He had once told me he was the Morning Sun. I felt my Angel was no longer at my side; has he now taken her place? The path God paved for me seem to be no more. Again, he asks Sandy, what did you see? I was afraid, he assures me that he will let no harm come to me. He rocked me back and forth, embracing me in his arms. He tells me not to worry, that the world will become my playground. I knew right then that I had been given an identity that was not my own; an identity that had not been paved for me. UNPAVED IDENTITY.

This book offers engagements with topics in mainline theology that concern the lifelines in and of the Pacific (Pasifika). The essays are grouped into three clusters. The first, Roots, explores the many roots from which theologies in and of Pasifika grow – sea and (is)land, Christian teachings and scriptures, native traditions and island ways. The second, Reads, presents theologies informed and inspired by readings of written and oral texts, missionary traps and propaganda, and teachings and practices of local churches. The final cluster, Routes, places Pasifika theologies upon the waters so that they may navigate and voyage. The ‘amanaki (hope) of this work is in keeping talanoa (dialogue) going, in pushing back tendencies to wedge the theologies in and of Pasifika, and in putting native wisdom upon the waters. As these Christian and native theologies voyage, they chart Pasifika’s sea of theologies.

James and Nancy Duncan look at how the aesthetics of physical landscapes are fully enmeshed in producing the American class system. Focusing on an archetypal upper class American suburb-Bedford in Westchester County, NY-they show how the physical presentation of a place carries with it a range of markers of inclusion and exclusion.

While much scholarship has been devoted to the interplay between language, identity and social relationships, we know less about how this plays out interactionally in diverse transient settings. Based on research in Indonesia, this book examines how talk plays an important role in mediating social relations in two urban spaces where linguistic and cultural diversity is the norm and where distinctions between newcomers and old timers changes regularly. How do people who do not share expectations about how they should behave build new expectations through participating in conversation? Starting from a view of language-society dynamics as enregisterment, Zane Goebel uses interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication to explore how language is used in this contact setting to build and present identities, expectations and social relations. It will be welcomed by researchers and students working in the fields of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, the anthropology of migration and Asian studies.

This book examines how state schooling in China has economically, culturally, and ideologically had an impact on and gradually transformed a traditional Muslim Hui village in rural Northwestern China. By discussing the interpretation and appropriation of dominant educational discourse of “quality” in the rural context, it illustrates the dichotomies of poverty and prosperity, civility and uncivility, and religiosity and secularity as they are perceived and understood by teachers, parents and students. Based on an original ethnographic research conducted in a secondary school, it further touches upon Muslim Hui students’ negotiations of filial, rural, and ethnoreligious identities when they struggle to seek a life of their own in the journey to prosperity. The book introduces audiences to multiple ways in which Muslim Hui students construct and negotiate identities through state schooling, especially the educational heterogeneity experienced by various Muslim youth. It also captures the changing rural-urban dynamic as state schooling continues to guide local formal educational activities as well as create tensions and confusions for both teachers and parents. Most importantly, the book challenges stereotypes about Muslim Hui students in Northwest China being assimilated into the mainstream culture by demonstrating how local Muslims live, study, pray, and fulfil the five pillars of Islam. It will be highly relevant to students and researchers in the fields of education, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies.

In 2004, Carolyn Han left her comfortable life and position as a lecturer in English at Hawaii Community College and went to live in one of the most remote and mysterious places in the Middle East—Yemen, known in the West primarily for providing a haven for terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda. The previous year, she had sold her gold jewelry to travel with Bedouin by camel from Marib to Shabwa, and the life-changing experience opened the path for her to become the first American English instructor in Yemen’s wild tribal area, Marib. Guided by fateful encounters and unfazed by warnings of danger, Han allowed her life to unfold as it might, with a sense of acceptance informed by the idea that whatever happens is meant to happen. Learning and understanding would follow. In this book,Han paints a vivid portrait of Yemeni customs, including their enjoyment of the stimulant qat and their proclivity for carrying AK-47s wherever they go, and she conveys what it was like to be a woman alone surrounded by a culture not her own. As the old saying goes, Han, the ostensible teacher, became the student, and through these pages she allows readers a rare glimpse into a Bedouin culture that most will never encounter.

How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession.

Nation-building as a process is never complete and issues related to identity, nation, state and regime-building are recurrent in the post-Soviet region. This comparative, inter-disciplinary volume explores how nation-building tools emerged and evolved over the last twenty years. Featuring in-depth case studies from countries throughout the post-Soviet space it compares various aspects of nation-building and identity formation projects. Approaching the issue from a variety of disciplines, and geographical areas, contributors illustrate chapter by chapter how different state and non-state actors utilise traditional instruments of nation-construction in new ways while also developing non-traditional tools and strategies to provide a contemporary account of how nation-formation efforts evolve and diverge.

In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape." Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of "school," understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton.

Entangled Terrains: Empire, Identity, and Memories of Guantánamo explores the challenges and conflicts of life in the transnational spaces between Cuba and the United States by examining the lived experiences of Alberto Jones, a first-generation black Cuban who worked at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Asa McKercher and Catherine Krull take readers on a journey through Jones’s life as he crossed the entangled political, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries, both in Cuba and living as a black Cuban in central Florida. McKercher and Krull argue that Jones’s story encapsulates the reality of recent Caribbean and Cuban experiences as they deconstruct the events of his life to reveal the broader cultural and social implications of identity, boundaries, and belonging throughout Caribbean and Cuban history.