of biological attacks in modern American history. Germ Wars argues that bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear in the modern age through the production of new forms of microbial nature and changing practices of warfare. Revolutions in biological science have made visible a vast microscopic world in the last century, and in this same era we have watched the rise of a global war on terror. Though these movements appear to emerge separately, this book argues that they are deeply entwined. New scientific knowledge of microbes makes possible new mechanisms of war. The history of the work done to harness and control germs, whether to create weapons or to eliminate disease, is an important site for investigating how biological natures shape modern life. Germ Wars aims to convince students and scholars as well as policymakers and activists that the ways in which bioterrorism has been produced have consequences in how people live in this world of unspecifiable risks.
Microbes for War and Peace
Authors: Armstrong Melanie
Published: September 2017

When the U.S. military created a bioweapons research program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, following World War II, it enlisted microbiology in the production of modern warfare. Biological weapons magnify the potential of germs to harm humans, remaking the terms of risk to account for natures that have been engineered to be more contagious, fatal, and far-reaching. This alliance between war and science also bracketed certain ways of knowing nature by creating spaces and mechanisms to control microbes according to human desires. Beyond the weapon itself, bioweapons research promulgated knowledge of containment, designing top-secret, high-security laboratory spaces for the safe study of deadly microbes, thereby materializing the belief that microbes must (and could) be contained.
Simulation Science
Authors: Armstrong Melanie
Published: September 2017

Because no large-scale bioterrorist attack has happened in the modern age, planning for bioterrorism requires imagination. Simulations, ranging from computer-generated models to large-scale role-playing events involving thousands of actors, have gained credibility as a scientific tool for calculating the outcomes of violent events. Expanding use of simulation raises questions about how modeling and scenario planning gain tenacity in the current political climate, used by planners and policymakers to generate knowledge of the future. In bioterrorism preparedness, simulations and scenarios matter because they rationalize political actions that manage human life, individually and collectively, in the present moment. A case study of a terrorism training center in Playas, New Mexico, demonstrates the material and political effects of scenarios and simulation.
Art of Connection
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. The book illuminates the lived experiences of marginalized Kenyan businesspeople struggling in the shadow of the country’s international tourism to balance new risks with new types of mobility. These new strategies are balanced against older models of development based on the co-operative industry and ethnic networks. But for many young traders, such models appear outdated and lacking innovation. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. By balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders can thus make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible. The art of connection is, therefore, a set of strategies for making and maintaining connections by deploying notions of transparency. But as the book illustrates, it is also an artistic motif that represents the importance of ideals of transparency and connections in the world today.
The Art of Connection
Authors: Mahoney Dillon
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the research and several of the main characters, their complex ethnic identities, and their struggles connecting to the global crafts business at a time of economic change in Mombasa, Kenya. Framing the larger set of stories within debates surrounding Afropolitanism and the “Africa Rising” narrative, this chapter argues that an exploration of the how Kenyan art traders adapt digital technologies to their businesses allows us to balance the optimism of the “Africa Rising” narrative with the realities of Africans’ struggles to connect but to forge trusting, dependable connections strong enough to be viable alternatives to ethnic and other informal networks. This chapter also uses background on the West’s curiosity with Africa’s “ethnic and tourist arts” to argue that digital technology has largely replaced art today as a means of evaluating African “development.”
Time Series Analysis in the Social Sciences
Authors: Shin Youseop
Published: September 2017

This book focuses on fundamental elements of time series analysis that social scientists need to understand to employ time series analysis for their research and practice. Avoiding extraordinary mathematical materials, this book explains univariate time-series analysis step by step from the preliminary visual analysis through the modeling of seasonality, trends, and residuals to the prediction and the evaluation of estimated models. Then, this book explains smoothing, multiple time-series analysis, and interrupted time-series analysis. At the end of each step, this book coherently provides an analysis of the monthly violent crime rates as an example.
Smoothing
Authors: Shin Youseop
Published: September 2017

Chapter Five explains how to make trends stand out more clearly by reducing residual fluctuations in a time series, focusing on two widely employed techniques, exponential smoothing and moving average smoothing.
Time Series Analysis as an Impact Analysis Method
Authors: Shin Youseop
Published: September 2017

Chapter Seven explains interrupted time series analysis. This chapter includes the impact analysis of the Three-Strikes-Out law with October 1994 (when Public Law 103-322 was enacted) as the intervention point.
Exceptional America
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, the literal truth of the Bible, apocalyptical prophecies, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sexual education, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. The intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. It is rather what makes America an exception, for better or worse. While exceptionalism once was largely a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts and injustices. They also shed light on the peculiar ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, radical anti-governmentalism, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, Mugambi Jouet explores American exceptionalism’s intriguing roots as a multicultural outsider-insider. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, he then lived throughout America, from the Bible Belt to New York, California, and beyond. His articles have notably been featured in The New Republic, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, and Le Monde. He teaches at Stanford Law School.
Mass Incarceration, Executions, and Gun Violence in “the Land of the Free”
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened.
Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA.
Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.
Conclusion
Authors: Jouet Mugambi
Published: September 2017

The Republican Party’s shift towards the far-right since the 1980s paved the way for Trump’s neo-fascist campaign. Trump’s agenda and rhetoric were not drastically different from the Republican establishment, which largely embraced winner-take-all economics, anti-intellectualism, disinformation, conspiracy-mongering, authoritarianism, racist dog-whistle messages, and torturing Muslims suspected of terrorism. Trumpism was an intensification of this ideology, not a departure from it. But America’s decline after little more than a century as a superpower still seems far from inevitable. It remains the world’s strongest economy. It is a leader in technology and many other fields. Its universities are widely recognized as the best in the world. It has great thinkers and innovators. In sum, there is much to admire about contemporary America and it is not too late to address the aspects of American exceptionalism that may precipitate its decline.
How May I Help You?
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

May I Help You? is Deepak Singh’s insightful and thought-provoking account of disillusionment when, as an educated upper-class Indian, he moves with his American wife to the United States and discovers that America doesn’t care if he has an MBA from India or had worked for the BBC. Like many immigrants before him, Singh discovers that in America employers only trust him with a minimum wage job as a clerk, but his disappointment and embarrassment soon give way to shock when he realizes that in this world of low-wage work he is joined not merely by other immigrants, but by many Americans, a whole swath of the citizenry who goes unacknowledged and unassisted in their struggles to make a living wage. In sincere and straightforward prose, Singh takes the reader along on his journey full of dismay and compassion when the expectations he had of the United States, built around interactions in India with well-educated, affluent expatriates, collide with the reality of a coworker who must skip lunch until payday and the customers who buy in anticipation of a paycheck.
My American Wife
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on how the author remembers how he understood his wife in India and how different she appeared in the United States, not just in dress, but in manner. He starts to feel the culture shock of arriving in Virginia.
One Month’s Notice
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter talks about how the author finds it hard to communicate with the customers and struggles to perform well. As a result, his boss puts him on a month’s notice to improve or leave.
Foreigner
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, like the previous two, author begins to connect with the customers—using his foreignness and his Indian upbringing—and finds a niche, his own customer base, mostly among foreign students and immigrants.
My Name Is Deepak
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at the author's responses to being given a nickname by his co-workers: Tupac. They do it in a friendly manner, but the author doesn’t understand the connection with the American rapper. It makes him think about who he is, his identity, and how people see him in his adopted country.
I’m Straight Today
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

In this chapter the author describes about dealing with a same-sex couple for the first time at the electronics store. The chapter draws from his experiences in India, where few people are open about their sexual orientation, and where homosexuality has been criminalized at some times.
Don’t Sue Me!
Authors: Singh Deepak
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses suing culture in the United States of America. An irate customer threatens to sue the store if the author refused to do what she wanted.
Introduction
Authors: Cobb L. Stephanie
Published: September 2017

The Introduction focuses on the differences between ancient and modern experiences of martyr texts. In particular, it explores how ancient audiences might have received these stories: aurally within communal settings, particularly in church settings. It examines the ways martyr texts employ techniques of oral delivery to engage audiences emotionally. It differentiates the cultural contexts of modern and ancient audiences that affect the ways the texts can be understood: what cultural knowledge is required to engage fully with martyr texts?
Divine Analgesia
Authors: Cobb L. Stephanie
Published: September 2017

Chapter Three surveys narrative techniques for rejecting pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom. A number of texts explicitly deny the experience of pain altogether by employing the language of analgesia or anesthesia in their descriptions of the martyrs’ experiences of torture; other texts employ typical terms for pain but negate them; some narratives differentiate the experiences of the martyrs’ bodies from those of their spirits. Often texts attribute Christian impassibility to the presence and support of the divine. Finally, many texts thwart the audience’s visual imagination by preparing listeners to envision a grotesque murder, but then unexpectedly describing, instead, a beautiful body unharmed by torture. In these stories, torture does not harm Christians but, rather, it heals them.
Maps of Home
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

Focusing on the locational map, this interlude is the first of several in the book that examine standard representational tools employed in the ethnography of indigenous peoples. It suggests that the locational map serves instant recognition of where on the globe the study-people live but that that recognition is dependent on readers’ own spatial imaginations and involves colossal scalar distortion of local worlds. In particular, mapping tiny-scale worlds obscures the local importance not of where people live but with
whom.
At Home
Authors: Bird-David Nurit
Published: September 2017

The Western philosophical “dwelling-in-the-world” perspective carries into hunter-gatherer studies distortive large-scale biases, and the ecological-anthropological perspective registers foragers’ dwellings as temporary huts. Aligning with studies of homes and houses as cultural sites, this chapter examines the forager hamlet as the physical setting and the mind setting of everyday life. Ethnography spanning the foragers’ vernacular architecture, domestic routines (especially sleeping and storage), (dis)order in the hamlet, material belongings, and semantics of dwelling(s) reveals the value accorded diversity, togetherness, and undivided habitus as well as locals’ conceptions of existence as pregiven being-with others and of plurality as encompassing diverse-and-related beings.
A Catholic Community in Crisis
Authors: Dutton George E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses Binh’s life after his ordination as a priest in late 1793, focusing on the growing rift between him and his superior, the Spanish Dominican apostolic vicar. It looks in detail at a series of new regulations imposed by the bishop that have significant consequences for the community, ranging from restrictions on the types of hats they are allowed to produce and wear to the pronunciation of liturgical terms. The chapter then explores the question of language and pronunciation within the mission context, suggesting both the parallels and differences that exist between this case and that described for the early colonial Philippines by Vicente Rafael. The community viewed the bishop’s restrictions as a direct attack upon its identity, leading its members openly to resist the bishop’s authority. In so doing, they were classified as schismatics, Catholics refusing the directives of their ecclesiastical superiors, and thus entered a form of internal exile – separated from the church for defying their bishop.
Conclusion
Authors: Braunstein Ruth
Published: September 2017

Chapter 7 summarizes the key findings and contributions of the book. First, it highlights the book’s contributions to understanding how broadly shared democratic ideals can refract into different understandings of what it means to be a good citizen in practice, and ultimately, different styles of engaging in active citizenship. It then discusses the implications of these findings for American democracy itself. Although Interfaith and the Patriots disagree about how democracy ought to work and the proper role of citizens within it, they share an abiding faith in the American democratic project itself. Moreover, the book suggests that this disagreement is not new, and that the complexity of America’s democratic tradition is both a blessing and a curse, fueling perpetual disagreement over what it means to be a good citizen, but also encouraging political commitment. It concludes by suggesting that as long as groups like Interfaith and the Patriots continue to cultivate and enact many different stories of America, and no single story becomes dominant, then citizens can productively interrogate their respective benefits and drawbacks.
Race and the Brazilian Body
Authors: Roth-Gordon Jennifer
Published: September 2017

Based on the spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Race and the Brazilian Body asks how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. The book draws on over 20 years of research to explain what is called Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” in which embedded structural racism that very visibly privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) carefully “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features, including skin color, hair texture, and facial features, but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech that is commonly described as slang (gíria). It is through adherence to implicit social norms that encourage individuals to display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), to avoid blackness, and to “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences), that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls, and who merits the rights of citizenship.
Fears of Racial Contact
Authors: Roth-Gordon Jennifer
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 describes how Rio residents engage in an endless process of reading bodies for racialized signs of civility or disorder in an attempt to keep themselves safe in a context of heightened crime and violence and in daily struggles over urban space. Here one’s capacity for crime and lawlessness can be linked to something as simple as the “uncultured” act of eating a bologna sandwich at the beach, a site where privileged lighter-skinned South Zone residents now worry they will be swept up in an arrastão or beach theft/riot amidst the thousands of new darker-skinned beachgoers who arrive, by bus and metro, from the geographically distant and socially marginalized suburbs. The lack of confidence in the security offered by the Brazilian state, combined with the vast openness and lack of barriers restricting access to Rio’s kilometers of postcard-worthy coastline, produces an incredibly rich and complicated system of symbolic segregation, one that relies on the opposition between cultural and linguistic practices associated with whiteness vs. those associated with blackness.
Making the Mano
Authors: Roth-Gordon Jennifer
Published: September 2017

Chapter 6 focuses on the intentional and defiant displays of blackness by politically conscious Brazilian rappers and rap fans and the challenges they pose to Brazil’s belief in racial tolerance. By the time politically conscious hip hop reached the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s, the nation was on the brink of engaging in a national debate surrounding sweeping legislative changes that would work towards addressing some of the country’s problems with structural racism, particularly through affirmative action quotas in higher education. But these changes would mark a dramatic shift in state policy and national reputation: Rather than continuing to celebrate race mixture and racial tolerance, the Brazilian state would publicly and officially admit to the visibility of blackness and to its racism. As reactions to politically conscious hip hop make apparent, this public recognition of racial difference and the challenges to ideas of racial tolerance provoked strong racial anxiety. This chapter explores rappers’ and rap fans’ embrace of “imported” cultural and linguistic practices that allowed them to wear blackness visibly, and defiantly, on their bodies in order to challenge their assigned place in Brazil’s racial hierarchy
Thoreau and the Language of Trees
Authors: Higgins Richard , Richardson Robert D.
Published: September 2017

Thoreau and the Language of Trees is the first in-depth study of Thoreau’s passionate engagement with trees and his writing about them. It explores his keen eye for trees as a naturalist, his creative response to them as a poet, his philosophical understanding of them, the joy they gave him and the spiritual bond he felt with them. It includes excerpts from Thoreau’s extraordinary writing about trees from 1837 to 1861, illustrated with Higgins’s photography. The excerpts show his detailed observations on trees, his sense of loss at the ravaging of the forest during his life and the delight he took in the splendor of Concord’s woods and meadows. They also show his response to individual trees: an iconic Concord elm, a stand of old-growth oaks he discovered, his beloved white pines, trees made new by snow and trees as ships at sea. Higgins shows that Thoreau probed the complex lives of trees in the forest as a scientist and, as a poet and spiritual seeker, saw them as miracles that encapsulate all that is good about nature.
Transformed by Snow
Authors: Higgins Richard , Higgins Richard
Published: September 2017

Thoreau loved trees in all seasons but had a special fondness for trees transformed by snow. Winter made the familiar trees he saw all year look new. After a winter storm, Thoreau went to see them as excited as a child on Christmas morning. He saw surreal and poetic forms in trees covered in snow. They were statues draped in white in a gigantic sculptor’s studio. Trees glistening with ice or clad in a coat of white quickened his pulse and stirred his pen. They stirred some of his best writing about trees.
Paul, Torah, and Jewish Identity
Authors: Collins John J.
Published: September 2017

Paul’s attitude to the Law has been endlessly debated. Several scholars have argued in recent years that Paul’s critique of the Law only applied to Gentiles, and that he assumed its continued validity for Jews. But in fact Paul claimed to have a new revelation, which superseded the Law for Jews as well as for Gentiles. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision ultimately mattered. Paul may not have objected to continued Jewish observance of the Torah, but he undermined its significance to a great degree. He arguably posed a greater threat to Jewish identity than had Antiochus Epiphanes in the Maccabean era.
Afghanistan’s Islam
Authors: Green Nile
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the study of Islam in Afghanistan to readers with no previous knowledge of the region. Based on two decades of research, it provides both a survey of Afghan religious history and a summary of existing scholarship on the subject. Since the book as a whole is intended to collate existing expert knowledge on Afghan Islam into a single volume, the summary of over half a century of scholarship in English, French, German, Italian and Swedish provides the fullest overview ever attempted of expertise on this much-discussed but rarely-researched topic. The chapter renders this précis readable and intelligible by structuring it in chronological terms that follow the emergence, expansion and diversification of Afghanistan’s various versions of Islam from the eighth to the twenty-first century. In this way, the introduction both enables readers to navigate through the more specialist ‘snapshot’ chapters that follow while at the same time drawing attention to the various gaps in even expert understanding of Islam in Afghanistan. The chapter is the most comprehensive general summary of the history and anthropology of Afghan Islam yet available.