Bøker utgitt av University of California Press

From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life and the hunt, along with musicians, dancing girls, and naked bathing women. The traveler is transported to the luxurious and erotic world of a mid-eighth-century Muslim Arab prince. For scholars, though, Qusayr 'Amra, probably painted in the 730s or 740s, has proved a mirage, its concreteness dissolved by doubts about date, patron, and meaning. This is the first book-length contextualization of the mysterious monument through a compelling analysis of its iconography and of the literary sources for the Umayyad period. It illuminates not only the way of life of the early Muslim elite but also the long afterglow of late antique Syria.

What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music grapples directly with these fundamental questionsquestions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding that includes Interpreting Music and Expression and Truth, Lawrence Kramer seeks answers in both thought about music and thought in musicthinking in tones. He skillfully assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. This authoritative and timely work challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities.The publisher gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The stars have always called us, but only for the past forty years or so have we been able to respond by traveling in space. This book explores the human side of spaceflight: why people are willing to brave danger and hardship to go into space; how human culture has shaped past and present missions; and the effects of space travel on health and well-being. A comprehensive and authoritative treatment of its subject, this book combines statistical studies, rich case histories, and gripping anecdotal detail as it investigates the phenomenon of humans in space-from the earliest spaceflights to the missions of tomorrow. Drawing from a strong research base in the behavioral sciences, Harrison covers such topics as habitability, crew selection and training, coping with stress, group dynamics, accidents, and more. In addition to taking a close look at spacefarers themselves, Spacefaring reviews the broad organizational and political contexts that shape human progress toward the heavens. With the ongoing construction of the International Space Station, the human journey to the stars continues, and this book will surely help guide the way.

In Works and Days, one of the two long poems that have come down to us from Hesiod, the poet writes of farming, morality, and what seems to be a very nasty quarrel with his brother Perses over their inheritance. In this book, Anthony T. Edwards extracts from the poem a picture of the social structure of Ascra, the hamlet in northern Greece where Hesiod lived, most likely during the seventh century b.c.e. Drawing on the evidence of trade, food storage, reciprocity, and the agricultural regime as Hesiod describes them in Works and Days, Edwards reveals Ascra as an autonomous village, outside the control of a polis, less stratified and integrated internally than what we observe even in Homer. In light of this reading, theconflict between Hesiod and Perses emerges as a dispute about the inviolability of the community's external boundary and the degree of interobligation among those within the village. Hesiod's Ascra directly counters the accepted view of Works and Days, which has Hesiod describing a peasant society subordinated to the economic and political control of an outside elite. Through his deft analysis, Edwards suggests a new understanding of both Works and Days and the social and economic organization of Hesiod's time and place.

The Los Angeles Times called the first volume of The Gold and the Blue "e;a major contribution to our understanding of American research universities."e; This second of two volumes continues the story of one of the last century's most influential figures in higher education. A leading visionary, architect, leader, and fighter for the University of California, Clark Kerr was chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1952 to 1958 and president of the university from 1958 to 1967. He saw the university through its golden years-a time of both great advancement and great conflict. This absorbing memoir is an intriguing insider's account of how the University of California rose to the peak of scientific and scholarly stature and how, under Kerr's unique leadership, it evolved into the institution it is today. In Volume II: Political Turmoil, Kerr turns to the external and political environment of the 1950s and 1960s, contrasting the meteoric rise of the University of California to the highest pinnacle of academic achievement with its troubled political context. He describes his attempts to steer a middle course between attacks from the political Right and Left and discusses the continuing attacks on the university, and on him personally, by the state Un-American Activities Committee. He provides a unique point of view of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964. He also details the events of January 1967, when he was dismissed as president of the university by the Board of Regents.

This book charts a comparative history of Latin America's national cinemas through ten chapters that cover every major cinematic period in the region: silent cinema, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, the New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. Schroeder Rodrguez weaves close readings of approximately fifty paradigmatic films into a lucid narrative history that is rigorous in its scholarship and framed by a compelling theorization of the multiple discourses of modernity. The result is an essential guide that promises to transform our understanding of the region's cultural history in the last hundred years by highlighting how key players such as the church and the state have affected cinema's unique ability to help shape public discourse and construct modern identities in a region marked by ongoing struggles for social justice and liberation.

A theoretically sophisticated and illuminating reading of Tacitus, especially the Histories, this work points to a new understanding of the logic of Roman rule during the early Empire.Tacitus, in Holly Haynes' analysis, does not write about the reality of imperial politics and culture but about the imaginary picture that imperial society makes of these concrete conditions of existence-the "e;making up and believing"e; that figure in both the subjective shaping of reality and the objective interpretation of it. Haynes traces Tacitus's development of this fingere/credere dynamic both backward and forward from the crucial year A.D. 69. Using recent theories of ideology, especially within the Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions, she exposes the psychic logic lurking behind the actions and inaction of the protagonists of the Histories. Her work demonstrates how Tacitus offers penetrating insights into the conditions of historical knowledge and into the psychic logic of power and its vicissitudes, from Augustus through the Flavians.By clarifying an explicit acknowledgment of the difficult relationship between res and verba, in the Histories, Haynes shows how Tacitus calls into question the possibility of objective knowing-how he may in fact be the first to allow readers to separate the objectively knowable from the objectively unknowable. Thus, Tacitus appears here as going further toward identifying the object of historical inquiry-and hence toward an "e;objective"e; rendering of history-than most historians before or since.

Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities. Charting the efforts of both the judiciary and a citizen's social movement to reverse the mafia's economic, political, and cultural power, the authors establish a framework for understanding both the difficulties and the accomplishments of Sicily's multifaceted antimafia efforts.

Throughout the twentieth century, neuronal researchers knew the adult human brain to be a thoroughly fixed and immutable cellular structure, devoid of any developmental potential. Plastic Reason is a study of the efforts of a few Parisian neurobiologists to overturn this rigid conception of the central nervous system by showing that basic embryogenetic processesmost spectacularly the emergence of new cellular tissue in the form of new neurons, axons, dendrites, and synapsescontinue in the mature brain. Furthermore, these researchers sought to demonstrate that the new tissues are still unspecific and hence literally plastic, and that this cellular plasticity is constitutive of the possibility of the human. Plastic Reason, grounded in years of fieldwork and historical research, is an anthropologist's account of what has arguably been one of the most sweeping events in the history of brain researchthe highly contested effort to consider the adult brain in embryogenetic terms. A careful analysis of the disproving of an established truth, it reveals the turmoil that such a disruption brings about and the emergence of new possibilities of thinking and knowing.

Drawing on the life stories of 266 migrants in South China, Choi and Peng examine the effect of mass rural-to-urban migration on family and gender relationships, with a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities. They show how migration has forced migrant men to renegotiate their roles as lovers, husbands, fathers, and sons. They also reveal how migrant men make masculine compromises: they strive to preserve the gender boundary and their symbolic dominance within the family by making concessions on marital power and domestic division of labor, and by redefining filial piety and fatherhood. The stories of these migrant men and their families reveal another side to China's sweeping economic reform, modernization, and grand social transformations.

This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, Daniel Gold develops a line of argument that begins with the aesthetics of academic writing in the field. He shows that successful writers on religion employ characteristic aesthetic strategies in communicating their visions of human truths. Gold examines these strategies with regard to epistemology and to the study of religion as a collective endeavor.

Preaching Islamic Renewal examines the life and work of Muhammad Mitwalli Sha'rawi, one of Egypt's most beloved and successful Islamic preachers. His wildly popular TV program aired every Friday for years until his death in 1998. At the height of his career, it was estimated that up to 30 million people tuned in to his show each week. Yet despite his pervasive and continued influence in Egypt and the wider Muslim world, Sha'rawi was for a long time neglected by academics. While much of the academic literature that focuses on Islam in modern Egypt repeats the claim that traditionally trained Muslim scholars suffered the loss of religious authority, Sha'rawi is instead an example of a well-trained Sunni scholar who became a national media sensation. As an advisor to the rulers of Egypt as well as the first Arab television preacher, he was one of the most important and controversial religious figures in late-twentieth-century Egypt. Thanks to the repurposing of his videos on television and on the Internet, Sha'rawi's performances are still regularly viewed. Jacquelene Brinton uses Sha'rawi and his work as a lens to explore how traditional Muslim authorities have used various media to put forth a unique vision of how Islam can be renewed and revived in the contemporary world. Through his weekly television appearances he popularized long held theological and ethical beliefs and became a scholar-celebrity who impacted social and political life in Egypt.

This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of';the Good, the True, and the Beautiful' to investigatehow the idea of nation embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, postCold War, and now post9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much ofthe volume is devoted to the resolutely cosmopolitan but inveterately Russian Igor Stravinsky, one of the major forces in the music of the twentieth century and subject of particular interest to composers and music theorists all over the world. Taruskin here revisits him for the first time since the 1990s, when everything changed for Russia and its cultural products. Other essays are devoted to the cultural and social policies of the Soviet Union and their effect on the music produced there as those policies swung away from Communist internationalism to traditional Russian nationalism; to the musicians of the Russian postrevolutionary diaspora; andto the tension between the compelling artistic quality of works such as Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps or Prokofieff's Zdravitsa and the antihumanistic or totalitarian messages they convey. Russian Music at Home and Abroad addresses these concerns in a personal and critical way, characteristically demonstrating Taruskin's authority and ability tobring living history out of the shadows.

Under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt in the middle of the third century B.C.E., Alexandria became the brilliant multicultural capital of the Greek world. Theocritus's poem in praise of Philadelphus-at once a Greek king and an Egyptian pharaoh-is the only extended poetic tribute to this extraordinary ruler that survives. Combining the Greek text, an English translation, a full line-by-line commentary, and extensive introductory studies of the poem's historical and literary context, this volume also offers a wide-ranging and far-reaching consideration of the workings and representation of poetic patronage in the Ptolemaic age. In particular, the book explores the subtle and complex links among Theocritus's poem, modes of praise drawn from both Greek and Egyptian traditions, and the subsequent flowering of Latin poetry in the Augustan age. As the first detailed account of this important poem to show how Theocritus might have drawn on the pharaonic traditions of Egypt as well as earlier Greek poetry, this book affords unique insight into how praise poetry for Ptolemy and his wife may have helped to negotiate the adaptation of Greek culture that changed conditions of the new Hellenistic world. Invaluable for its clear translation and its commentary on genre, dialect, diction, and historical reference in relation to Theocritus's Encomium, the book is also significant for what it reveals about the poem's cultural and social contexts and about Theocritus' devices for addressing his several readerships.COVER IMAGE: The image on the front cover of this book is incorrectly identified on the jacket flap. The correct caption is: Gold Oktadrachm depicting Ptolemy II and Arsinoe (mid-third century BCE; by permission of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France-both by Gentiles and Jews themselves-Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory, Obstinate Hebrews is a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the "e;other."e; Schechter argues that the French paid attention to the Jews because thinking about the Jews helped them reflect on general issues of the day. These included the role of tradition in religion, the perfectibility of human nature, national identity, and the nature of citizenship. In a conclusion comparing and contrasting the "e;Jewish question"e; in France with discourses about women, blacks, and Native Americans, Schechter provocatively widens his inquiry, calling for a more historically precise approach to these important questions of difference.

Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn't always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States.The Big Rigexplains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking's labor markets--once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history--into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.

Encountering Povertychallenges mainstream frameworks of global poverty by going beyond the claims that poverty is a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions. By focusing on the power and privilege that underpin persistent impoverishment and using tools of critical analysis and pedagogy, the authors explore the opportunities for and limits of poverty action in the current moment.Encountering Povertyinvites students, educators, activists, and development professionals to think about and act against inequality by foregrounding, rather than sidestepping, the long history of development and the ethical dilemmas of poverty action today.

Tracing the rise and development of the Ghanaian video film industry between 1985 and 2010, Sensational Movies examines video movies as seismographic devices recording a culture and society in turmoil. This book captures the dynamic process of popular filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination and tracks the interlacing of the medium's technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Christianity on the other. Birgit Meyer analyzes Ghanaian video as a powerful, sensational form. Colliding with the state film industry's representations of culture, these movies are indebted to religious notions of divination and revelation. Exploring the format of "e;film as revelation,"e; Meyer unpacks the affinity between cinematic and popular Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this brilliant study, Meyer offers a deep, conceptually innovative analysis of the role of visual culture within the politics and aesthetics of religious world making.

In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself-the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi's chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America's voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry's reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Based on the author's six years of collaboration with a local workers' center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people's racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area's long history of racial inequality, the industry's growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants' contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers' prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Floyd Levin, an award-winning jazz writer, has personally known many of the jazz greats who contributed to the music's colorful history. In this collection of his articles, published mostly in jazz magazines over a fifty-year period, Levin takes us into the nightclubs, the recording studios, the record companies, and, most compellingly, into the lives of the musicians who made the great moments of the traditional jazz and swing eras. Brilliantly weaving anecdotal material, primary research, and music analysis into every chapter, Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians is a gold mine of information on a rich segment of American popular music. This collection of articles begins with Levin's first published piece and includes several new articles that were inspired by his work on this compilation. The articles are organized thematically, beginning with a piece on Kid Ory's early recordings and ending with a newly written article about the campaign to put up a monument to Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. Along the way, Levin gives in-depth profiles of many well-known jazz legends, such as Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, and many lesser-known figures who contributed greatly to the development of jazz. Extensively illustrated with previously unpublished photographs from Levin's personal collection, this wonderfully readable and extremely personal book is full of information that is not available elsewhere. Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians will be celebrated by jazz scholars and fans everywhere for the overview it provides of the music's evolution, and for the love of jazz it inspires on every page.

Returned follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportationan emergent global order of social injusticereaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. The book includes accounts of displacement, struggle, suffering, and profound loss but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. Returned tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.

With a fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Janis H. Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and interpretation. Extraordinary Conditions illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human. Jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book asserts that the study of mental illness is indispensable to the anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness.

The title of this unique insider's look at a crucial decade of Sino-American interchange derives from a Chinese expression that describes a relationship of two people whose lives are intimately intertwined but who do not fundamentally communicate with each other. David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, demonstrates that while the United States and China have enormous interests at stake in their bilateral relationship, neither has been particularly deft in dealing with the other. His fascinating account shows how the processes of globalization, along with the development of international regimes and multilateral organizations, have brought America and China increasingly close in the global bed. At the same time, their respective national institutions, interests, popular perceptions, and the very characters of their two peoples, assure that the nations continue to have substantially different dreams. Lampton explores the reasons why the Sino-American relationship is so difficult for both nations to manage and suggests ways it can be more effectively conducted in the future. His unique experience in China-nearly thirty years as a scholar, as the head of a policy-oriented exchange organization, and as director of Washington think-tank research programs-enabled him to spend extended periods with Chinese leaders and see them as they encountered America, as well as to observe U.S. leaders as they tried to come to grips with Chinese circumstances. Among many other key events, Lampton witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, successive congressional battles over most-favored-nation tariff treatment, the end of the Bush era and the rocky beginning of the Clinton administration, the death of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin's transition to power, the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, and the Asian financial crisis that unfolded from mid-1997 to the end of the decade. Lampton's careful documentary research is supplemented by interviews and accounts of his personal interaction throughout the period with leaders and key players in Washington, Beijing, Taipei, and Hong Kong. The book thus represents a singular combination of historical research, policy analysis, and personal observation, and offers guidance for those in both America and China who must shape this critical relationship in the twenty-first century.

Wild Mammals of Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park provides the scholar, conservationist, and interested lay reader with information on the state's 117 wild mammalian species from grizzly bears to pygmy shrews. It describes the history of mammalogy in Wyoming, the zoogeography of Wyoming mammals, and the prehistoric mammals of Wyoming. It also characterizes the habitats of Wyoming mammals and addresses the conservation and management of mammals in the region. Expanding beyond the traditional field guide, Steven W. Buskirk emphasizes taxonomic classification, geographic range, and conservation status for mammalian species. Introductory sections are provided for each order and family, and individual species accounts organize a wealth of data ranging from habitat associations to field measurements in an easy-to-use format. Featuring color species photos, continental and state-scale distribution maps, and a comprehensive bibliography with nearly 1,000 references, Wild Mammals of Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park is an indispensable resource for wildlife and conservation biologists and mammalogists working in this region.

In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the "e;neighborhood"e; of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.

Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, especially small loans, to the world's poor. In this book, Caroline Schuster explores Paraguayan solidarity lending as a window into the tensions between social development and global finance.Social Collateraltracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border by examining group loans made to women by nonprofit development programs. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressuresocial collateralrather than through physical collateral. This story of social collateral necessarily includes an interwoven account about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of genderfrom pink-collar financial work, to men's committees, to women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and global opportunity.

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region's ';coming of age'? El Mall is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, Dvila shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogot, Colombia, El Mall is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

Of the twenty-three Brazilian policemen interviewed in depth for this landmark study, fourteen were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "e;violence workers"e; and the other group of "e;atrocity facilitators"e; who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: Why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds-on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?

A woman with hypertension refuses vegetables. A man with diabetes adds iron-fortified sugar to his coffee. As death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes in Latin America escalate, global health interventions increasingly emphasize nutrition, exercise, and weight loss-but much goes awry as ideas move from policy boardrooms and clinics into everyday life. Based on years of intensive fieldwork, The Weight of Obesity offers poignant stories of how obesity is lived and experienced by Guatemalans who have recently found their diets-and their bodies-radically transformed. Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr challenges the widespread view that health can be measured in calories and pounds, offering an innovative understanding of what it means to be healthy in postcolonial Latin America. Through vivid descriptions of how people reject global standards and embrace fatness as desirable, this book interferes with contemporary biomedicine, adding depth to how we theorize structural violence. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the politics of healthy eating.