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Being Lolita: A Memoir
by Alisson Wood"Have you ever read Lolita?"So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson's metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. He praises her as a special and gifted writer, and she blossoms under his support and his vision for her future.Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a relationship that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance, with Mr. North convincing her that theirs is a love affair rivalled only by Nabokov's masterpiece. But as time progresses and his hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of that narrative is actually a disturbing fiction.In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from re-reading Lolita in college, to working with teenage girls, to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her and how to harness that power to tell her own true story.Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir of obsession, passion and manipulation, shining a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realises her entire narrative must be rewritten and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.
Being Lolita: A Memoir
by Alisson Wood"Have you ever read Lolita?"So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson's metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. He praises her as a special and gifted writer, and she blossoms under his support and his vision for her future.Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a relationship that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance, with Mr. North convincing her that theirs is a love affair rivalled only by Nabokov's masterpiece. But as time progresses and his hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of that narrative is actually a disturbing fiction.In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from re-reading Lolita in college, to working with teenage girls, to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her and how to harness that power to tell her own true story.Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir of obsession, passion and manipulation, shining a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realises her entire narrative must be rewritten and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.
Being Maori in the City
by Natacha GagnéIndigenous peoples around the world have been involved in struggles for decolonization, self-determination, and recognition of their rights, and the Māori of Aotearoa-New Zealand are no exception. Now that nearly 85% of the Māori population have their main place of residence in urban centres, cities have become important sites of affirmation and struggle. Grounded in an ethnography of everyday life in the city of Auckland, Being Maori in the City is an investigation of what being Māori means today.One of the first ethnographic studies of Māori urbanization since the 1970s, this book is based on almost two years of fieldwork, living with Māori families, and more than 250 hours of interviews. In contrast with studies that have focused on indigenous elites and official groups and organizations, Being Māori in the City shines a light on the lives of ordinary individuals and families. Using this approach, Natacha Gagné adroitly underlines how indigenous ways of being are maintained and even strengthened through change and openness to the larger society.
Being Middle Class in China: Identity, Attitudes and Behaviour (Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy)
by Ying MiaoMany studies of the Chinese middle class focus on defining it and viewing its significance for economic development and its potential for sociopolitical modernisation. This book goes beyond such objective approaches and considers middle class people’s subjective understanding and diverse experiences of class. Based on extensive original research including social surveys and detailed interviews, the book explores who the middle class think they are, what they think about a wide range of socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues, and why they think as they do. It examines attitudes towards the welfare state, social inequality, nationalism, relations with foreign countries and opinions on many social controversies, thereby portraying middle class people as more than simply luxury consumers and potential agents of democracy. The book concludes that a clear class identity and political consciousness have yet to emerge, but that middle class attitudes are best characterised as searching for a balance between old and new, the traditional and the foreign, the principled and the pragmatic.
Being Middle-class in India: A Way of Life (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series)
by Henrike DonnerHailed as the beneficiary, driving force and result of globalisation, India’s middle-class is puzzling in its diversity, as a multitude of traditions, social formations and political constellations manifest contribute to this project. This book looks at Indian middle-class lifestyles through a number of case studies, ranging from a historical account detailing the making of a savvy middle-class consumer in the late colonial period, to saving clubs among women in Delhi’s upmarket colonies and the dilemmas of entrepreneurial families in Tamil Nadu’s industrial towns. The book pays tribute to the diversity of regional, caste, rural and urban origins that shape middle- class lifestyles in contemporary India and highlights common themes, such as the quest for upward mobility, common consumption practices, the importance of family values, gender relations and educational trajectories. It unpacks the notion that the Indian middle-class can be understood in terms of public performances, surveys and economic markers, and emphasises how the study of middle-class culture needs to be based on detailed studies, as everyday practices and private lives create the distinctive sub-cultures and cultural politics that characterise the Indian middle class today. With its focus on private domains middleclassness appears as a carefully orchestrated and complex way of life and presents a fascinating way to understand South Asian cultures and communities through the prism of social class.
Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America)
by Kate ShindleFor nearly a hundred years, young women have competed for the title of Miss America—although what it means to wear the crown and be our “ideal” has changed dramatically over time. The Miss America Pageant began as a bathing beauty contest in 1920s Atlantic City, New Jersey, sponsored by businessmen trying to extend the tourist season beyond Labor Day. In the post–World War II years, the pageant evolved into a national coronation of an idealized “girl next door,” as pretty and decorous as she was rarely likely to speak her mind on issues of substance. Since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, the pageant has struggled to find a balance between beauty and brains as it tries to remain relevant to women who aspire to become leaders in the community, not hot babes in swimsuits. In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating and insightful history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America’s “ideal,” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant’s story, with a special focus on Miss America’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the “gown and crown” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America.
Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America)
by Kate Shindle&“[Shindler] tells the story of her year wearing the crown while offering an incisive history and analysis of an always-controversial beauty contest.&” —Kirkus Reviews In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America&’s &“ideal,&” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant&’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant&’s story, with a special focus on Miss America&’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant&’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle&’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the &“gown and crown&” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America. &“Kate Shindle&’s sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who&’s thought about what it takes to be America&’s ideal.&” —Jennifer Weiner, New York Times-bestselling author &“This memoir offers a captivating cultural history of the last 100 years in America through the lens of the Miss America Pageant and its white-knuckled struggle to remain relevant.&” —Library Journal
Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today
by Paul WillisThis book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to a new cultural landscape of meaning characterized by the worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism and fixation with the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time it provides sites where the new meets the old in the experiences, practices and developing self-identities of students and future generations of workers and citizens. In the closed walls of the school and the inescapability of its `scores`, an astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old with a tapestry of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs, secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies. Willis presents the human stories, the everyday human habitations and facilitations of how vast change comes about in local registers and feelings. The conformists and educational achievers have a particular way of relating to modernity that involves duty, delay and sacrifice – perhaps without end. Those failing or rebelling in school find their own more immediate ways of relating to modernity but it is a different and more brutal kind of modernity, arrived at with apparent enthusiasm but great cost. By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of society that it is today, a society that is obsessed with the future and at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul GawandeIn Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending<P> Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.<P> Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.<P> Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end. <P><b>A New York Times Bestseller</b>
Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
by Sylvia Chan-Malik2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice MagazineAn exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Muslim womanhood that centers the lived experience of women of color For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women’s rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women’s identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Through archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, the author maps how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, Being Muslim brings insight to the resistance that all Muslim women must engage in the post-9/11 United States. From the stories that she gathers, Chan-Malik demonstrates the diversity and similarities of Black, Arab, South Asian, Latina, and multiracial Muslim women, and how American understandings of Islam have shifted against the evolution of U.S. white nationalism over the past century. In borrowing from the lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, Chan-Malik offers us a new vocabulary for U.S. Muslim feminism, one that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.
Being Muslim
by Haroon SiddiquiThere has been a flood of books about Islam. There are books by Muslims for fellow believers, denying the problems that do exist or claiming to fix them by battling for the "soul" of Islam. There are anti-Islamic tracts galore. There are books with breathless titles meant to scare us about terrorism. There are political tomes for political insiders, diplomats and academics.
Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics #55)
by Tone Bringa"I have been able to follow a Bosnian community over a period of six years, during which it has undergone dramatic changes. In the late 1980s people were working hard against economic crisis. In 1990 they were full of optimism for the future. In January 1993 the village was in fear, surrounded by war on all sides. In April 1993 it was attacked by Croat forces. In October 1993 none of the Muslims in the village remained. They had either fled, been placed in detention camps, or been killed." <P><P>Thus begins Tone Bringa's moving ethnographic account of Bosnian Muslims' lives in a rural village located near Sarajevo. Although they represent a majority of the population in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslims are still members of a minority culture in the region that was once Yugoslavia. The question of ethno- national identity has become paramount in this society, and the author focuses on religion as the defining characteristic of identity. Bringa pays particular attention to the roles that women play in defining Muslim identities, and she examines the importance of the household as a Muslim identity sphere. In so doing, she illuminates larger issues of what constitutes "nationality." This is a gripping and heartfelt account of a community that has been torn apart by ethno-political conflict. It will attract readers of all backgrounds who want to learn more about one of the most intractable wars of the late twentieth century and the people who have been so tragically affected.
Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960 (McGill-Queen's Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies)
by Catharine Anne WilsonThroughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation. Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life.
Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
by Natasha LennardAn urgent challenge to the prevailing moral order from one of the freshest, most compelling voices in radical politics todayBeing Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and the ghosts in our lives. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that the personal is political, and situates as the central question of our time—How can we live a non-fascist life?
Being of Two Minds: Modernist Literary Criticism and Early Modern Texts
by Jonathan GoldbergBeing of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality.Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference.The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.
Being Online: On Computing, Data, the Internet, and the Cloud
by Jian WangA pioneer of cloud computing and big data offers his vision of the future world taking shape around us. Jian Wang was the founder and architect of Alibaba's cloud and has been the driving force behind its technology innovations. He was also the founder of the City Brain initiative to develop a new digital infrastructure for sustainable cities. Being Online is his meditation on the moment we are in, as the digital era shifts to the internet era, spawning new innovations at a seemingly dizzying pace: cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, big data, wearables, robots, virtual reality, the internet of things, blockchain, and more. For Wang, the invisible hand that connects them is being online. The conjunction of computing, data, and the internet has erased the difference between being online and off. When computing can be done in the cloud, it is on the road to becoming a utility. When data is connected, making it big, its usefulness multiplies exponentially in unforeseeable ways, as does its value. This moment will be as transformative for humanity as Henry Ford's production line. Data is changing the nature of business. Computing is reshaping the economy. The cloud will help us do things we could never do before, at scales that were previously impossible. It will reshape our vision of the world, as electrification once did and, more recently, the transition from analog to digital. While telling the story of Alibaba&’s breakthroughs and the development of his own understanding of the internet, Jian Wang's visionary book lays out the implications of this shift and how to think about being online.
Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas
by Oscar GoodmanIn Being Oscar,one of America's most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia's go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and "Lefty" Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge.After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America's greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the $5, $25, and $100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story--the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918
by Tamara Trojanowska Joanna Nizynska Przemyslaw Czaplinski Agnieszka PolakowskaBeing Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Being Present: Mobile Cinema in Kham Tibetan Areas (Pluralism, Culture and Communication in Contemporary China)
by Jianbin Guo Jingjing ChenThis book presents the restoration of rural mobile cinema network in the Great Triangle region at the conjunction of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet in China in the new century, which has added a new chapter to the long-standing complex relationship between cinema and social change. Based on five years of multi-sited fieldwork, abundant interviews and oral history narratives, this work shows the entanglement of the State, the projectionists and local film viewers in the historical and social context in a holistic analytic framework. By using the key concept of “being present” to examine the tangling relations between the actors in mobile cinema as social practice, the work argues that mobile cinema and contemporary Chinese society are mutually constructed in both textual and practical level.
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
by Joshua BennettA prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.
Being Santa Claus: What I Learned about the True Meaning of Christmas
by Sal Lizard Jonathan LaneA veteran Santa reveals heartwarming true stories and lessons from his twenty-year career spreading Christmas magic. With the holiday shopping season beginning earlier each year, more than ever. Americans are struggling to remember the true meaning of Christmas. And who better to deliver the gift of Christmas inspiration than a man who has spent the last two decades playing Santa? Sal Lizard was in his twenties when his beard and hair turned completely white. Today he appears everywhere from malls and parades to schools and hospitals. And— from his custom-made red velvet suits to the mistletoe that hangs from the rearview mirror in his Santa-mobile—he is Santa Claus three hundred and sixty-five days a year. In Being Santa Claus Sal reflects on his experiences with both children and adults including: Christmas magic is all around us: We don’t always see it, but it is there, shaping and enriching our lives. Sometimes you need to go that extra mile:Santa Claus is the one person who can’t even use a blizzard as an excuse not to honor his commitments, and Sal teaches adults the importance of always showing up for our children. Even a small child can make a big difference: Sal has met some impressive children over the years, and he’s learned that you don’t need to be a grown-up to make an impact on the world around you. In Being Santa Claus Sal shares these lessons, along with often heartwarming, occasionally heartbreaking, and sometimes downright hysterical stories from his twenty-year career as Santa. .
Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective
by Christopher CarrThis book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people’s ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people’s strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians’ narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l’anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology, is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.
Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism
by Elsa SjunnesonA deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they&’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she&’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.
Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity #15)
by Sarah LambA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Today, the majority of the world's population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women living in India, examining what makes living outside marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, the book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides, from urban professionals and rural day laborers, to those who identify as heterosexual and lesbian, to others who evaded marriage both by choice and by circumstance. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and evading marriage is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society's broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems of gender, sexuality, kinship, freedom, and social belonging in India today.
Being the Best Man For Dummies - UK
by Dominic BlissIf you're looking for practical, straight-talking advice on getting things right, look no further. Being the Best Man For Dummies is a perfect one-stop guide to being the ideal best man. This newly updated edition includes: Advice on organising the stag night (or weekend), including a guide to the best destinations, activities, and organisers, with contact information. An outline of your wedding day responsibilities (in the morning, at the church, during the reception, and all points in between) plus tips on how not to screw things up. A guide to writing a delivering a great speech, including opening lines, jokes, quotes, and more. Ten wedding-day nightmare scenarios to avoid. Guidance on how to dress to impress. All that in one convenient package that also doubles as a terrific prop for the reception speech.