Books in the The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues series

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...

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...

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.