Whether as wine, beer, or spirits, alcohol has had a constant and often controversial role in social life. In his innovative book on the attitudes toward and consumption of alcohol, Rod Phillips surveys a 9,000-year cultural and economic history, uncovering the tensions between alcoholic drinks as healthy staples of daily diets and as objects of ......
Although what happens in the toilet usually stays in the toilet, this brilliant, revelatory, and often funny book aims to bring it all out into the open, proving that profound and meaningful history can be made even in the can
Meet the People Keeping Hong Kong's Traditional Industries Alive
This book tells the stories of Hong Kong's traditional tradesmen and women through stunning imagery and candid interviews. Covering a myriad of curious professions that are quickly falling into obscurity, from fortune telling to face threading and letter writing to bird cage making, readers soon find themselves immersed in the streets of old Hong ......
During the dramatic economic and social transformation of late twentieth-century Indonesia, theatre performances in Central Java featured a familiar cast of rulers, nobles, clown servants and ordinary people. However, these presentations were not a repetition of age-old cultural 'traditions'. Instead, by stretching the framework of Javanese ......
This book provides an account of the vigorous survival of an Islamic community in the strife-torn borderlands of the lower Mekong Delta and its creative accommodation to the modernising reforms of the Vietnamese government. Officially regarded as one of Vietnam's national minority groups, the multilingual Cham are part of a cosmopolitan, ......
Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History
Cities, states, and nations are grappling with how best to commemorate historical events and anniversaries in ways that are fair, accurate, and open public dialogue about the often contested past. This volume springs from varied approaches to the historical commemoration of Maine's state bicentennial in 2020 that involved academics, independent ......
Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History
Cities, states, and nations are grappling with how best to commemorate historical events and anniversaries in ways that are fair, accurate, and open public dialogue about the often contested past. This volume springs from varied approaches to the historical commemoration of Maine's state bicentennial in 2020 that involved academics, independent ......
Ritual, Performance, and Belonging in Buryat Communities of Siberia
In the mid-2000s, the Russian government began to merge Siberia's smallest Indigenous territories into larger administrative regions. Among Buryat Mongols living to the west of Lake Baikal the state promoted a policy of "National Cultural Autonomy," which sought to separate culture from territory amid this consolidation of land and people. ......
