Cultural Anthropology

Making the Mark
· Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
· By Miroslava Prazak

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
· By Wendy Wilson-Fall
· Foreword by Michael Gomez

Bridges history and ethnography to explore stories of Malagasy ancestry and African American identity.

Twins Talk
· What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society
· By Dona Lee Davis

Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the “who am I” and “who are we” questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.