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From The Editor

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

After the 1988 Conference, several members expressed an interest in an issue of Explorations in Ethnic Studies which would focus on ethnicity and health. We were fortunate to receive a number of submissions in this area, and this issue includes an article by Ella P. Lacey which reports on pica and the ethnic and cultural implications of the use of pica as well as the limited reporting of that use. NAES member Jim Schnell wrote us after he returned from China and sent along the essay on Chinese medicine. Jim's essay is a personal response to recent information about an …

Critique [Of American Medical And Intellectual Reaction To African Health Issues, 1850-1960: From Racialism To Cross-Cultural Medicine By David Mcbride], Celia J. Wintz

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

Theories about inherent racial characteristics, both those purporting to be scientifically (empirically) based and those emanating from the "soft" sciences, have changed dramatically over the past century and a half. As David McBride notes, the basis for research about the etiology of disease and the provision of health care in the United States has been and continues to be empirically questionable. McBride further argues that the American health care approach has been significantly influenced by cultural, social, and economic factors which had little or no relation to scientific truth.

American Medical And Intellectual Reaction To African Health Issues, 1850-1960: From Racialism To Cross-Cultural Medicine, David Mcbride

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

During recent decades, social scientists, particularly anthropologists, sociologists and medical historians, have looked increasingly at how social and cultural factors inform a society's medical community and vice-versa. As Roger Cooter recently stated, "... medicine is a social phenomenon capable of being properly studied only when treated as a part of its social, political, economic and cultural totality."[1] In America, a steady flow of medical sociologists -- most notably Henry E. Sigerist in the 1940s, Talcott Parsons in the 1950s, David Mechanic in the 1960s and 1970s, and Vern and Bonnie Bullough in the 1980s -- contributed numerous empirical studies that …

Contributors

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

Notes on contributors to Explorations in Ethnic Studies, Volume 12, Issue 1, 1989

Critique [Of Equity And Excellence In Education--Compatible Concepts Or Hostile Abstractions? By Theresa E. Mccormick], Margaret A. Laughlin

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

Theresa McCormick argues that equity and excellence in education should not be accepted as being on opposite ends of a continuum, but rather should be viewed as two related components of education. The twin concepts of equity and excellence are compatible and must be identified as important goals of education. Educators at all instructional levels in all subject disciplines need to include a study of and value these educational and social concepts. These concepts can be taught to young people as "fairness" and "goodness." More mature students can examine the concepts from the perspective of several academic disciplines.

Abstracts From The Seventeenth Annual Naes Conference

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

Johnnella Butler, chair of Afro-American Studies at the University of Washington, directed the seventeenth annual Conference on Ethnic and Minority Studies in Seattle. Graduate students and staff from the Department of American Ethnic Studies provided support for the planning and several students from the University of Washington participated either as presenters or observers. Participants from throughout the United States arrived in Seattle during a rare spring snowstorm to hear papers on the conference theme, "Ethnicity in America: Interdisciplinary Approaches." Participants were welcomed by James D. Nason, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, and the General …

Explorations In Ethnic Studies

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

No abstract provided.

Pica: Consideration Of A Historical And Current Problem With Racial Ethnic/ Cultural Overtones, Ella P. Lacey

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

Pica is an eating disorder that affects an individual who experiences a craving that is satisfied by ingestion of either unusually large amounts of selected food items (e.g., baking soda) or repeated ingestion of nonfood items (e.g., clay, laundry starch). Pica is more than an anomaly of human behavior; it is an eating disorder that carries all the risks that are inherent to impaired nutrition, including death. Pica can be dated to antiquity, yet there is little question that it continues as a current practice. As an eating disorder, pica has implications for persons who are in positions to influence …

Explorations In Ethnic Studies

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

No abstract provided.

[Review Of] Gary Soto. The Elements Of San Joaquin, Carl R. Shirley

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

California's fertile San Joaquin Valley is the setting of this first published collection of poems by one of Chicano literature's leading voices [other books include The Tale of Sunlight (1978), Father Is a Pillow Tied to a Broom (1980), Where Sparrows Work Hard (1981), and Black Hair (1985)]. Thirty-eight poems comprise the three sections which take the reader through a series of disturbing images of the region. (Critic Bruce-Novoa has compared Elements with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land). In the first poem, " San Fernando Road," migrants are described in the language of travail as men " Whose arms/Were …

[Review Of] Karl H. Schlesier. The Wolves Of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies, And Prehistoric Origins, William Willard

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Schlesier has a necessary footnote advisory to readers explaining the way in which he has structured The Wolves of Heaven. In the advisory Schelesier [Schlesier] writes that the book is a slow read on purpose so as to develop the story of how it was that the Tsistsistas (Cheyenne), came out of the boreal forest to become hunters of the northern plains, evolving eventually into the 19th century Tsistsistas bison hunting horse nomads.

[Review Of] Philip E. Webber. Pella Dutch: The Portrait Of A Language And Its Use In One Of Iowa's Ethnic Communities, Phillips G. Davies

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This book does exactly what it says it will, namely to study how language is used by the some two hundred and fifty citizens of Pella who still make use of it. As such it should be useful to those interested in nineteeth [nineteenth] century emigrants from Europe whose descendants are still clinging to part of their ethnic roots.

[Review Of] Irene I. Blea, Toward A Chicano Social Science, Glen M. Kraig

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

The author's stated purpose of this work was to "inform the reader about the Chicano population and its concerns" and "the potential impact of the group on America's future." In that sense the work is a resounding success. The author correctly points out that "those who teach and design policy relevant to Hispanic children are few ... [and thus] the need to understand the Chicano in order not only to be able to provide services but also better race and ethnic relations in the United States" is great.

[Review Of] Jennifer S.H. Brown And Robert Brightman. "The Orders Of The Dreamed":George Nelson On Cree And Northern Ojibwa Religion And Myth, 1823, Kenneth M. Morrison

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This text addresses the complex challenge of comprehending religious otherness. Brown and Brightman present a previously unpublished 1823 letter journal of fur trader George Nelson in which he reflects on his struggle to understand the Cree and Ojibwa people he knew at first hand. While he constantly wondered at the strangeness of Algonquian religion, he also expressed his admiration as frequently. The Cree and the Ojibwa were thoroughly religious and, paradoxical as it seemed to Nelson, he did admit that their religion worked.

[Review Of] Luciano Mangiafico. Contemporary American Immigrants: Patterns Of Filipino, Korean And Chinese Settlement In The United States, Steven J. Gold

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Since the passage of the immigration acts of 1965, a large number of skilled Asians have migrated to the United States. Scholars have noticed this trend, labelling these, along with other skilled third world sojourners, "the new immigration."

[Review Of] Langston Hughes. The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Alice A. Deck

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

In the last ten years a number of critical studies on the Harlem Renaissance have been published, and these in turn have sparked a revival of interest in the cultural, political, and social activities that took place during the ten-year period in Afroamerican history between 1919 and 1929. There is a renewed interest in the life and writings of Renaissance figures such as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. Hence many of their autobiographies, first published in the 1930s and 1940s, are being reissued in response to the demand for more information …

[Review Of] Mine Okubo. Citizen 13660, Neil Nakadate

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Citizen 13660, first published in 1946, is part of the scant first-person record of Japanese American experience in the first half of the twentieth century. Like S. Frank Miyamoto's Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle (1939, repr. 1984) and Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California (1949, repr. 1986), Okubo's book has been given new life by the University of Washington Press.

[Review Of] Felix M. Padilla. Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case Of Mexican Americans And Puerto Ricans In Chicago, Jesse M. Vazquez

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Felix M. Padilla's contribution to the growing body of literature on Latino/Hispanic identity in the United States represents a significant departure from the way most social scientists have approached their analysis of ethnic identity and consciousness. On his way to putting together a conceptual framework for supporting his thesis of an emerging Latino ethnic identity and consciousness, Padilla provides a substantial in-depth analysis of the Mexican American and Puerto Rican community-based organization in Chicago during the early 1970s.

Sports Notes, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

Another racial myth came tumbling down in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea. Blacks had never before been prominent in swimming competitions at the national level in the United States or at the international level. Several theories about the bone structure and body mass of black people have been offered to explain the absence of blacks on the victory stands at these top competitive levels. But at the 1988 Olympics Anthony Nesty, a black man from Surinam (South America), bested Matt Biondi, swimming’s golden boy in those Olympics, to win the 100-meter butterfly.

Political Participation Of Puerto Rican Women: Mapping A Research Agenda, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

This article reviews the theoretical approaches used to study Hispanic women in politics and highlights their inadequacies for studying the political behavior of low-income Puerto Rican women, who are used as a case in point. It is not an in-depth study but an effort to develop appropriate research questions and to suggest strategies for the systematic collection of data. In general, community groups are the basic arena for the political activity of Puerto Rican women in New York City. Thus, new theoretical approaches are necessary to capture Hispanic women’s modes of influencing public policy.

Black-White Housing Segregation In The City Of St. Louis : A 1988 Update, John E. Farley

Books and Monographs

The purpose of this paper is to examine trends and changes in the patterns of black-white housing segregation in the city of St. Louis between 1980 and 1988. The 1988 Dress Rehearsal Census, conducted in St. Louis city in preparation for the 1990 Census of Population and Housing, offers a unique opportunity to assess recent trends in black-white housing segregation in St. Louis city. Paper for presentation at colloquium jointly sponsored by Regional Research and Development Services and Department of Sociology and Social Work, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, November 29, 1989.

The Vanguard (Vol. 35, No. 4), Jul-Aug 1989, Lutheran Human Relations Association Of America

The Vanguard

Armies of both liberation and occupation have incited fear throughout history in the lands through which they marched or in which they were posted. Since World War II, an increasingly militarized world has continued to suffer under the power of this military presence.

Strong cries of protest are now not only being raised, but are also finally being heard. Not surprisingly, they are women's voices. Women worldwide, struggling for their own human rights, are also expressing the rage and horror of their people who witness the ravishment of their culture, their land, and their lives.