Making Their Way: Four Books on Youth, Culture, and Identity

Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. 257 pp.
Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Ralph Cintron. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 264 pp.
Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers. Niobe Way. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 310 pp.
At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Tobias Hecht. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 267 pp.     

Practicing Community: Class, Culture and Power in an Urban Neighborhood.

Practicing Community: Class, Culture and Power in an Urban Neighborhood. Rhoda H. Halperin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 352 pp.     

Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives.

Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Frank J. Korom. ed. St-Hyacinthe, Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1997. 230 pp.     

Fleeting Identities: Perishable Material Culture in Archaeological Research

Fleeting Identities: Perishable Material Culture in Archaeological Research. Penelope Ballard Drooker. ed. Carbondale, 1L: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 2001.410 pp.     

The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present

The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Sian Jones. London: Routledge, 1997. 180 pp.     

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Fred R. Myers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 410 pp.     

There Once Was a Maiden and a Middle Class: The Making of a Neoliberal Thriller

Coinciding with India's turn to neoliberalism, a new genre—the conspiracy thriller—has appeared in popular Hindi cinema. Its aesthetics of speed, movement, and surprise express the fear and furious reasoning of an individual who must save her- or himself from a conspiracy that threatens to destroy them. This article contextualizes the genre in the urban spaces of neoliberalism, its architecture of private enclosures, and the paranoid subjectivities it has produced.     

Identities in Context: Politicized Racial Group Consciousness Among Asian American and Latino Youth

This article examines the role of context on the mobilization of politicized racial group consciousness among Asian American and Latino youth. We investigate group membership by analyzing face-to-face interview data with Latino and Asian American youth in New York and California on their responses to questions about the meaning of their race and ethnicity to politics. Next, we use survey data from a nationally representative sample of Asian American and Latino youth taken during the 2004 election. We also analyze the extent to which the contextual circumstances of systematic exposure to an experimental frame prompting racial and ethnic group pride influence racial group consciousness. The data help to illuminate the extent to which racial and ethnic identities of Asian American and Latino youth are manifest in their unique political contexts.     

Throwing in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic: inferences from an analysis of humeral retroversion

When in evolutionary history did long-range projectile weapons become an important component of hunting toolkits? The archeological evidence for the development of projectile weaponry is complex and generally indirect, and has led to different conclusions about the origin and spread of this technology. Lithic evidence from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) has led some researchers to suggest that true long- range projectile weaponry developed in Africa perhaps as early as 80,000 years ago, and was part of the subsistence toolkit carried by modern humans who expanded out of Africa after 50,000 years ago. Alternatively, temporal patterns in the morphology of pointed lithics has led others to posit an independent, convergent origin of projectile weaponry in Africa, the Near East, and Europe during the interval between 50,000-40,000 years ago. By either scenario, projectile weapons would not have been a component of the hunting arsenal of Neandertals, but may have been in use by European early modern humans and thus, projectile technology may have entered into the competitive dynamics that existed between these two groups. The origins of projectile weapons can be addressed, in part, through analyses of the skeletal remains of the prehistoric humans who made and used them. Habitual behavior patterns—including those related to the production and use of technology—can be imprinted on the skeleton through both genetic and epigenetic pathways. Recent studies in the field of sports medicine indicate that individuals who engage in habitual throwing have increased humeral retroversion angles in their throwing arms and a greater degree of bilateral asymmetry in retroversion angles than do non-throwers. This contribution investigates humeral torsion through analysis of the retroversion angle in samples of Eurasian Neandertals, European early modern humans of the middle and late Upper Paleolithic, and comparative samples of recent humans. This analysis was conducted under the assumption that if throwing-based projectile weaponry was used by early modern Europeans but not Neandertals, Upper Paleolithic samples should be similar to recent human groups engaged in habitual throwing in the degree of humeral retroversion in the dominant limb and in bilateral asymmetry in this feature. Neandertals on the other hand, would not be expected to show marked asymmetry in humeral retroversion. Consistent with other studies, Neandertals exhibit increased retroversion angles (decreased humeral torsion or a more posteriorly oriented humeral head) relative to most modern human samples, although this appears more likely related to body form and overall activity levels than to habitual throwing. Although Neandertals with bilaterally preserved humeri sufficient for measurement are rare (consisting of only two males and one female), levels of bilateral asymmetry in humeral retroversion are low, suggesting a lack of regular throwing. While patterning across fossil and comparative samples in levels of humeral retroversion was not clear cut, males of both the middle and late Upper Paleolithic demonstrate a high level of bilateral asymmetry, comparable to or in excess of that seen in samples of throwing athletes. This may indicate habitual use of throwing-based projectile weaponry by middle Upper Paleolithic times. Small sample sizes and relatively great variance in the fossil samples makes these results, however, suggestive rather than conclusive.     

Constructing Alzheimer's: Narratives of Lost Identities,Confusion and Loneliness in Old Age

This paper is a qualitative study based on retrospective, unstructured, qualitative interviews with Mrs. Jones and other African-American, Chinese-American, Irish-American and Latino family caregivers in the Boston area. A narrative approach is used to show how family caregivers draw on their cultural and personal resources to create stories about the nature and meaning of illness and to ask how ethnic identity may influence the kinds of stories family caregivers tell. Three different story types are identified and described, each with a distinctive configuration of illness meanings and overarching theme, or storyline: a subset of African-American, Irish-American, and Chinese-American caregivers told us stories about Alzheimer's as a disease that erodes the core identity of a loved one and deteriorates their minds; a subset of Chinese caregivers narrated stories that emphasized how families managed confusion and disabilities, changes ultimately construed as an expected part of growing old; a subset of Puerto Rican and Dominican families, while using the biomedical label of Alzheimer's disease or dementia, placed the elder's illness in stories about tragic losses, loneliness, and family responsibility. To construct their stories, caregivers drew upon both biomedical explanations and other cultural meanings of behavioral and cognitive changes in old age. Their stories challenge us to move beyond the sharp contrast between ethnic minority and non-ethnic minority views of dementia-related changes, to local clinics and hospitals as sites where biomedical knowledge is interpreted, communicated, discussed, and adapted to the perspectives and lived realities of families.     

Re/Making La Negrita: Culture as an Aesthetic System in Costa Rica

In this article, I examine the production of meaning in the veneration of La Negrita, the black Madonna and patroness of Costa Rica. Both an apparition and an icon, La Negrita is a 20-centimeter, dark-colored statue of the Virgin Mary that appeared to a mulata girl on the outskirts of the colonial city of Cartago in 1635. Throughout the ensuing 400 years, La Negrita has been remade in the image of hegemony, even as the experience of her perceived power has challenged that ideological and coercive project. Through an analysis of this historical progression, I argue for a theory of culture as an aesthetic system, where the egalitarianism of experience is always in conflict with the authoritarianism of meaning.     

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Bradd Shore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 428 pp.     

Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition/Seeking Mahadevi: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess.

Questioning Ramayanas:. South Asian Tradition. Paula Richman. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 452 pp.
Seeking Mahadevi: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess. Tracy Pintchman. ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 254 pp.