Books published by AltaMira Press

This collection of individually authored chapters provides cutting-edge approaches to ethnography. Specialized Ethnographic Methods: A Mixed Methods Approach complements the basic inventory of ethnographic data collection tools presented in Book 3 with a number of important additional approaches to conducting ethnography. These include defining and collecting cultural artifacts, collecting secondary and archival data, cultural sorting and comparing methods, spatial research and analysis, network research and analysis, use of multimedia strategies for the collection of ethnographic data, ways to recruit and study "hidden populations," and participatory ethnographic video production.

Book 2 explores in depth the many critical issues that ethnographic researchers need to consider before going to the field and in the earliest stages of the field experience.

The Manual of Museum Planning has become the definitive text for museum professionals and others who are concerned with the planning, renovation, or expansion of a public gallery or museum. This third edition features new sections on operations and implementation as well as revised sections on planning for visitors, collections, and the building itself.

The book is critical to understanding Muslim worldviews today, providing an analysis of ethno-cosmology, emic interpretation of sacred tradition, and crucial insight into modernity, folklore, geography, dreams, imagination, hybridity, and identity transformation.

Tracing dramatic changes in how Americans ate during the 1800s, Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America argues that novelists, along with writers of cookbooks and domestic guides, helped negotiate the meaning of these changes in ways that still shape how Americans eat today.

Reader of original synthesizing articles for introductory courses on archaeology and native peoples of California.

Ritual and Belief: Readings in the Anthropology of Religion is intended to satisfy the needs of students in undergraduate courses in the anthropology of religion and comparative religion. It may be used either as a stand-alone text or as a supplement. This is a text that is more instructor- and student-friendly than any other anthology currently available.

Focusing on the archaeological investigation of a Moravian mission in southeastern Australia, the traditional country of the Wergaia-language speakers,Fantastic Dreaming examines how spatial organization, the consumption of Western goods, and the practices required by domesticity were used to transform Aboriginal people.

Part One of Nelson's 'Handbook of Gender in Archaeology.'

In Hidden Circles in the Web, scholar and Feminist Wiccan practitioner Constance Wise explores the growing and mysterious Pagan tradition of Feminist Wicca through the lens of process thought.

Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique represents a synthesis of postcolonial archaeological studies from the Old and New Worlds. This volume addresses the processes of postcolonialism in light of new paradigms in contemporary academia that affect the practice of archaeology.

Details the efforts of the author's Chicago youth gang project, a comprehensive, community-based model designed to reduce gang problems, including violence and illegal drug activity. This title shows the successes and failures at each level individual-youth, gang-as-unit, community, and policy development.

Legal Anthropology: An Introduction offers an initial overview into the challenging debates surrounding the cross-cultural analysis of legal systems. Equal parts review and criticism, the text outlines the historical landmarks in the development of the discipline, identifying both strengths and weaknesses of each stage and contribution.

A collection of readings chosen to demonstrate the varied and valuable applications of the anthropological perspective to real-world problems on local, regional, and global scales. It provides students with a variety of ethnographic and other anthropological materials so they do not have to buy an array of titles.

Alexander's linked essays on the African American male experience.

Reveals how the structure of a multinational state has the potential to create more equal and just national communities for Native peoples around the globe. In the US, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala, this work shows how indigenous people preserve their territory, rights to self-government, and culture.

Noted sociologist and feminist Mirra Komarovsky interviewed 59 families between 1935-36 to study man's role as economic provider. The result is an unprecedented study of masculinity and depression and the effect of social institutions on the individual.

In Women In College, Mirra Komarovsky followed her groundbreaking works on gender roles to focus on the essentialist debate. Komarovsky interviewed post-WWII generation female students about their feelings about gender inequality and domesticity. She makes a strong case for the role of society over biology in shaping gender roles.

This book explores the 8,000 years of hunter-gatherer life in eastern North America, reinterpreting the prehistory of the indigenous peoples living east of the Mississippi.

With an ethnographer's eye, Stacy Holman Jones provides a cultural critique of torch singing-describing the genre as a rich drama of passiveness, deception, desire, and resistance.

Reveals the impact of violence and victimization in the lives of children and adolescents from a developmental perspective. This title offers case studies and professional resources, including web sites and readings related to violence and mental health. It is suitable for parents and public health practitioners in school systems.

Third version of a long-standing textbook that examines the self in everyday life.

A brief introduction to the history, archaeology, art, language, and culture of the Indus Valley civilization, written by the leading North American Indus archaeologist.

States that rock art is often one of the strongest lines of evidence available to scholars in understanding ritual practices, gender roles, and ideological constructs of prehistoric peoples. This book argues that art is both a product of its physical and social environment and a tool of influence in shaping behavior and ideas within a society.

Edited volume tracing the state of knowledge of gender in Ancient Mayan society.

Presents a collection of scholarship, poetry, prose, and art - from photography and graffiti to rap and songs - that documents American Indian experiences of urban life.

New immigrants - those arriving since the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 - have altered American culture and have been profoundly altered in turn. This book combines studies of thirteen congregations in the Houston area with seven thematic essays looking across their diversity.

Museum Exhibition Planning and Design is a comprehensive introduction and reference to exhibition planning and design. This book focuses on both the procedural elements of successful planning, like the phases of exhibit design and all associated tasks and issues, and on the design elements that make up the realized exhibit itself, such as color, light, shape, form, space, and building materials.

This first culinary history of picnics reveals rustic outdoor dining in its more familiar and unusual forms, the history of the word itself, the cultural context of picnics and who arranged them, and, most important, the gastronomic appeal. Drawing on various media and literature, painting, music, and even sculpture, Walter Levy provides an engaging and enlightening history of the picnic.