Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Maschio uses the concepts and language of the Rauto people themselves to 'unpack' what might otherwise be considered a human anomaly–a minimalist culture, a people who live a rich emotional life but share the most stringent reservations against its figurative expression." —Roy Wagner, University of Virginia
Review
"A first-rate ethnography of a little-studied area. Maschio reaches back to the ethnographic writings of French Melanesianist Maurice Leenhardt to ground his account of the emotive/expressive self in religious phenomenology. This complex reading of ritual and expressive culture connects with a growing number of contemporary ethnographies that put poetic utterances at the center of cultural articulations of self and society."—James Clifford, series editor
Synopsis
David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America s working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals.
Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association"
Synopsis
As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self.
Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory—one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-241) and index.
About the Author
Thomas Maschio received his Ph.D. in anthropology from McMaster University and his M.A. from New York University. He has taught at the American Museum of Natural History and New York University.