Born To Heal takes you from the mystical green jungles to the overwhelming crush of humanity in India's crowded cities to the stark beauty of Arizona's high desert where McGarey follows one woman's haunting quest for spiritual and professional growth.

The Oxford Handbook of Acculturation and Health expertly brings together two very distinct, but complementary, streams of work and thought: theoretical and methodological work on acculturation, and the applied work linking acculturation to various health outcomes among international migrants and their families. In this important volume, the work of landmark acculturation theorists and methodologists come together to showcase applied epidemiologic and intervention work on the issues facing acculturation and public health today. Edited by Seth J. Schwartz and Jennifer B. Unger, this Handbook is divided into two important parts for readers. Part one features chapters that are dedicated to theoretical and methodological work on acculturation, including definitional issues, measurement issues, and procedures for studying acculturation across immigrant groups and national contexts. The second part focuses on the links between acculturation and various health outcomes, such as obesity, physical activity, drug and alcohol abuse, mental health, delinquency, and suicide. Notably, because a majority of the research on acculturation and health has been conducted on Hispanic immigration, this volume contextualizes that research and offers readers compelling insight for how to apply these principles to other immigrant groups in the United States and around the world.

Scholars of popular Hindu religion in India have always been fascinated by oral texts and rituals, but surprisingly only few attempts have as yet been made to analyse the relationship between rituals and texts systematically. This book contributes to the filling of this gap. Focusing on the dynamics of a local (non-Brahmanical) ritual, its modular organisation and inner logic, the interaction between narrative text and ritual, and the significance of the local versus translocal nature of the text in the ritual context, the study provides a broad range of issues for comparison. It demonstrates that examining texts in their context helps to understand better the complexity of religious traditions and the way in which ritual and text are programmatically employed. The author offers a vivid description of a hitherto unnoticed ritual system, along with the first translation of a text called the Icakkiyamman-Katai (IK). Composed in the Tamil language, the IK represents a substantially longer and embellished form of a core versio which probably goes as far back as the seventh century C.E. Unlike the classical source, this text has been incorporated into a living tradition, and is being constantly refashioned. A range of text versions have been encapsulated in the form of a conspectus, which will shed light on the text's variability or fixity and will add to our knowledge of bardic creativity. Includes a film by the author on DVD.

Gender and the "three rural problems" -- Gender and industrial reforms: from ownership restructuring to social protection -- Gender and the family planning policy: "population security" free from sex selection -- Chinese women in decision making: from grassroots governance to national politics.