Social Science / General

Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Based on extensive fieldwork and through an analysis of construction, mobility, technology, media, development, Islam, and the state along the Pamir Highway, Mostowlansky shows how conceptualizations of modernity are both challenged and reinforced in contemporary Tajikistan.

Judith Beyer presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Beyer shows how local Kyrgyz negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation needs to be understood as a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt to suit political, legal, economic, and religious environments.

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper Midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others.

Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power.

Morgan Y. Liu provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.This study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership.

Winner of the 2014 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences.

Examines the negotiations over women’s rights and the politics of gender in Chile throughout the twentieth century. Centering her study on motherhood, Pieper Mooney explores dramatic changes in health policy, population paradigms, and understandings of human rights, and reveals that motherhood is hardly a private matter defined only by individual women or couples. Instead, it is intimately tied to public policies and political competitions on nation-state and international levels.

Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology— the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture.

An examination of the quest for information exchange in an increasingly international, open society, Transparency in Global Change discusses the reasons for the recent increase in public desire for transparency and the byproducts this transparency can produce.

A dialogue between father and son, combining prose and poetry, that uses fishing as a shared activity and a metaphor, to address the universal challenge of raising good children. The lessons they share have the power to save a generation of young black men.

A celebration of Pittsburgh’s industrial landscape and an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America. A unique addition to the literature on the importance of place.

Paul Diesing takes an innovative, sometimes iconoclastic look at social scientists at work in many disciplines.

The essays in this collection highlight theoretical issues surrounding concepts of power. These essayists argue that the only way to fully comprehend and analyze the complexities of power is to locate where the material, psychological, and social dimensions of political power are socially situated and reproduced.

Examines the 1985 confrontation between police and members of the black counterculture group MOVE, which ended in the destruction of sixty-one homes and the death of eleven residents—five of them children. Sheds light on relevant issues such as negotiating with “irrational” adversaries and problems of perception and misperception when different cultures clash.

This reference offers a simple method for choosing a valid sample of the world’s known societies for cross-cultural research.

The essays in this volume represent trends in social stratification studies undertaken in major culture areas of the world. The empirical data of the chapters are set with special reference to the dynamics of processes within these diverse traditions and heritages as sources of comparison with one another and with the experiences of western societies.