Böcker utgivna av University of California Press

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "e;West."e; Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism-including citizenship and equality-were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past?It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of "e;culture"e; in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the "e;indigenous ethnic group"e; who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous.One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.

This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct-possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities-each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.

Eating Apes is an eloquent book about a disturbing secret: the looming extinction of humanity's closest relatives, the African great apes-chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. Dale Peterson's impassioned expose details how, with the unprecedented opening of African forests by European and Asian logging companies, the traditional consumption of wild animal meat in Central Africa has suddenly exploded in scope and impact, moving from what was recently a subsistence activity to an enormous and completely unsustainable commercial enterprise. Although the three African great apes account for only about one percent of the commercial bush meat trade, today's rate of slaughter could bring about their extinction in the next few decades. Supported by compelling color photographs by award-winning photographer Karl Ammann, Eating Apes documents the when, where, how, and why of this rapidly accelerating disaster. Eating Apes persuasively argues that the American conservation media have failed to report the ongoing collapse of the ape population. In bringing the facts of this crisis and these impending extinctions into a single, accessible book, Peterson takes us one step closer to averting one of the most disturbing threats to our closest relatives.

The general practitioner was once America's doctor. The GP delivered babies, removed gallbladders, and sat by the bedsides of the dying. But as the twentieth century progressed, the pattern of medical care in the United States changed dramatically. By the 1960s, the GP was almost extinct. The later part of the twentieth century, however, saw a rebirth of the idea of the GP in the form of primary care practitioners. In this engrossing collection of oral histories and provocative essays about the past and future of generalism in health care, Fitzhugh Mullan-a pediatrician, writer, and historian-argues that primary care is a fascinating, important, and still endangered calling. In conveying the personal voices of primary care practitioners, Mullan sheds light on the political and economic contradictions that confront American medicine.Mullan interviewed dozens of primary care practitioners-family physicians, internists, pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants-asking them about their lives and their work. He explains how, during the last forty years, the primary care movement has emerged built on the principles of "e;big doctoring"e;--coordinated, comprehensive care over time. This book is essential reading for understanding core issues of the current health care dilemma. As our country struggles with managed care, market reforms, and cost containment strategies in medicine, Big Doctoring in America provides an engrossing and illuminating look at those in the trenches of the profession.

This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism.A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "e;good with their hands"e; to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work.Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "e;truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."e;

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time-how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces-sometimes called talk poems or simply talks-began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward.

Lawsuits over coffee burns, playground injuries, even bad teaching: litigation "e;horror stories"e; create the impression that Americans are greedy, quarrelsome, and sue-happy. The truth, as this book makes clear, is quite different. What Thomas Burke describes in Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights is a nation not of litigious citizens, but of litigious policies-laws that promote the use of litigation in resolving disputes and implementing public policies. This book is a cogent account of how such policies have come to shape public life and everyday practices in the United States.As litigious policies have proliferated, so have struggles to limit litigation-and these struggles offer insight into the nation's court-centered public policy style. Burke focuses on three cases: the effort to block the Americans with Disabilities Act; an attempt to reduce accident litigation by creating a no-fault auto insurance system in California; and the enactment of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act. These cases suggest that litigious policies are deeply rooted in the American constitutional tradition. Burke shows how the diffuse, divided structure of American government, together with the anti-statist ethos of American political culture, creates incentives for political actors to use the courts to address their concerns. The first clear and comprehensive account of the national politics of litigation, his work provides a new way to understand and address the "e;litigiousness"e; of American society.

With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story. When Women Come First explains how men who lost social status in the immigration process attempted to reclaim ground by creating new roles for themselves in their church. Ironically, they were stigmatized by other upper class immigrants as men who needed to "e;play in the church"e; because the "e;nurses were the bosses"e; in their homes. At the same time, the nurses were stigmatized as lower class, sexually loose women with too much independence. George's absorbing story of how these women and men negotiate this complicated network provides a groundbreaking perspective on the shifting interactions of two nations and two cultures.

Drawing a completely new road map toward a sustainable future, Jack M. Hollander contends that our most critical environmental problem is global poverty. His balanced, authoritative, and lucid book challenges widely held beliefs that economic development and affluence pose a major threat to the world's environment and resources. Pointing to the great strides that have been made toward improving and protecting the environment in the affluent democracies, Hollander makes the case that the essential prerequisite for sustainability is a global transition from poverty to affluence, coupled with a transition to freedom and democracy. The Real Environmental Crisis takes a close look at the major environment and resource issues-population growth; climate change; agriculture and food supply; our fisheries, forests, and fossil fuels; water and air quality; and solar and nuclear power. In each case, Hollander finds compelling evidence that economic development and technological advances can relieve such problems as food shortages, deforestation, air pollution, and land degradation, and provide clean water, adequate energy supplies, and improved public health. The book also tackles issues such as global warming, genetically modified foods, automobile and transportation technologies, and the highly significant Endangered Species Act, which Hollander asserts never would have been legislated in a poor country whose citizens struggle just to survive. Hollander asks us to look beyond the media's doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment, for much of it is simply not true, and to commit much more of our resources where they will do the most good-to lifting the world's population out of poverty.

The sights, sounds, and smells of life on the streets and in the houses of eighteenth-century Paris rise from the pages of this marvelously anecdotal chronicle of a perpetually alluring city during one hundred years of extraordinary social and cultural change. An excellent general history as well as an innovative synthesis of new research, The Making of Revolutionary Paris combines vivid portraits of individual lives, accounts of social trends, and analyses of significant events as it explores the evolution of Parisian society during the eighteenth century and reveals the city's pivotal role in shaping the French Revolution.David Garrioch rewrites the origins of the Parisian Revolution as the story of an urban metamorphosis stimulated by factors such as the spread of the Enlightenment, the growth of consumerism, and new ideas about urban space. With an eye on the broad social trends emerging during the century, he focuses his narrative on such humble but fascinating aspects of daily life as traffic congestion, a controversy over the renumbering of houses, and the ever-present dilemma of where to bury the dead. He describes changes in family life and women's social status, in religion, in the literary imagination, and in politics.Paris played a significant role in sparking the French Revolution, and in turn, the Revolution changed the city, not only its political structures but also its social organization, gender ideologies, and cultural practices. This book is the first to look comprehensively at the effect of the Revolution on city life. Based on the author's own research in Paris and on the most current scholarship, this absorbing book takes French history in new directions, providing a new understanding of the Parisian and the European past.

The windmill's labor is contingent upon the weather, upon what air masses, at any given time, overlie its landscape. Anticipatory in mood, Weather Eye Open adopts the emblem of the windmill, seeking what Merleau-Ponty calls the "e;inspiration and expiration of Being."e; The windmill serves as analogue to the perceiving subject, to the poet, whose consciousness, though rooted and partial, is yet always receptive to being energized, turned. Like open sails, the perceiver ushers the weather indoors, converting one motion, the wind, to another, the grinding burrstones. The poems in this collection pursue a similar transmutation through language, a staying open to its various weather (and whether) systems. For Sarah Gridley, language strikes at the "e;X"e; of experience: part presence and part absence, part spirit and part matter, part home and part homesickness, part harnessed and part wild. In the face of such weather, the stance of the poet is both rapacious and passive, searching and struck still.

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace -from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again-touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

This is the moving and improbable story of Claire Ferchaud, a young French shepherdess who had visions of Jesus and gained national fame as a modern-day Joan of Arc at the height of World War I. Claire experienced her first vision after a childhood trauma in which her mother locked her in a closet to break her stubborn willfulness. She developed her visionary gifts with the aid of spiritual directors and, by the age of twenty, she had come to believe that Jesus wanted France consecrated to the Sacred Heart. Claire believed that if France undertook this devotion, symbolized by adding the image of the Sacred Heart to the French flag, it would enjoy rapid victory in the war. From her modest origins to her spectacular ascent, Claire's life and times are deftly related with literary verve and insight in a book that gives a rare view of the French countryside during the Great War.

Haidee Wasson provides a rich cultural history of cinema's transformation from a passing amusement to an enduring art form by mapping the creation of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, established in 1935. The first North American film archive and museum, the film library pioneered an expansive moving image network, comprising popular, abstract, animated, American, Canadian, and European films. More than a repository, MoMA circulated these films nationally and internationally, connecting the modern art museum to universities, libraries, women's clubs, unions, archives, and department stores. Under the aegis of the museum, cinema also changed. Like books, paintings, and photographs, films became discrete objects, integral to thinking about art, history, and the politics of modern life.

Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays-originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens-tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a hilarious, inspired sampling of American popular culture-from songs to movie stars to slang. Matching the original Latin line for line, this volume captures the full exuberance of Plautus's street language, bursting with puns, learned allusions, ethnic slurs, dirty jokes, and profanities, as it brings three rarely translated works-Weevil (Curculio), Iran Man (Persa), and Towelheads (Poenulus)-to a wide contemporary audience. Richlin's erudite introduction sets these plays within the context of the long history of East-West conflict and illuminates the role played by comedy and performance in imperialism and colonialism. She has also provided detailed and wide-ranging contextual introductions to the individual plays, as well as extensive notes, which, together with these superb and provocative translations, will bring Plautus alive for a new generation of readers and actors.

In this rich and deeply personal account of life in the highlands of Nepal, Geoff Childs chronicles the daily existence of a range of people, from venerated lamas to humble householders. Offering insights into the complex dynamics of the ethnically Tibetan enclave of Nubri, Childs provides a vivid and compelling portrait of the ebb and flow of life and death, of communal harmony and discord, and of personal conflicts and social resolutions. Part ethnography, part travelogue, and part biography, Tibetan Diary is a one-of-a-kind book that conveys the tangled intricacies of a Tibetan society. Childs's immensely readable and informative narrative incorporates contemporary observations as well as vignettes culled from first-person testaments including oral histories and autobiographies. Examining the tensions between cultural ideals and individual aspirations, he explores certain junctures in the course of life: how the desire to attain religious knowledge or to secure a caretaker in old age contrasts with social expectations and familial obligation, for example. The result is a vivid and unparalleled view of the quest for both spiritual meaning and mundane survival that typifies life in an unpredictable Himalayan environment.

David Shambaugh, a leading international authority on Chinese strategic and military affairs, offers the most comprehensive and insightful assessment to date of the Chinese military. The result of a decade's research, Modernizing China's Military comes at a crucial moment in history, one when international attention is increasingly focused on the rise of Chinese military power. Basing his analysis on an unprecedented use of Chinese military publications and interviews with People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers, Shambaugh addresses important questions about Chinese strategic intentions and military capabilities--questions that are of key concern for government policymakers as well as strategic analysts and a concerned public.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that-at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities-Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.

This timely and critically important work does what hostilities in the Middle East have made nearly impossible: it offers a measured, internal perspective on Palestinian politics, viewing emerging political patterns from the Palestinian point of view rather than through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork, interviews with Palestinian leaders, and an extensive survey of Arabic-language writings and documents, Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords presents the meaning of state building and self-reliance as Palestinians themselves have understood them in the years between 1993 and 2002.Nathan J. Brown focuses his work on five areas: legal development, constitution drafting, the Palestinian Legislative Council, civil society, and the effort to write a new curriculum. His book shows how Palestinians have understood efforts at building institutions as acts of resumption rather than creation-with activists and leaders seeing themselves as recovering from an interrupted past, Palestinians seeking to rejoin the Arab world by building their new institutions on Arab models, and many Palestinian reformers taking the Oslo Accords as an occasion to resume normal political life. Providing a clear and urgently needed vantage point on most of the issues of Palestinian reform and governance that have emerged in recent policy debates-issues such as corruption, constitutionalism, democracy, and rule of law-Brown's book helps to put Palestinian aspirations and accomplishments in their proper context within a long and complex history and within the larger Arab world.

Why does a bit of ocean floor lie on top of Mt. Diablo? Why is Red Rock, that small, knobby island in San Francisco Bay, red? Why is Loma Prieta high? This book is for San Francisco Bay Area residents and visitors who want to explore the geologic world of this spectacular area, to learn about its shapes, colors, and rocky foundations. Doris Sloan illuminates the colorful geologic mosaic that surrounds San Francisco Bay and lucidly explains the complex and fascinating processes that have forged it over millions of years. In a lively and engaging style, Sloan describes forces such as the movement of tectonic plates, erosion, the waves on the coast, and human activity. She provides background information on the processes, time frame, and rocks that are the key to understanding the Bay Area landscape and geologic history, then turns to distinct regions of the Bay Area and to San Francisco Bay itself. * Superbly illustrated with 139 color photographs, 41 drawings, and 29 maps * Covers Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties * Gives clear, nontechnical explanations of complex topics including plate tectonics and the Bay Area's fault systems * Suggests locales in parks and open space preserves to view Bay Area geology in action

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "e;had our eyes done"e;; why we are "e;moved"e; by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "e;making sense"e; requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the "e;supermaximums"e;-and the mental health units that complement them-Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an expose, Total Confinement is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions-from the violent to the tender-among prisoners and staff. Total Confinement offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.

Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom fuel ideological battles on many fronts, especially battles about sex and gender. We now know that male marmosets help take care of their offspring. Is this heartening news for today's stay-at-home dads? Recent studies show that many female birds once thought to be monogamous actually have chicks that are fathered outside the primary breeding pair. Does this information spell doom for traditional marriages? And bonobo apes take part in female-female sexual encounters. Does this mean that human homosexuality is natural? This highly provocative book clearly shows that these are the wrong kinds of questions to ask about animal behavior. Marlene Zuk, a respected biologist and a feminist, gives an eye-opening tour of some of the latest developments in our knowledge of animal sexuality and evolutionary biology. Sexual Selections exposes the anthropomorphism and gender politics that have colored our understanding of the natural world and shows how feminism can help move us away from our ideological biases.As she tells many amazing stories about animal behavior--whether of birds and apes or of rats and cockroaches--Zuk takes us to the places where our ideas about nature, gender, and culture collide. Writing in an engaging, conversational style, she discusses such politically charged topics as motherhood, the genetic basis for adultery, the female orgasm, menstruation, and homosexuality. She shows how feminism can give us the tools to examine sensitive issues such as these and to enhance our understanding of the natural world if we avoid using research to champion a feminist agenda and avoid using animals as ideological weapons. Zuk passionately asks us to learn to see the animal world on its own terms, with its splendid array of diversity and variation. This knowledge will give us a better understanding of animals and can ultimately change our assumptions about what is natural, normal, and even possible.

meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juarez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.

Bangkok has been at the frontier of capitalism's drive into the global south for three decades. Rapid development has profoundly altered public and private life in Thailand. In her provocative study of contemporary commerce in Bangkok, Ara Wilson captures the intimate effects of the global economy in this vibrant city. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok is a multifaceted portrait of the intertwining of identities, relationships, and economics during Bangkok's boom years. Using innovative case studies of women's and men's participation in a range of modern markets-department stores, go-go bars, a popular downtown mall, a telecommunications company, and the direct sales corporations Amway and Avon-Wilson chronicles the powerful expansion of capitalist exchange into further reaches of Thai society. She shows how global economies have interacted with local systems to create new kinds of lifestyles, ranging from "e;tomboys"e; to corporate tycoons to sex workers. Combining feminist theory with classic anthropological understandings of exchange, this historically grounded ethnography maps the reverberations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity at the hub of Bangkok's modern economy.

In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese-often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude-this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.

In Greece, women speak of mothering as "e;within the nature"e; of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, Heather Paxson tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's "e;nature"e; is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, Paxson offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.

Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions-of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry-affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream.In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "e;the other Asians"e; whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "e;Buddha is hiding."e; Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.

When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity-national, political, personal, and sexual-music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn's study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference-including that embodied in Germany's difficult history-rather than to "e;master"e; or "e;get past"e; it. Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music's role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement's charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.