Boasian Verse explores the understudied poetic output of three major twentieth-century anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Providing a comparative analysis of their anthropological and poetic works, this volume explores the divergent representations of cultural others and the uses of ethnographic studies for cultural critique. This volume aims to illuminate central questions, including: Why did they choose to write poetry about their ethnographic endeavors? Why did they choose to write the way they wrote? Was poetry used to approach the objects of their research in different, perhaps ethically more viable ways? Did poetry allow them to transcend their own primitivist, even evolutionist tendencies, or did it much rather refashion or even amplify those tendencies? This in-depth examination of these ethnographic poems invites both cultural anthropologists and students of literature to reevaluate the Boasian legacy of cultural relativism, primitivism, and residual evolutionism for the twenty-first century. This volume offers a fresh perspective on some of the key texts that have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of culture and cultural relativism, and a unique contribution to readers interested in the dynamic area of multimodal anthropologies.

In the famous paper of 1938, “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting”, written by Ralph Boas along with Frank Smithies, using the pseudonym H. Pétard, Boas describes sixteen methods for hunting a lion. This marvelous collection of Boas memorabilia contains not only the original article, but also several additional articles, as late as 1985, giving many further methods. But once you are through with lion hunting, you can hunt through the remainder of the book to find numerous gems by and about this remarkable mathematician. Not only will you find his biography of Bourbaki along with a description of his feud with the French mathematician, but also you will find a lucid discussion of the mean value theorem. There are anecdotes Boas told about many famous mathematicians, along with a large collection of his mathematical verses. You will find mathematical articles like a proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra and pedagogical articles giving Boas' views on making mathematics intelligible.

The twentieth-century reality in the Unites States was harsh for Japanese immigrants who attempted to settle down and follow their dreams in the new land. Prejudice and discrimination against the newcomers, rife among Americans, were exacerbated by the ramifications of World War II events, including the Pearl Harbor attack, which irrevocably changed the pattern of immigrant lives. In the aftermath, internment camps that ensued became an inexorable part of their already miserable existence. The book delves not only into the painful past of the Japanese immigrants and their immediate descendants but also illustrates a wide array of Japanese customs that the immigrants brought with them as their rich cultural legacy. It also engages in discourse on acculturation and acculturation strategies adopted by the two generations. Japanese-American authors, in their fictional and non-fictional literary accounts, reveal the search for their ethnic identity and resulting tensions between their American and Japanese selves. An examination tool employed for the purpose of the study has been developed by John Widdup Berry, a cross-cultural psychologist, who has formulated acculturation theory with its strategies of assimilation, integration, separation and marginalisation. The book attempts to examine cultural attitudes (preferences) of Japanese immigrants and their offspring, and their cultural practices (reflected in acculturation strategies). It also presents the reader with a wide array of cultural aspects of life in the United States that—through the lens of acculturation strategies—reflect a rich literary matrix of intersecting sociocultural, historical and political factors inscribed in the twentieth-century reality of Japanese immigrants and their Japanese-American offspring. Engaging not only for academic professionals but also for those curious readers who long to inspect the past and its cultural interrelations through the memories of witnesses and their literary heritage they have left.

"The introductory volume to the Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, which examines Boas' stature as public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography and activism"--

This book explores the great influence of twentieth-century artists and art movements on many major writers of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on four seminal writers who were strongly influenced by very different movements: they are Gertrude Stein and Cubism, William S. Burroughs and Dada, J. G. Ballard and Surrealism, and Douglas Coupland and Pop Art. For these authors the presence and influence of these art movements is not limited to a small cluster of texts, but can be felt much more expansively across their work, infiltrating all manner of multifarious and complex dimensions. These authors are all keen to explore new methods of shifting the signature styles and forms of visual art into the literary world. Alongside these more overt methods of artistic transposition, the authors also often demonstrate a deep philosophical affinity with their chosen movements. This book uproots and examines these kinds of artistic engagements, and also explores the authors’ own personal connections with the world of art. For these are all authors not only interested in visual art, but also intimately connected to the art world. Indeed, some went on to become renowned artists in their own right, while others were closely associated with major historical art figures. Above all however, they are unified by a kindred interest in exploring how the methods and philosophies of art can be transposed into, and even challenge the constraints of traditional forms of literature.

The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun offers an introduction to Korea’s first modern woman writer to publish a collection of creative works, Kim Myŏng-sun (1896–ca. 1954). Despite attempts by male contemporaries to assassinate her character, Kim was an outspoken writer and an early feminist, confronting patriarchal Korean society in essays, plays, poems, and short stories. This volume is the first to offer a detailed analysis in English of Kim’s poetry. The poems examined in this volume can be considered early twentieth-century versions of #MeToo literature, mirroring the harrowing account of her sexual assault, and also subversive challenges to traditional institutions, dealing with themes such as romantic free love, same-sex love, single womanhood, and explicit female desire and passion. The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun restores a long-neglected woman writer to her rightful place in the history of Korean literature, shedding light on the complexity of women’s lives in Korea and contributing to the growing interest in modern Korean women’s literature in the West.

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novels themselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the religious theme of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this text has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture—among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world.