Banished for promiscuity, Tieta returns to the seaside village of Agreste after twenty-six years. Thinking she is now a rich, respectable widow, her mercenary family welcomes her with open arms. But Tieta is forced to reveal her true identity in order to save the town's beautiful beaches from ugly development. For the only way she can stop the factory is to call upon her close connections in Sao Paulo's highest political and financial circles--as only the Madam of the city's ritziest bordello can.

"Maracatu Atômico" is the first academic work to investigate the mangue movement, one of Brazil's most vital pop culture trends of the last thirty years, and the related "new music scene" of Northeast Brazil. Contending with the widespread poverty and social problems, mangue places a renewed value on the local environment and its myriad folk traditions while embracing modern, global pop influences and technology. The book provides historical and ethnographic accounts of the movement, analyzes salient examples of folk and pop fusion music, and enters recent debates about postmodernity, globalization, and "world music" in an attempt to understand better how local musicians in one "Third World" region interact within a more global cultural system.

This book provides a unique, up-to-date survey of individual Uralic languages and sub-groupings from Finnish to Selkup. Spoken by more than 25 million native speakers, the Uralic languages have important cultural and social significance in Northern and Eastern Europe, as well as in immigrant communitites throughout Europe and North America. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the Uralic language family and is followed by 18 chapter-length descriptions of each language or sub-grouping, giving an analysis of their history and development as well as focusing on their linguistic structures. Written by internationally recognised experts and based on the most recent scholarship available, the volume covers major languages - including the official national languages of Estonia, Finland and Hungary - and rarely-covered languages such as Mordva, Nganasan and Khanty. The 18 language chapters are similarly-structured, designed for comparative study and cover phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Those on individual languages also have sample text where available. Each chapter includes numerous tables to support and illustrate the text and bibliographies of the major references for each language to aid further study. The volume is comprehensively indexed. This book will be invaluable to language students, experts requiring concise but thorough information on related languages and anyone working in historical, typological and comparative linguistics.

Understanding the role of women in Latin American history demands a full examination of their activities in the region's political, economic, and domestic spheres. Toward this end, historian Gertrude M. Yeager has assembled the multidisciplinary collection Confronting Change, Challenging Tradition. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which Latin American women have shaped-and have been shaped by-the traditional practices and ideologies of their cultures. The selections are arranged in two sections: Culture and the Status of Women, and Reconstructing the Past.

Automatic style characterization is the process of measuring, extracting, and analysing different formal elements. Brushstroke technique, in conjunction with other formal elements such as colour and texture, play a vital role in defining an artistic style. This thesis explores the stroke-based style analysis of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, who is well-known for his use of wide and repetitive brushstrokes. Novel brushstroke extraction techniques are used to segment and analyse Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. The extracted features can then be compiled into a feature set which represents the quantified brushstrokes’ properties and tested using several classification based tests. The most contributing factor for detecting visible brushstroke is the brushstroke’s texture, due to the fact that the texture-based segmentation methods give more satisfactory results in extracting visible brushstrokes with their average classification accuracy and F-measure being 98.30% and 0.973 respectively.

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s.