Music in the American Diasporic Wedding explores the complex cultural adaptations, preservations, and fusions that occur in weddings between couples and families of diverse origins. Discussing weddings as a site of negotiations between generations, traditions, and religions, the essays gathered here argue that music is the mediating force between the young and the old, ritual and entertainment, and immigrant lore and assimilation. The contributors examine such colorful integrations as klezmer-tinged Mandarin tunes at a Jewish and Taiwanese American wedding, a wedding services industry in Chicago's South Asian community featuring a diversity of wedding music options, and Puerto Rican cultural activists dancing down the aisles of New York's St. Cecilia's church to the thunder of drums and maracas and rapping their marriage vows. These essays show us what wedding music and performance tell us about complex multiethnic diasporic identities and remind us that how we listen to and celebrate otherness defines who we are.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of global courtship and marriage customs, from ancient history to contemporary society, demonstrating the vast differences as well as the similarities across all of human culture. This second edition of Marriage Customs of the World examines historical context, social significance, and current trends and controversies of matrimony in the Western world as well as other cultures. Apart from detailing the ceremonies from specific countries, the book identifies specific elements of the wedding event and discusses them in a comparative manner, showcasing the similarities across cultures. The new content in this work includes additional information on courtship and how future spouses are found in other cultures; marriage in art, cinema, theater, and poetry; wedding bands; forced marriages and shotgun weddings; New Year's weddings; legislation regarding marriage; and engagement practices. Entries carried over from the first edition have been revised and updated as well. With its broad scope and consideration of contemporary issues alongside historical information, this work will be ideal for high school and undergraduate students; scholars of anthropology, social studies, and history; and general readers.

Above the precipice, a lone eagle circled. Two, three, four times, it floated across a half-dozen spots of living flesh, six men ascending painfully up the cliff face, praying for wings like his. Deep in the winter of 1896, Dan Skinner and his younger brother, André, flee into the icy, windswept mountains of British Columbia, barely ahead of a contingent of Mounties and their Tsimshian tracker, Tom LaCross, once a friend and mentor to Dan. In the brutal, relentless cat and mouse chase that ensues, some of these men will fall, but for the survivors a collision of cultures awaits far ahead in the wilderness. As history painfully unwinds at a dire time for the Native Peoples, and environmental disaster follows the destruction of their way of life, Black Wing introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: two friends torn apart by racial hatred, a Native shaman with formidable power, a wife determined to reunite with her lost husband, a band of Native people fighting to preserve their ways...and generations later, a descendant who takes on the quest for ecological balance. In gorgeous, sensory, lyrical prose, author David Campiche has filtered his meticulous research on First Nations history and traditions into a nail-biting thriller that pulses with grief and rage at all that’s been lost. Black Wing is a banquet for the senses, a symphony for the emotions, an elegy for what’s gone, and a clarion call for what needs to be done.