Eh Paesan

Today's Italian-Canadians face different images than previous generations. An exploration of the reproduction of cultural heritage in a global economy of rapid international communication.

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"Renowned as the predominant farmers and landlords of Punjab, and long possessed of an autocthonous agricultural identity, Jat Sikhs today often live urban and diasporic lives. Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams examines the formation of Jat Sikh identity amid diverse ideals and incursions of modernity, exploring the question of what it means to be Jat Sikh in the contemporary Indian city.Nicola Mooney describes a number of Jat Sikh social practices and narratives – education, professional development and employment, the making of appropriate marriage matches, and the discourse of progress – through which contemporary notions of identity are developed. She contextualizes these elements of Jat Sikh modernity against local, regional, and national histories of cultural and political differentiation, perceptions of marginality, and the expression of increasingly exclusive notions and practices of identity. Mooney argues that class practices incorporate urban Jat Sikhs into national and transnational communities, separating them from rural Jat Sikhs and confounding caste solidarities. Nevertheless, rural attachments remain important to urban identities.This is a unique ethnography that incorporates first-hand observations and local narratives to develop insights into the traditions and social memory of Jat Sikhs, as well as on the issues of urban and transnational social transformation."

'Being Alive Well': Health and the Politics of Cree Well-Being is a critical medical anthropological analysis of health theory in the social sciences with specific reference to the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec. In it the author argues that definitions of health are not simply reflections of physiological soundness but convey broader cultural and political realities. The book begins with a treatise on the study of health in the social sciences and a call for a broader understanding of the cultural parameters of any definition of health. Following a chapter that outlines the history of the Whapmagoostui (Great Whale River) region and the people, Adelson presents the underlying symbolic foundations of a Cree concept of health, or miyupimaatisiiun. The core of this book is an ethnographic study of the Whapmagoostui Cree and their particular concept of "health" (miyupimaatisiiun or "being alive well"). That concept is mediated by history, cultural practices, and the contemporary world of the Cree, including their fundamental concerns about their land and culture. In the contemporary context, health – or more specifically, "being alive well" – for the Cree of Great Whale is an intimate fusion of social, political, and personal well-being, thus linking individual bodies to a larger socio-political reality.

Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides a detailed account of how local conceptions of imperial cosmopolitanism shaped the city's identity in a newly formed state.

Indigenous peoples around the world have been involved in struggles for decolonization, self-determination, and recognition of their rights, and the Māori of Aotearoa-New Zealand are no exception. Now that nearly 85% of the Māori population have their main place of residence in urban centres, cities have become important sites of affirmation and struggle. Grounded in an ethnography of everyday life in the city of Auckland, Being Maori in the City is an investigation of what being Māori means today. One of the first ethnographic studies of Māori urbanization since the 1970s, this book is based on almost two years of fieldwork, living with Māori families, and more than 250 hours of interviews. In contrast with studies that have focused on indigenous elites and official groups and organizations, Being Māori in the City shines a light on the lives of ordinary individuals and families. Using this approach, Natacha Gagné adroitly underlines how indigenous ways of being are maintained and even strengthened through change and openness to the larger society.

In Light of Africa explores how the idea of Africa as a real place, an imagined homeland, and a metaphor for Black identity is used in the cultural politics of the Brazilian state of Bahia. In the book, Allan Charles Dawson argues that Africa, as both a symbol and a geographical and historical place, is vital to understanding the wide range of identities and ideas about racial consciousness that exist in Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian communities. In his ethnographic research Dawson follows the idea of “Africa” from the city of Salvador to the West African coast and back to the hinterlands of the Bahian interior. Along the way, he encounters West African entrepreneurs, Afrobeat musicians, devotees of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, professors of the Yoruba language, and hardscrabble farmers and ranchers, each of whom engages with the “idea of Africa” in their own personal way.