Perhaps best known for his coauthored bestselling books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Robert N. Bellah is a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four deca
The United States has more than two million people locked away in federal, state, and local prisons. Although most of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic and white, the vast majority of the incarcera
In CT Suite the doctor and anthropologist Barry F. Saunders provides an ethnographic account of how a particular diagnostic technology, the computed tomographic (CT) scanner, shapes social relations
Trinidad is known for its vibrant musical traditions, which reflect the island’s ethnic diversity. The annual Carnival, far and away the biggest event in Trinidad, is filled with soca and calyp
As the United States moves to a low-carbon economy in order to combat global warming, credits for reducing carbon dioxide emissions will increasingly become a commodity that is bought and sold on the
What happens when a baby is born with “ambiguous” genitalia or a combination of “male” and “female” body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are conf
Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to instit
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a conti
Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country&
On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societi
Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sci
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New Yor
Often called the “most African” part of Brazil, the northeastern state of Bahia has the country’s largest Afro-descendant population and a black culture renowned for its vibrancy. I
This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the layered cultures of the northeast China city of Harbin and the region formerly known as Manchuria. During the first half of the twentieth
This final installment of the Millennial Quartet addresses the question of whether cosmopolitanism—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society—is simply th
Under pressure of cultural colonization from the West and expanding an imperialist force and cultural colonizer within Asia, Japan occupied a unique space on the international landscape in the years
The State Question in Chinese Popular Culture presents a series of groundbreaking essays that challenge the paradigm dividing Chinese culture into "official" and "unofficial" cate
What is the impact of globalization on texts and media? To what extent do artists and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their work? Translation in a Global Market addres
An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vowel configurations in a wide variety of dialects of English found in the Western Hemisphere. While
This special issue employs the tools of history, anthropology and ethnology to address the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Venezuela. It examines various aspects of the Venezu
