Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation.

Draws on court records and the city's dazzling literary tradition to explore the material culture of premodern Damascus and provides an unusual and intimate account of the choices, constraints, and compromises that defined consumer behavior.

Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). Yang sought to "renew the old" by patterning these works on earlier classics, drawing inspiration from the Confucian Analects for Exemplary Figures. In this philosophical masterwork, constructed as a dialogue, Yang poses and then answers questions on philosophical, political, ethical, and literary matters. Michael Nylan's rendering of this text, which is laden with word play and is extraordinarily difficult to translate, is a joy to read-at turns wise, cautionary, and playful.

Fair Trade from the Ground Up documents achievements at both the producer and the consumer ends of commodity chains and assesses prospects for future growth, meeting a long-felt need among economic-justice activists, consumer groups, and academics for a reliable qualitative and quantitative overview of achievements of the Fair Trade movement.

Through a skillful blend of ethnography, oral history, and ethnohistory, Jolles views the contemporary Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island in terms of the enduring beliefs and values that have contributed to the community’s ongoing survival and adaptability. Drawing on ten years of fieldwork, Jolles demonstrates the central importance of three aspects of Yupik life: religious beliefs, devotion to a subsistence life way, and family and clan ties.