America stocks its shelves with mass-produced goods but fills its imagination with handmade folk objects. In Pennsylvania, the "back to the city" housing movement causes a conflict of cultures. In Indiana, an old tradition of butchering turtles for church picnics evokes both pride and loathing among residents. In New York, folk-art exhibits raise choruses of adoration and protest. These are a few of the examples Simon Bronner uses to illustrate the ways Americans physically and mentally grasp things. Bronner moves beyond the usual discussions of form and variety in America's folk material culture to explain historical influences on, and the social consequences of, channeling folk culture into a mass society.

Many political commentators, both liberal and conservative, have argued that the 1980s were a period of fundamental conservative change. Some of them believe that the changes have been so important that the 1980s should be seen as a watershed period in American political history as significant as the 1930s. Schwab argues here that politics and policy have not fundamentally changed in a conservative direction, but have actually moved in the opposite direction. This book is a timely and comprehensive analysis of the Reagan years, of interest to all readers interested in politics and national policy.

Redefining Culture: Perspectives Across the Disciplines argues that culture is one of the most important factors we need to know when we interact as well as in our discussions of social problems and their solutions. This book picks up the dialogue where Kroeber and Kluckhohn left off in their classic 1952 collection and analysis of definitions of culture. As a resource for personal and academic libraries, this volume provides an updated listing of over 300 definitions of culture from a wide array of disciplines. Chapters examine how the definition of culture has changed historically, consider themes that cut across the definitions, and provide models for organizing approaches to defining culture. To round out this multi-disciplinary perspective, Renato Rosaldo provides a foreword, and prominent authors from six disciplines write about how they conceptualize culture and use it in their research and practice. This resource is an indispensable reference for scholars studying or integrating culture into their work. It will appeal to anyone interested in culture, particularly students and scholars in anthropology, intercultural and international communication, cultural studies, cultural and social psychology, linguistics, sociology, family studies, political science, intergroup relations, cultural geography, and multicultural education.

Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is a collection of 15 compelling and controversial articles from the pages of Taboo: The Journal of Cultural Studies and Education. Scholars including Henry A. Giroux, Deborah P. Britzman, and Lawrence Grossberg explore intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and power by examining cultural icons such as Forrest Gump and Borat, and social phenomena including cheerleading and the depiction of Jewish mothers on television. Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is an indispensable resource for cultural studies scholars and students alike.

An exploration of the meanings of the Andalusian carnival, focusing in particular on the songs, or coplas. The author offers translations of many of these carnival productions, and contends that they are less about revolution or politics, than about the ambivalence of all human feeling.

The Inka empire was the largest pre-Columbian polity in the New World. Its vast expanse, its ethnic diversity, and the fact that the empire may have been consolidated in less than a century have prompted much scholarly interest in its creation. In this study, Besom explores the ritual practices of human sacrifice and the worship of mountains, attested in both archaeological investigations and ethnohistorical sources, as tools in the establishment and preservation of political power. Besom examines the relationship between symbols, ideology, ritual, and power to demonstrate how the Cuzqueños could have used rituals to manipulate common Andean symbols to uphold their authority over subjugated peoples. He considers ethnohistoric accounts of the categories of human sacrifice to gain insights into related rituals and motives, and reviews the ethnohistoric evidence of mountain worship to predict locations as well as motives. He also analyzes specific archaeological sites and assemblages, theorizing that they were the locations of sacrifices designed to assimilate subject peoples, bind conquered lands to the state, and/or justify the extraction of local resources.

What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "bridge" both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "anthropological" concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "autonomy of the political" assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

Bhagat Singh, 1907-1931, Indian revolutionary and freedom fighter.