Why do people have religious ideas? And why thosereligious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties o
Ngoma, in Bantu, means drum, song, performance, and healing cult or association. A widespread form of ritual healing in Central and Southern Africa, ngoma is fully investigated here for the first time
Orson Welles considered The Magnificent Ambersons the crucial turning point in his career. He said, "They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me." In 1942, while Welles was away, RKO Studios drastica
Noel Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history. Life to Those Shadows presents a critique of "classical" approaches to film: t
Based on in-depth interviews and two years of participant observation of felons, this book traces the career paths of such criminal types as the thief, the hustler, and the junkie, as well as the non-
In The Company We Keep, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature.But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to i
"A groundbreaking analysis of the dynamics of Jewish-Arab relations."--Roger Owen, author of The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914"Very rarely does a scholar set out to do, or accomplish as
War of Shadows is the haunting story of a failed uprising in the Peruvian Amazon?told largely by people who were there. Late in 1965, Ashaninka Indians, members of one of the Amazon's largest native t
"A masterful study. . . . It does for ecological history what the writings of Marx and Engels did for the study of class relations and social production."--Michael Adas, Rutgers University
The basic principles of progression and the means by which tonality is established in Bartok's music remain problematical to many theorists. Elliott Antokoletz here demonstrates that the remarkable co
By the middle of the sixteenth century, Jews in the cities of Italy were being crowded into compulsory ghettos as a result of the oppressive policies of Pope Paul IV and his successors. Forced to list
Despite the emergence of fragile democracies in Latin America in the 1980s, a legacy of fear and repression haunts this region. This provocative volume chronicles the effect of systematic state terror
"No one is better qualified than Tucci to write a general yet comprehensive work on such a complex subject. His explorations in Tibet, extensive personal experiences, direct observations of ritual, an
Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminat
One of the most original, rebellious, and idiosyncratic directors in the American cinema, Nicholas Ray lived and worked with an intensity equal to that of his films. Best known for his direction of J
Native Sources is a collection of seminal essays on the demographic, economic, and social history of Tokugawa and modern Japan by one of the most eminent historians of Japan in this country. Gathered
Long notorious as one of the most turbulent areas of the world, Lebanon nevertheless experienced an interlude of peace between its civil war of 1860 and the beginning of the French Mandate in 1920. En
At a time when politics and virtue seem less compatible than oil and water, Democracy and Moral Development shows how to bring the two together. Philosopher David Norton applies classical concepts of
In this innovative synthesis of film history and cultural analysis, Marsha Kinder examines the films of such key directors as Buñuel, Saura, Erice, and Almodóvar, as well as works from the popular cin
The New Thought Movement was an enormously popular late nineteenth-century spiritual movement led largely by and for women. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science is but one example of the fascinating ra
