Ethnography
Boy and Girl Tramps of America
In 1933 and 1934, Thomas Minehan, a young sociologist at the University of Minnesota, joined the ranks of a roving army of 250,000 boys and girls torn from their homes during the Great Depression. Disguised ...
Smoker beyond the Sea
In this groundbreaking volume, Juan José Baldrich traces the deep changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers and their export markets from the Spanish colonization of the island ...
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends
In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But ...
Hearing Brazil
Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation’s slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a wide range of traditions helping ...
Songs of Earth
Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, ...
One Grand Noise
For many, December 26 is more than the day after Christmas. Boxing Day is one of the world’s most celebrated cultural holidays. As a legacy of British colonialism, Boxing Day is observed throughout ...
In Search of Ancient Kings
The Egúngún society is one of the least-studied and written-about aspects of African diasporic spiritual traditions. It is the society of the ancestors, the society of the dead. Its primary function ...
The Sacred Language of the Abakuá
In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. ...
French on Shifting Ground
In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life ...
Consuming Katrina
When and under what circumstances are disaster survivors able to speak for themselves in the public arena? In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative, author Kate Parker Horigan shows ...