Why do 'Jaws', 'Field of Dreams', 'The Big Lebowski', and 'The Godfather' remain strikingly popular in this age of fragmented audiences and ever-faster spin cycles? "Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies" argues that these films continue to captivate audiences because they play upon underlying tensions and problems in American culture, much like the myths that anthropologists study in non-Western contexts. In making this argument, the authors employ and extend anthropo...

This book demonstrates that the beliefs about writing reflect extensive contact with birth certificates, baptism records, and other church and state documents. It reviews Ecuadorian history to identify the specific documentation sources that have most influenced beliefs in the witch's book.

This book tells the incredible true story of Ranulfo Juárez, a Mexican immigrant. After working for years in the fields of Oregon and becoming a U.S. citizen, Ranulfo started making plans to buy a small bakery in 2005. But not knowing if the economy would hold steady, Ranulfo examined his dreams every morning in search of secret clues foretelling insight and a successful bakery—or homelessness. Ranulfo also enlisted author Peter Wogan, a white anthropology professor with a penchant for sel...

International adoptions are both high-profile and controversial, with the celebrity adoptions and critically acclaimed movies such as Casa de los babys of recent years increasing media coverage and influencing public opinion. Neither celebrating nor condemning cross-cultural adoption, Karen Dubinsky considers the political symbolism of children in her examination of adoption and migration controversies in North America, Cuba, and Guatemala.Babies Without Borders tells the ...

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in American culture.provides a detailed background on the theory of race and racismreveals how racializing discourse—talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them—facilitates a victim-blaming logicintegrates a broad...

Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital’s outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing...

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and...

Urban ethnography is the firsthand study of city life by investigators who immerse themselves in the worlds of the people about whom they write. Since its inception in the early twentieth century, this great tradition has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers. The past few decades have seen an extraordinary revival in the field, as scholars and the public at large grapple with the increasingly complex and pressing issues that affect the ever-changing American city-from ...

Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations?These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for A...

What does it feel like to be a minority within a minority? For lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of color, their experiences coming out and living openly can be incredibly complicated. They may face discrimination from their community because of their sexual orientation, and they may be subjected to racism by their LGBT peers. Learn about the complicated health and personal issues related to this community, and find out how role models such as openly gay comedian Wanda ...

In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña and Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. Her engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic study reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among Latina gang girls in California, and th...

Girls in gangs are usually treated as objects of public criticism and rejection. Seldom are they viewed as objects worthy of understanding and even more rarely are they allowed to be active subjects who craft their own public persona—which is what makes this work unique. In this book, Marie "Keta" Miranda presents the results of an ethnographic collaboration with Chicana gang members, in which they contest popular and academic representations of Chicana/o youth and also construct their own...