Books in the The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues series

For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan-face to face, over an extended period of time. At last in the late 1980s she set out on an excursion to Sichuan...

What happens when persons of several Latin American national groups reside in the same neighborhood- Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta consider the stories of women of different nationalities-Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Uruguayan, and others-who live together in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens. Corona has long been an arrival point for immigrants and is now made up predominantly of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean and South and Central America, with smaller numbers from Asia, Africa, and Europe. There are also long-established populations of white Americans, mainly of Italian origin, and African Americans.The authors find that the new pan-Latin American community in Corona has emerged from the interactions of everyday living. Hispanas de Queens focuses on the places where women gather in Corona-bodegas, hospitals, schoolyards, and Roman Catholic and Protestant churches-to show how informal alliances arise from proximity.Ricourt and Danta document how a group of leaders, mainly women, consciously promoted this strong sense of community to build panethnic organizations and a Latino political voice. Hispanas de Queens shows how a new group identity-Hispanic or Latino-is formed without replacing an individual's identification as an immigrant from a particular country. Instead, an additional identity is created and can be mobilized by pan-Latino leaders and organizations.

This is the first book on New York's subway musicians-modern troubadours who perform on platforms, mezzanines, and even trains pounding through the city. Illustrating her account with captivating photos, Susie J. Tanenbaum draws on interviews with...

Many indigenous Hawaiians who have moved to the islands' cities languish at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale and are thought to have lost their cultural roots. Initially apolitical urban Hawaiians were often skeptical of activists who sought to...

Thirty-two million Americans have lost jobs because of permanent factory closings since 1970. Gregory Pappas here provides an intimate account of the economic, social, psychological, and medical consequences of one such closing.

A holistic portrait which reveals why Sikh high school students, despite language barriers, prejudice, and significant cultural differences, often outperform their majority peers and other United States minority groups.

In Upscaling Downtown, anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnography of a changing urban neighborhood that she calls "Elm Valley." Located in Washington, D.C., Elm Valley was one of the first neighborhoods to draw middle-class property owners back to the inner city, but a faltering housing industry halted what might have been the rapid...

Taking a novel anthropological approach to the issue of white ethnicity in the United States, this book challenges the model of uniform ethnic family and community culture, and argues for a reconsideration of the meaning of class, kinship, and gender in America's past and present.

Navigating the maze of modern American health care is rarely easy; those who enter it are confronted with a dizzying array of specialists, practitioners, and clinics from which to choose, and are forced to make decisions regarding drugs and treatments...

Since the 1960s the number of Indian immigrants and their descendants living in the United States has grown dramatically. During the same period, the make-up of this community has also changed-the highly educated professional elite who came to this...

Civilized Women is concerned with the intersection of cultural constructions of gender and other systems of ranking among the Glebo people of Cape Palmas, in southeastern Liberia.

Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that...

Janet Siskind goes back to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in the United States to better understand the formation of the country's capitalist culture. She studies the papers and letters of three generations of the Watkinson family. The...

Faced with an aging workforce, Japanese firms are hiring foreign workers in ever-increasing numbers. In 1990 Japan's government began encouraging the migration of Nikkeijin (overseas Japanese) who are presumed to assimilate more easily than are...

In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three bilingual, bicultural psychiatric programs for Latino patients at...

A dilemma long faced by western societies-how to bring the generations together-is also of growing concern in the east. In Japan, where, until recently, the extended family often lived under the same roof, social programs designed to facilitate...

Anna M. Kerttula, an anthropologist, offers a vivid portrayal of life in Sireniki, a Siberian village on the Bering Sea. Once a traditional Yup'ik community, it was by the final years of the Soviet Empire home to three cultural groups: the Yup'ik...

Sequestered within the heart of a cosmopolitan city is an exotic world-a place where diamonds, astronomically priced, are bought and sold on the strength of a handshake, and business disputes are resolved according to ancient Jewish principles of...

The working class in New York City was remade in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1820s a substantial majority of city artisans were native-born; by the 1850s three-quarters of the city's laboring men and women were immigrants. How did the influx of this large group of young adults affect the city's working class? What determined the texture...

Kim Hopper has dedicated his career to trying to address the problem of homelessness in the United States. In this powerful book, he draws upon his dual strengths as anthropologist and advocate to provide a deeper understanding of the roots of homelessness.

A unique interpretation of how wartime internment and the movement for redress affected Japanese Americans.

In one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf places her community into context, showing its increasing historical and political significance.

The recession of the 1980s triggered important economic and cultural changes in the United States, and working women were at the center of these changes. Sunbelt Working Mothers compares the experiences of Mexican-American and white mothers employed in apparel and electronics factories in Albuquerque and illuminates the ways in which individual...

Building on earlier work in the anthropology of law and taking a critical stance toward it, June Starr and Jane F. Collier ask, "Should social anthropologists continue to isolate the `legal' as a separate field of study?" To answer this question, they confront critics of legal anthropology who suggest that the subfield is dying and advocate a...

Building on earlier work in the anthropology of law and taking a critical stance toward it, June Starr and Jane F. Collier ask, "Should social anthropologists continue to isolate the `legal' as a separate field of study?" To answer this question, they confront critics of legal anthropology who suggest that the subfield is dying and advocate a...

By focusing on the social and cultural life of post-1965 Taiwan immigrants in Queens, New York, this book shifts Chinese American studies from ethnic enclaves to the diverse multiethnic neighborhoods of Flushing and Elmhurst. As Hsiang-shui Chen documents, the political dynamics of these settlements are entirely different from the traditional closed Chinese communities; the immigrants in Queens think of themselves as living in "e;worldtown,"e; not in a second Chinatown. Drawing on interviews with members of a hundred households, Chen brings out telling aspects of demography, immigration experience, family life, and gender roles, and then turns to vivid, humanistic portraits of three families. Chen also describes the organizational life of the Chinese in Queens with a lively account of the power struggles and social interactions that occur within religious, sports, social service, and business groups and with the outside world.

Providing an informed account of change and continuity in one town, Dismantling Apartheid is a compelling preview of future social relations in South Africa....

St. Petersburg, Florida, has become virtually synonymous with retirement and old age. The city of green benches once courted its elderly population; now, however, it seeks to rejuvenate its image, to attract the young through urban revitalization. In this humane and sensitive book, Maria Vesperi, an anthropologist and journalist, looks at the...

Caribbean immigrants have now become part of the social landscape of many American cities. Few studies, however, have treated in detail the process of their integration in American society. American Odyssey assesses the development and adaptation in...