This book explores how dreams, remembered upon awakening, are turned into social action in a European society. Supported by ethnographic research of modern Iceland and examples from the historical literature, the book argues that the social meaning ascribed to the Icelandic dream has been a continuous part of Icelandic everyday life for a thousand years and is still being adapted today. (Series: European Studies in Culture and Policy - Vol. 12)

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.

Rethinking a key epoch in East Asian history, Hyun Ok Park formulates a new understanding of early-twentieth-century Manchuria. Most studies of the history of modern Manchuria examine the turbulent relations of the Chinese state and imperialist Japan in political, military, and economic terms. Park presents a compelling analysis of the constitutive effects of capitalist expansion on the social practices of Korean migrants in the region. Drawing on a rich archive of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Park describes how Koreans negotiated the contradictory demands of national and colonial powers. She demonstrates that the dynamics of global capitalism led the Chinese and Japanese to pursue capitalist expansion while competing for sovereignty. Decentering the nation-state as the primary analytic rubric, her emphasis on the role of global capitalism is a major innovation for understanding nationalism, colonialism, and their immanent links in social space. Through a regional and temporal comparison of Manchuria from the late nineteenth century until 1945, Park details how national and colonial powers enacted their claims to sovereignty through the regulation of access to land, work, and loans. She shows that among Korean migrants, the complex connections among Chinese laws, Japanese colonial policies, and Korean social practices gave rise to a form of nationalism in tension with global revolution—a nationalism that laid the foundation for what came to be regarded as North Korea’s isolationist politics.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

An affecting biography of the author of Anne of Green Gables is the first for young readers to include revelations about her last days and to encompass the complexity of a brilliant and sometimes troubled life. Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, “I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them.” Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, not a great deal was known about Maud’s personal life. Her childhood was spent with strict, undemonstrative grandparents, and her reflections on writing, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her “year of mad passion,” and her difficult married life remained locked away, buried deep within her unpublished personal journals. Through this revealing and deeply moving biography, kindred spirits of all ages who, like Maud, never gave up “the substance of things hoped for” will be captivated anew by the words of this remarkable woman.

From noted humanitarian, business leader, speaker, and author, Marilyn Tam, comes the how to book "Living the Life of Your Dreams: The Secrets to Turning Your Dreams into Reality". As a native from Hong Kong who arrived in America barely speaking English, Marilyn’s own journey provides a fascinating backdrop to this unique how to book. Designed primarily for readers trying to balance professional and personal lives of meaning and purpose, "Living the Life of Your Dreams" focuses on how readers can have powerful professional fulfillment, happy home lives, loving interpersonal relationships, excellent physical and mental health, and spiritual growth all at the same time. Marilyn has achieved this dynamically balanced state in her own life and learned from her own mistakes along the way. She is now dedicated to helping others achieve the balance she has in her life and will be doing so, not just in this book, but in keynote speeches, workshops, DVDs and CDs, all focused on sharing the Secrets presented in "Living the Life of Your Dreams".