Böcker i Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World-serien

Few people understand what it is like to work in corrections. Claire Schmidt, whose extended family includes three generations of Wisconsin prison workers, introduces readers to penitentiary officers and staff as they share stories, debate the role of corrections in American racial politics and social justice, and talk about the important function of humor in their jobs.

Karl May wrote novels about a fictionalized American Wild West that count among the most popular books of German literature. His stories left an imprint on German culture, resulting in a variety of Wild West festivals. This book, based on years of fieldwork, addresses a timely issue: cultural transfer and appropriations.

Presents an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on diaspora/homeland understandings of each other in Ukraine and in Ukrainian ethnic communities. Exploring a rich array of folk songs, poetry and stories, correspondence, family histories, and rituals of homecoming and hosting that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine during the twentieth century, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen asserts that many aspects of modern ethnic identity form, develop, and reveal themselves in a homeland's deeply felt connection to its diaspora.

Changing from child to young adult is difficult everywhere. But to experience childhood in continuous flight from conflict, then move into adolescence as a refugee in a radically different culture, is a more than usually complicated transition. Improvised Adolescence explores how teenagers from southern Somalia, who spent much of their childhood in East African refugee camps, are adapting to resettlement in the American Midwest.

Reveals the daily lives and religious practice of ordinary Muslim men in Tajikistan as they aspire to become Sufi mystics. Benjamin Gatling describes in vivid detail the range of expressive forms - memories, stories, poetry, artifacts, rituals, and other embodied practices - employed as they try to construct a Sufi life in twenty-first-century Central Asia.