A manual addressed to students rather than to teachers or researchers, Oral History: An Introduction for Students is unique among the "how to" books in the field, adapting some of the best methods of group oral history projects to the needs of individual students. Useful in courses devoted entirely to oral history, the book also addresses the wider audience of students who may choose to do oral research in the context of otherwise traditional courses. The emphasis is on humanistic, imagininative, and intellectual challenge for students in integrating oral accounts with written documents. Only by achieving such flexibility, argues the author, can oral history fully realize its potential as a learning and teaching technique. A signficant contribution to theory and methodology as well as an introductory manual, this book will be of interest to professional oral history researchers and those individual scholars interested in adding oral history to their research techniques. James Hoopes has explored the writings of sociology and communications specialists in order to present a richly detailed and helpful analysis of the interview situation from a transactional point of view. Of particular interest is the section of the book devoted to the ways in which oral history can be related to other areas of research such as biography and family history and to the broader fields of cultural and social history. Hoopes' s central theme is that oral history, whether viewed primarily as a learning or research technique, can fulfill its promise as an important and humanistic resource only if it becomes part of general historical study wherever it is applicable.

Terrorism and the State is a volume on the political economy of terrorism. Emphasizing the role of ideological systems in the definition of political violence, this book is theoretical, historical, and critical. It first presents and refutes the two most commonly expressed definitions of terrorism: the absolutist view, a simplistic picture of international deviance on the part of fanatics, and the liberal relativistic view, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Both views focus on the definition of behaviors rather than on the real relations of domination and subjugation embodied in the social structure. Neither view can be used as a vehicle when analyzing institutionalized forces of domination through fear. The author suggests that there is presently a double standard of terrorism, one for the state and the other for its opponents. Terrorism and the State reframes the terrorism debate. A historical review supports a revisionist position that places the issue in the context of global relations. Attention is given to the role of the media in the selective selling of international terrorism. Having established his framework, the author proceeds through the investigation of historically grounded cases to systematically analyze state terrorism: the coercive power of today's nuclear weapon state, global apartheid, terrornoia, settler terrorism, holy terror, and, finally, surrogate terrorism. Terrorism and the State develops its framework for the terrorism debate within the first three chapters: The Ideology of Terrorism, Terrorism and the State, and Mediaspeak: The Selling of International Terrorism. The remainder of this volume concentrates on historically grounded cases: The Real Nuclear Terrorism; Racial Terrorism: Apartheid in South Africa; Terrornoia and Zonal Revolution: The Case of Libya; Settler Terrorism: Israel and the P.L.O.; Holy Terror: Iran and Irangate; Surrogate Terrorism: The United States and Nicaragua

The Diné, or Navajo, creation story says there were four worlds before this, the Glittering World. For the present-day Diné this is a world of glittering technology and influences from outside the sacred land entrusted to them by the Holy People. From the Glittering World conveys in vivid language how a contemporary Diné writer experiences this world as a mingling of the profoundly traditional with the sometimes jarringly, sometimes alluringly new. "Throughout the book, Morris’s command of a crisp unpretentious prose is most impressive...His style is so low-key that he hardly seems to be trying to be ’artistic,’ yet the cumulative effect of these pieces is quite powerful. For Morris’s beautiful descriptions of the remote Navajo reservation this book deserves to be on the shelf of anyone tracking the literature of the Southwest."-Western American Literature "Beginning with the Navajo creation story and ending with the summation of everything in between, Morris shows an incredible agility in jumping from truth to myth, from now to then, and from what is to what might have been."-The Sunday Oklahoman "In From the Glittering World, Irvin Morris has woven a wondrous and sometimes terrifying weave of stories centered in the Navajo experience. . . . Irvin Morris’ strong style, his vivid imagery, his deft handling of complex structures, and his deep knowledge of Navajo tradition combine to produce a work as powerful and enduring as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller and N. Scott Momaday’s The Names. With From the Glittering World, Irvin Morris has joined the ranks of great contemporary authors."-Telluride Times-Journal

Examines the history, culture, changing fortunes, and current situation of the Navajo Indians.

In a rare combination of competence, an architectural historian (Niels Gutschow) and an indologist (Axel Michaels) have documented death rituals of the ethnic community of Newars in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The first part of the book focusses to a specific setting, the ancient city of Bhaktapur and its calendric rituals of death and renewal. An introduction to the urban fabric with its cremation places, routes of death processions, places of spirits and ancestor deities is followed by a presentation of specialists involved in the death and ancestor rituals - illustrated by 28 maps. The second part presents a detailed description of the union of the deceased with his forefathers, a ritual which is also documented on a DVD. In addition, local handbooks and manuals used by the Brahmin priest during this ritual are edited and translated. This ethno-indological method of combination of textual and contextual approaches aims at understanding both the agency in rituals and the function of the text in contexts. Formalized rituals turn out to be by no means strict, stereotypical and unchangeable. The uniqueness of the actors, places and time has prompted the authors to name places and actors and to date time. The study of death rituals represents the first part of a trilogy of studies of life-cycle rituals in Nepal, carried out under the auspices of the Collaborative Research Centre "Dynamics of Ritual" (Sonderforschungsbereich 619: Ritualdynamik).

Words and Deeds is a collection of articles on rituals in South Asia with a special focus on their texts and context. The volume presupposes that a comprehensive definition of "ritual" does not exist. Instead, the papers in it avoid essentialist definitions, allowing for a possible polythetic definition of the concept to emerge. Papers in this volume include those on Initiation, Pre-Natal Rites, Religious Processions, Royal Consecration, Rituals which mark the commencement of ritual, Rituals of devotion and Vedic sacrifice as well as contributions which address the broader theoretical issues of engaging in the study of ritual texts and ritual practice, both from the etic and the emic perspective. These studies show that any study of the relationship between the text and the context of rituals must also allow for the possibility that different categories of performers can and do subjectively constitute the relationship between their ritual knowledge and ritual practice, between text and context in differing and nuanced ways.

Drawing on textual and anthropological research, this book demonstrates how popular ritual texts and stories have shaped the religion and culture of the only surviving Mahayana Buddhist society, the Newars of Kathmandu.