Bøker utgitt av University of California Press

"Agustín Fuentes engages readers in a complex but well-mapped journey that challenges commonly accepted assumptions about the nature of race, aggression, and fundamental differences in the desires and behaviors of men and women. . . . Readers for whom biology, anthropology, and psychology are not disciplines of practice or interest need not fret. The author masterly conveys his knowledge in an informative way. . . . If you are willing to enhance your worldview by sleuthing to discover 'who we are and why we do what we do, ' Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You is for you. Whether you agree with Fuentes or not, it will at least engage your critical thinking skills and encourage you to be a more active and discerning consumer of information."--Science "Where these myths come from, and how to bust them, is the basis of this lively, thoughtful book."--Boston Globe "Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior."--Guardian "In this compelling bit of pop science, [the author] asks readers to throw out their preconceptions about what it means to be a human. . . . It is a weighing of experience with a healthy dose of speculation and doubt that Fuentes claims is the key to uncovering anthropological truths, and thereby navigating the world as a more responsible and unbiased member of society."--Publishers Weekly "As an introductory text for students . . . the book is clear and engaging. Fuentes provides brief and understandable accounts about the basic biological and cultural concepts associated with each of the myths he lays out, as well as a set of endnotes that might encourage students to look up more material on their own."--American Journal of Physical Anthropology "Fuentes deserves praise for and success with this book. The myth-busting toolkit, which is essentially a pattern of questioning, is a wonderful device. . . . Fuentes is not just informing, he is teaching readers how to think critically."--Washington Independent Review of Books "[Fuentes] debunks some popular misconceptions about evolutionary change and provides a basic primer on evolutionary theory."--American Journal of Human Biology

A guide to Yellowstone National Park. It features more than 500 maps including topographic maps of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. It gives place name references for Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and the surrounding region.

Focuses on the life and public sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), one of the early twentieth century's few African American women artists. This title argues that Fuller's efforts to represent black identity in art provide a window on the Progressive Era and its heated debates about race, national identity, and culture.

Are Japanese families in crisis? In this dynamic and substantive study, Merry Isaacs White looks back at two key moments of family making in the past hundred yearsthe Meiji era and postwar periodto see how models for the Japanese family have been constructed. The models had little to do with families of their eras and even less to do with families today, she finds. She vividly portrays the everyday reality of a range of families: young married couples who experience fleeting togetherness until the first child is born; a family separated by job shifts; a family with a grandmother as babysitter; a marriage without children.

Looking beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity-such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines--in late imperial China, this book explores the cult's political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. In the first full-length study of the subject, Janet Theiss examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, she provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.

James Stewart once said, "e;For John Ford, there was no need for dialogue. The music said it all."e; This lively, accessible study is the first comprehensive analysis of Ford's use of music in his iconic westerns. Encompassing a variety of critical approaches and incorporating original archival research, Kathryn Kalinak explores the director's oft-noted predilection for American folk song, hymnody, and period music. What she finds is that Ford used music as more than a stylistic gesture. In fascinating discussions of Ford's westerns-from silent-era features such as Straight Shooting and The Iron Horse to classics of the sound era such as My Darling Clementine and The Searchers -Kalinak describes how the director exploited music, and especially song, in defining the geographical and ideological space of the American West.

Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni's story the only one-or even the most interesting one-in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it's Mozart's men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist's point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It's time to give Mozart's women-and Mozart's multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character-their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart's four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and Die Zauberflote. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations.Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero's narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart's women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts-past and current-influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud's dozens of texts that portray three Persian "e;others"e;: the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the Jews of late antique Iran.

Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia on Cyprus from 367 to 403 C.E., was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text (the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies) is studied for lost sources, Epiphanius himself is often dismissed as an anti-intellectual eccentric, a marginal figure of late antiquity. In this book, Andrew Jacobs moves Epiphanius from the margin back toward the center and proposes we view major cultural themes of late antiquity in a new light altogether. Through an examination of the key cultural concepts of celebrity, conversion, discipline, scripture, and salvation, Jacobs shifts our understanding of late antiquity from a transformational period open to new ideas and peoples toward a Christian Empire that posited a troubling, but ever-present, otherness at the center of its cultural production.

"A delightful and perceptive read. The author traces the threads which are woven throughout the land and sensory 'scapes' of a valley in Armenia: its archaeology, architecture and people's lives, past and present. She argues that, like other places across Afro-Eurasia, this valley and its people reveal their part in the wider 'scape' of a cosmopolitan medieval world, the Silk Roads."--Susan Whitfield, author of Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road "Culminating in a tasty stew shared in a medieval Armenian caravanserai, Kate Franklin's feminist analysis of different scales of the material culture of hospitality and its powers turns the heroic travel narratives of what we call the Silk Road inside out, recapturing the overlapping space-times of moving and staying that co-created the everyday cosmopolitanisms of the medieval world. A critical tour de force."--Francesca Bray, author of Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered "This is a thought-provoking work of modern scholarship, a perfect marriage of historical theory and archaeological investigation. Works concentrating on the non-European world are often concerned with regional outlooks, seldom addressing larger issues of world history. Franklin's book, on the other hand, brings the local perspective to a global context, contributing meaningfully to the emerging field of Global Middle Ages."--Khodadad Rezakhani, author of ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity "A master class in constructing an anthropological archaeological argument that incorporates a wide variety of sources in this field and others. Franklin provides us with a fresh new path along a well trodden road."--Joshua Wright, University of Aberdeen

"Full of interesting stories, We Gather Together is a very entertaining read. It is also quietly subversive. Beneath the veil of gentle humor and the perceptive readings of paintings, the book carries an important message: at a time when global warming is endangering life on this planet, the book implores us to think more deeply about our fundamental relationship with the earth."--Henry Adams, author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock "Wide-ranging and wonderfully illustrated, Eldredge's book examines how farming once defined America's sense of self and collective purpose."--Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America

"A must-read that exposes the hidden effect of insults on national policy. Attacks on BLM, #MeToo, LGBT, immigration, and abortion rights have deflected, created headwind, and posed deadweight for reform. Ruth Colker powerfully shows how these insults can and must be countered in the future."--Suja A. Thomas, author of The Missing American Jury "A tour de force. Colker masterfully reframes debates about public insults and hate speech into a transformative playbook, arming civil rights and civil liberties proponents with insightful new approaches for understanding and addressing public insults as tools of power bullies. She brilliantly makes the case that incrementalist, neoliberal approaches do not provide for systemic change. I couldn't put the book down."--Michele Goodwin, author of Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood "Colker's insights shift our attention to a new civil rights battleground: public insults. Essential reading for anyone looking to better understand partisan political efforts to undermine civil rights and democratic governance."--Jasmine E. Harris, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law "Colker brilliantly documents how power bullies use insults to perpetuate the subordination of people with disabilities, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. Those of us who value free speech must acknowledge these grievous harms and develop strategies to counter the pernicious effects of public insults."--Daniel P. Tokaji, Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School

"Providing a gripping historical account of hunger strikes over the past century, Nayan Shah sheds light on the paradox of using the frailty of the human body as a political weapon, showing how strikers slowly kill themselves in order to secure a series of rights and political goals. Refusal to Eat is as riveting as it is illuminating."--Neve Gordon, coauthor of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire "This sweeping account of the hunger strike as form of geopolitical protest manages to be both a total history and a primer for contemporary activism. Nayan Shah materializes the agony of embodied suffering and the global consequences of the refusal to eat in a truly devastating, inspiring, read."--Antoinette Burton, coeditor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times "In this global study of the use of the hunger strike over the course of the twentieth century--by suffragists, Irish republicans, Japanese American internees, Indian decolonial activists, South African anti-apartheid activists, and more--Shah offers an affecting analysis of an embodied political weapon of last resort and a meditation on the nature of modern state and carceral power and resistance to it."--Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality "A true tour de force. Shah's writing is clear and accessible and simultaneously engages with high-level critical discourse; it invites the reader, no matter one's background, into a serious and sustained study of hunger striking and the marginalized subjects who practice it. I really cannot heap sufficient praise on this work."--Patrick Anderson, author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance