A performance culture of illness and wellness In southern Uganda, ritual healing traditions called kusamira and nswezi rely on music to treat sickness and maintain well-being. Peter J. Hoesing blends ethnomusicological fieldwork with analysis to examine how kusamira and nswezi performance socializes dynamic processes of illness, wellness, and ......
Frequently Asked Questions About the Ancient Greeks and Romans
Why didn't the ancient Greeks or Romans wear pants? How did they shave? How likely were they to drink fine wine, use birth control, or survive surgery? In a series of short and humorous essays, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants explores some of the questions about the Greeks and Romans that ancient historian Garrett Ryan has ......
Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds
Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money ......
Getting Real About Race is an edited collection of short essays that address the most common stereotypes and misconceptions about race held by students, and by many in the United States, in general. Key Features Each essay concludes with suggested sources including videos, websites, books, and/or articles that instructors can choose to ......
From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the "twenty-first-century socialist" government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and ......
Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy-but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on ......
Gendered Network Memory in the Mara Region, Tanzania
Among communities in the Mara region of Tanzania, it is considered men's responsibility to maintain "history." But when Jan Bender Shetler's questions turned to specific familial connections within the village, she discovered her male informants had to occasionally leave the room-to ask their wives for clarification. The result is an original and ......
Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows, eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the ......
A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, ......
