Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

In The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011), Carla Bellamy explores the role of saint shrines in India, while focusing on a particular venue known as Husain Tekri, or “Husain Hill.” Through her in-depth ethnographic research, Bellamy’s monograph provides vivid description and analysis of the site as well as first-person narratives of pilgrims in order to offer a dynamic portrayal of the shrine complex. Bellamy shows how lines between religious communities are often fluid rather than fixed. She also problematizes notions of so-called spirit possession, interrogates the metaphysical power of frankincense, and articulates myriad perspectives of what healing might mean for those who visit Husain Tekri and participate in its rituals. Bellamy’s rich ethnography should appeal to numerous audiences, including those interested in South Asia, shrine culture, Islam, Indian religion, and Sufism.

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A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013), Ian Jared Miller explores this transformation and its reverberations in a fascinating...

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Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those determinations?Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012)guides readers through the ecologies...

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There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia.

Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone.

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Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of...

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During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a capitalist frontier in a new phase of industrial revolution. In Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California...

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The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the newborn. It’s an arresting way to begin an inspiring new book by Fabian Drixler. Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in...

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Christine Trost is program director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies and associate director of the UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Her co-editor is Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director and lead researchers of Center for Right-Wing Studies at Berkeley. The volume includes chapters by scholars such Alan Abramowitz (Emory University), Martin Cohen (James Madison University), Clarence Lo (University of Missouri at Columbia), but also has several chapters written by practitioners, lending the book a varied assessment on the Tea Party. These authors unearth what Trost and Rosenthal call the “stunning” emergence of the Tea Party following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Chapters situate the Tea Party in its historical context and consider the extent to which this social movement is best understood as emerging from the grassroots or whether it is better placed into the national conservative movement. The collection is informative and deeply readable together and as individual chapters.

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When I was a teenager growing up in the early 80s, I took it as an article of faith that punk rock and heavy metal were definably different genres. To be sure, punk and metal bands both played heavy, loud, and fast music, but beyond those sonic similarities, these groups and their fans seemed to have little in common. When I read heavy metal magazines, metal musicians expressed contempt for punk bands and their purported lack of musical talent. Conversely, when I read the skateboarding magazine Thrasher, punk musicians mocked heavy metal acts for their supposed obsession with instrumental virtuosity. Closer to home, the shorthaired punkers who wore Black Flag shirts and combat boots to school sneered at the longhaired metalheads who donned their Black Sabbathshirts and high-top sneakers. And so my sense of this divide was crystal clear by the time a punk-rock loving friend of mine played the Circle Jerks’ 1985 hardcore punk anthem “American Heavy Metal Weekend” for me, which lampooned metal bands for their provinciality and lack of authenticity.

It turns out that like a lot of critics, fans, and scholars who have observed this dynamic, I what I thought I knew about heavy metal and punk rock wasn’t quite right. As Steve Waksman shows in his illuminating and entertaining This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009),punk and metal engaged in a relationship of musical cross-pollination that stretches back to the early 1970s, more than a decade before the notion of punk-metal “crossover” became part and parcel of the culture of heavy music. Drawing on the insights of music theorists, critics, and journalists and based upon a close examination of the interviews, writings, and music of dizzying array of bands and musicians, Waksman offers an essential revisionist study that helps to redefine popular conceptions of these abrasive and aggressive musical forms.

Steve Waksman is an Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Along with an array of essays and reviews, he has written two books,Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience(Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk, which won the prestigious Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 2010.

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What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared prosperity. First known for his work on electoral reform in the United States, Hill began travelling through Europe in the late 90’s to study the use of proportional representation (PR) in European elections. Once there, his research agenda gradually broadened to include European approaches to healthcare, corporate governance, support for families, transportation, energy, media, and other policies that together constitute what Hill calls “The European Way,” as compared to “The American Way.” This comparison is laid out with clarity and a wealth of examples in Hill’s highly-readable book Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (University of California Press, 2010). In the first half of this interview, we discuss the compatibility of European healthcare systems with thriving economies, focusing on models from Germany for controlling costs and increasing transparency. Hill explains how Europe manages to maintain more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China combined, while at the same time offering benefits to workers like paid maternity leave, generous vacations, paid sick leave, and low-cost child care. We also discuss CEO perspectives on codetermination–a form of corporate power-sharing among workers and management–in German companies like Deutsche Bank, Mercedes, and Volkswagen. In the second half of the interview, we take up the American side of the question. I ask Steven if European-style policies are only possible in small countries with PR, or if they are also possible in a large country without PR, like the United States. Hill describes what it would it take for U.S. states to enact similar policies and where, if anywhere, that is most likely to happen.

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