It’s one of the coldest winters on record in Iowa City, Iowa, with snow still on the ground. The dean of one of the colleges is missing after Thanksgiving break, but even worse, two vans full of returning students are involved in a fiery crash. Soon the media and parents are frantically calling the university. President Barlow and his trusted administrative assistant Mary Lou stand united in their duty, but it’s not too long before things get even more complicated. The dean’s murdered body is found, state police worry that drug cartels are behind the crash, and someone has warned Mary Lou about becoming involved. The body count continues to rise, as does the number of connections between the university and drugs. It will take a cooperative effort of law enforcement, both the two-legged and four-legged kind, as well as a resourceful secretary and her family to unravel the mystery. Drawing on the sixteen years she spent as a faculty member at the University of Iowa, Margery Wolf has crafted a tale that leads readers down a path of intrigue and suspense. Trouble at the U weaves in details of the world of a large university from academic politics to relationships between a small town and professors. The mystery reflects Margery’s ethnographer’s eye in portraying different kinds of people and what makes them unique as Hawkeye state residents.
Via time travel, Charlotte Makee, a 21st century anthropologist, meets an elderly Coast Miwok curer named Sekiak in the hills near Olompali in Marin County, California. Charlotte wishes to learn about Coast Miwok life before their society was disrupted and then destroyed by Catholic priests, Spanish soldiers, settlers, and other foreigners over less than 100 years. Once Sekiak decides to work with Charlotte, she administers a potion that renders her visitor invisible to all but Sekiak and one or two others. That potion also allows Charlotte to comprehend Miwok speech, and she embarks on ethnographic fieldwork, listening and observing in the nearby settlements with Sekiak as her primary teacher of local customs and history. As the two women move back and forth through time, Charlotte fills dozens of notebooks with data about Coast Miwok life that she intends to draw upon to tell the story of what happened to the people of Coyote’s Land. But as Margery Wolf’s “novel ethnography” unfolds, an ominous air settles over the research enterprise, comparable to the ominous air of death and devastation that demolish a once-thriving society. This experimental ethnography joins fiction to historical and cultural data, helping us to feel and see what happened as the Coast Miwok world turned upside down and then was altered beyond recognition.
A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan--a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article--to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a decidedly abherrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization? Or was she being cynically manipulated by her ne'er-do-well husband to elicit sympathy and money from her neighbors? In the end, the woman was taken away from the area to her mother's house. For some villagers, this settled the matter; for others the debate over her behavior was probably never truly resolved. The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occurred almost thrity years ago; the second text is a copy of the fieldnotes collected about the events covered in the short story; the third text is an article published in 1990 in American Ethnologist that analyzes the incident from the author's current perspective. Following each text is a Commentary in which the author discusses such topics as experimental ethnography, polyvocality, authorial presence and control, reflexivity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography. The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the genereal problems posed by feminist and postmodernist critics of ethnography and presents her personal exploration of these issues in an argument that is strongly self-reflexive and theoretically rigorous. She considers some feminist concerns over colonial research methods and takes issues with the insistence of some feminists tha the topics of ethnographic research be set by those who are studied. The book concludes with a plea for ethnographic responsibility based on a less academic and more practical perspective.
Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life. This study seeks to fill some of these gaps by examining the ways rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and each other in the pursuit of their personal goals. The source of a woman's power, her home in a social structure dominated by men, is what the author calls the uterine family, a de facto social unity consisting of a mother and her children. The first four chapters are devoted to general background material: a brief historical sketch of Taiwan and a description fo the settings in which the author's observations were made; the history of a particular family; the relation of Chinese women to the Chinese kinship system; and the interrelationships among women in the community. The remaining ten chapters take up in detail the successive stages of the Taiwanese woman's life cycle: infancy, childhood, engagement, marriage, motherhood, and old age. Throught the book the author presents detailed information on such topics as marriage negotiations, childbirth, child training practices, and the organization of women's groups.
A water buffalo wanders onto the landing field of the Taipei airport just as an airplane lands.Two of the survivors of the crash, a Chinese-born professor of Chinese Literature and an American graduate student going to Taiwan to do ethnographic fieldwork, become friends during their stay in the hospital. After their release the friendship continues and in time enlarges to include similarly lonely people, such as the Fongs--a brother and sister who as children saw their parents executed on the streets of Shanghai; Professor Li's nephew and his adopted sister who were destined by Taiwanese tradition to be married; Chen Chieh, a superb cook who holds this unusual family together with her amazing food and has her own secrets; and a few others. Their time together on Taiwan has its share of joys and tragedies that draw the group even closer together in what they call their family. When members of that family marry, they all go to California to celebrate the happy event just in time for a major earthquake that devastates the small city of Santa Rosa and draws the two Fongs, both doctors, into the emergency immediately following the wedding.
The Communist revolution promised Chinese women an end to thousands of years of subjugation, an equality with men in all matters legal, political, social, and economic. This book examines the extent to which this promise has been kept. Based on nearly a year of field research and interviews with over 300 women in six widely separated rural and urban areas, it gives us a vivid picture of Chinese women today - their day-to-day lives, their views of the present, and their hopes for the future. To date nothing approximating equality has been achieved: in working conditions, in pay, in educational opportunity. In the cities, and to a lesser extent in the countryside, women are better off than in pre-revolutionary China. But nowhere except in the rhetoric of the regime are they equal to men. Nor does the immediate future look much brighter, given the continuing social constraints, the government's controversial family limitation program, and the nature of the new economic policies introduced in 1980. So far as possible, the women interviewed are allowed to speak for themselves. Some take refuge behind government slogans, some are shy or wary, but a surprising number are quick to give their own opinions despite an ever-present government cadre. These opinions, combined with the author's astute observations on their local and national context, add up to a wholly new perspective on an all too familiar problem.
The Thompsons and the Tanakas worked neighboring apple orchards for three generations before WWII disrupted their community. This story follows the history of the families during and after these troubling times.
Gary Morris and his team, air lifted a woman that had been lost and wandering in the mountains for weeks. When she awakes in the hospital, she asks for her friend, Sally Ann Proctor. Gary is shocked when he hears the name, he has a locket that belongs to her, a locket that he is strangely drawn to. He suddenly feels an urgency to find the woman that is still missing in the mountains.Sally Ann Proctor was the last of three nurses that were kidnapped and held captive in a hunter's shack in the mountains. Her best friend had gone for help. She had almost given up hope when she was finally rescued but something happened. After all she had been through, she had a seizure and went into a coma.The moment Gary saw Sally, he knew she was his true mate. He had already lost a woman he loved and a daughter he adored. He swore he wouldn't get involved again. But then he had a strange dream; a woman was drowning and his daughter begged him to save her. The woman was Sally Ann.
Childrens Literature is now a recognised area of study, mainly PG but also on undergraduate education courses. Makes literary theory accessible to teachers
In this volume, Margery Hargest Jones – whose previous books for Austin Macauley have covered some of the most iconic folk tales of the British Isles, from the Mabinogion and King Arthur to Robin Hood – now tells, or re-tells, some of her favourite stories. Three of these are given in full, while the other four are compressed into intriguing and resonant summary form. The title story, ‘The Aged Infant’, is set in the author’s native Wales and concerns a devoted mother’s troubles with a changeling child. The next, ‘The Miraculous Watermelon’, reads like one of the piquantly comic tales from The Arabian Nights. The final tale in this section, ‘Caravan Joe’, details how the eponymous character deals with the mischievous inhabitants of Squirrel Wood. The four subsequent summaries range from a simple anecdote about Larry the Lamb and other much-loved characters of ‘ToyTown’ to a mini-epic in which the Nordic hero Sigmund battles with a she-wolf.
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