In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood through bearing and raising healthy children, especially sons. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. Amidst struggle for survival and expectations of heroic mothering, women face realities that challenge their ability to fulfill their prescribed roles. Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout many parts of Africa, reproductive traumas—infertility, miscarriage, children’s illnesses, and mortality—disrupt women’s reproductive health and impede their efforts to achieve the status that comes with fertility and motherhood. In Embodying Honor Amal Hassan Fadlalla finds that the female body is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, threats perceived to be disruptive to morality, feminine identities, and social well-being. As a “northern Sudanese” viewed as an outsider in this region of her native country, Fadlalla presents an intimate portrait and thorough analysis that offers an intriguing commentary on the very notion of what constitutes the “foreign.” Fadlalla shows how Muslim Hadendowa women manage health and reproductive suffering in their quest to become “responsible” mothers and valued members of their communities. Her historically grounded ethnography delves into women’s reproductive histories, personal narratives, and ritual logics to reveal the ways in which women challenge cultural understandings of gender, honor, and reproduction.

One of the first anthropological studies based on extensive fieldwork in Vietnam in decades, Embodying Morality examines child-rearing in a rural Red River delta commune. It is a sophisticated and intriguing exploration of the ways in which a family system based on principles of male descent influences the moral upbringing and learning of girls and boys. In Vietnamese culture boys alone perpetuate the patrilineal family line; they incorporate the past, present, and future morality, honor, and reputation of their father's lineage. Within this patrilineal universe, girls are viewed as blank sheets of paper and must compensate for this deficiency by embodying tinh cam (sensitivity, sense). Such attitudes play a significant role in the upbringing of girls and boys and in how they learn to use and understand their bodies. Helle Rydstrøm offers fresh data--from audiotapes, videotapes, textbooks, observations in the home and at school--for identifying the transformation of local and educational constructions of females, males, and morality into body styles of girls, boys, women, and men. She highlights the extent to which body performances in daily life produce, reproduce, and challenge widespread northern Vietnamese ideals of femininity and masculinity. The author's highly original application of post-structuralist theory to Vietnam blends epistemology, practice, body, and socialization theories with feminist analysis and relates these to children's learning. By proposing the body as an analytic category that can move feminist theory beyond the impasse of the well-established opposition between sex and gender, Embodying Morality demonstrates vividly how specific cultural elaborations of corporeality are learned, lived, and experienced in contemporary rural Vietnam.

This ethnography goes beyond anthropology's symbolic analysis of fertility rituals to also ground the Hadendowa's meanings of honor and fertility practices in their perceptions of foreignness and its danger to procreation, which reflect their marginal location at the intersection of both national and global powers.

A determined truth-seeker craving success and belonging unexpectedly meets her journeying soul, leading to greater self-acceptance, a deeper understanding of the mysteries of life and death, and the realization that every new beginning provides a rich opportunity for healing and personal evolution.

Learn to celebrate your body by attending to daily spiritual practices In Honoring the Body, Stephanie Paulsell speaks to those who have ever wondered how to celebrate the body's pleasures and protect the body's vulnerabilities in a world that seems confused about both. What we need, she shows, are practices that honor the body. Paulsell invites readers to explore how we might honor the body in daily activities--bathing, clothing, eating, working, exercising, loving, and suffering--seeking wisdom from Scripture, history, and contemporary experience, in story and song and poetry. She argues that the accumulated wisdom of religious traditions provides the resources for a rich practice of honoring the body. This practice will not be just an individual practice, however. It will be a shared, communal practice, one we engage in with others. Honoring the Body is for those who want to honor their body and the bodies of others, who wish for a community that cherishes, attends to, celebrates, and soothes the body.

This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being. Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments of honor that shaped the Romans' sense of themselves and their society. Speaking directly to the concerns and curiosities of the contemporary reader, Barton brings Roman society to life, elucidating the complex relation between the inner life of its citizens and its social fabric. Though thoroughly grounded in the ancient writings—especially the work of Seneca, Cicero, and Livy—this book also draws from contemporary theories of the self and social theory to deepen our understanding of ancient Rome. Barton explores the relation between inner desires and social behavior through an evocative analysis of the operation, in Roman society, of contests and ordeals, acts of supplication and confession, and the sense of shame. As she fleshes out Roman physical and psychological life, she particularly sheds new light on the consequential transition from republic to empire as a watershed of Roman social relations. Barton's ability to build productively on both old and new scholarship on Roman history, society, and culture and her imaginative use of a wide range of work in such fields as anthropology, sociology, psychology, modern history, and popular culture will make this book appealing for readers interested in many subjects. This beautifully written work not only generates insight into Roman history, but also uses that insight to bring us to a new understanding of ourselves, our modern codes of honor, and why it is that we think and act the way we do.

Kai Ting knows what it means to become an American and lose all that is Chinese. It happened to his father, a former officer in Chiang Kai-shek's army, who never came to terms with his new life in the United States. Now, as a West Point cadet in the 1960s, Kai has a golden chance both to retain his heritage and to become undeniably, gloriously American. But the Point has dangerous preconceptions about Asians, especially as the war in Vietnam escalates. Kai walks on a razor's edge...and falls into the dark pit of a cheating scandal. Suddenly, he must learn a new tribal behavior, a new etiquette. And his very survival depends on learning it fast....