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Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts

Surviving on the Streets: How to Go Down Without Going Out Review

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(More customer reviews)Truly inspiring account of life on the streets. Ace tells it like it us and doesn't sugarcoat or fabricate details to get better ratings. Although I have a permanent place to call home, I found his book very informational and helpful to all walks of life. A "dumpster diver" myself, I can't get enough of diving stories! People should be ashamed of themselves for all the waste they create! I take that back, bless the wasteful, selfish people of the world for giving my life a purpose! To all those found at the bottom of a can, I commend you for doing what you do! Keep up the good work Ace! You are my new hero! :)

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Ace Backwards gives us our first real foray into the daily life of street people.Intended to be written as a how-to for anyone comtemplating or more likely thrust by circumstances into street life, it is an uncensored and candid look at an entirely different world that exists co-dependently with the one with which most of us are familiar.Ace himself admits that no book can teach you to survive the countless turbulent pitfalls awaiting you on the street - each street person's situation is unique.However, this book offers specific tips on street survival that worked - and some that didn't, which might be just as valuable for those who could learn from Ace's mistakes.For those of us who will never live on the streets, this book gives a brutally honest peek into an alien world from the eyes of a native.

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Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities (Chicago Series in Law and Society) Review

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(More customer reviews)I read this for my ADA class. It describes real and personal challenges associated with disability rights - the benefits of asserting those rights vs. the fear of stigma. It brings it home.

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Rights of Inclusion provides an innovative, accessible perspective on how civil rights legislation affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Based on eye-opening and deeply moving interviews with intended beneficiaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger argue for a radically new understanding of rights-one that focuses on their role in everyday lives rather than in formal legal claims.Although all sixty interviewees had experienced discrimination, none had filed a formal protest or lawsuit. Nevertheless, civil rights played a crucial role in their lives. Rights improved their self-image, enhanced their career aspirations, and altered the perceptions and assumptions of their employers and coworkers-in effect producing more inclusive institutional arrangements. Focusing on these long-term life histories, Engel and Munger incisively show how rights and identity affect one another over time and how that interaction ultimately determines the success of laws such as the ADA.

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Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Review

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(More customer reviews)This book has the rare quality of being a classroom text as well as a report. Today's Russia. Pyramid schemes, religion, rave parties,rock music, detective stories, cinema, pets, porn, graffiti, tattooing... the carnival of crazy New Russia to be read overnight. A shock.

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With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia. The contributors examine how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture—as well as the communist legacy—with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia's political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens' cultural production and consumption. This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.Contributors. Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky

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Soccer Madness: Brazil's Passion for the World's Most Popular Sport Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is worth reading, mostly because there simply aren't many books about Brazilian football, & you have to know about Brazil if you really want to know about football.
Anyway, as a book about sociology of football, it is not bad. At least, there was quite a large amount of research and it showed. It just feels a bit awkward, because, despite the many years the author spent in Brazil, she wasn't born in a country which likes football. So, sometimes what she wrote sounds a bit funny.

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Lever's interest in Brazilian soccer and her friendshipwith Pel led to this thoughtful, well-written account ofBrazilians' madness for spectator sports. Drawing on interviews withsoccer club directors, coaches, players, officials, sportswriters, fanclub leaders, and 200 fans, Lever gives readers a fascinating study ofpeople, culture, and politics. She reaches beyond soccer in Brazil toanalyze both the appeal and the cultural achievement of spectatorsports in all modern societies. Sports, she finds, provide an arenafor dramatizing conflicting loyalties while emphasizing the sharedinterests that make us all alike.

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A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont Review

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(More customer reviews)This was an enjoyable anthropological look into modern deer hunting culture in Vermont. Having grown up inside this culture I found Marc Boglioli's insight as an 'outsider' well rounded and welcome, humanizing a traditional way of life that many people who don't hunt simply don't understand.

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American hunters occupy a remarkably complex place in this country s cultural and political landscape. On the one hand, they are cast as perpetrators of an anachronistic and unnecessary assault on innocent wildlife. On the other hand, they are lauded as exemplars of no-nonsense American rugged individualism. Yet despite the passion that surrounds the subject, we rarely hear the unfiltered voices of actual hunters in discussions of hunting.In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America s so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.

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Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World Review

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(More customer reviews)Gay Becker's "Disrupted Lives" deals with the normalizing ideologies of American culture which people have to confront when their ideas of normal life trajectories are "disrupted." She reports on different studies of disrupted lives and gives several examples (those of infertility and stroke victims being the most memorable). The theoretical lens Becker builds for her analysis can be extended to other areas of research wherever the analysis of "disruption" is the focus -obvious examples being stories of addiction and recovery, stories of crime and punishment, stories of religious conversion, or other more quotidian disruptions (eg. such as not finishing an academic project). In any case, this book provides a very cogent analysis of how Americans deal with the increasingly disjunctive nature of modernity American-style. One critical remark that scholars of the left may have is that Becker does not make it clear how her approach/material would address larger debates on questions of exclusion by race and class (given the overarching normative trajectory encompassed by the story of the American Dream). On the other hand, Becker gives a longish methodological appendix that explains clearly how she analyzes her narratives. This section is very valuable and offers a general enough method that can be easily extended into to other fields of research not directly covered. This book is a must read for students and scholars of sociology and anthropology whose methods are qualitative and whose findings are based on narrative analysis. I highly recommend this book!

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Our lives are full of disruptions, from the minor--a flat tire, an unexpected phone call--to the fateful--a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States.FROM THE BOOK:"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."

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How People Live Review

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(More customer reviews)I am VERY familiar with this book, having read it at night to my 11 year old son for months now! We just finished it. He loved it--he is a huge geography buff and was fascinated with the glimpes of so many cultures around the world. We both learned a lot about people and countries we had known nothing or very little about before now.
A few small things would have made this a much better book, however! I would have loved to have a small map on each 2 page spread about a culture, so that we could have seen exactly where the people talked about lived. I'd have liked very much to have some of the words in other languages spelled out phonetically, as I was often guessing wildly at how things were said. I also wish the book would have focused a little less on exotic and unusual cultures and a little more on more common cultures---the former was very interesting, but the latter would have given us probably a more realistic world view!
My sons are annoyed that I am writing so many complaints! They felt this was a wonderful book, and so did I---I just think it could have been even better!

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