In this fascinating and pathbreaking work, Susan Starr Sered uncovers, describes, and analyzes religions, scattered throughout the world, in which women are both the majority of leaders and the majority of participants. How are these women's religions different from those dominated by men? What can we learn from them about the ways in which women experience and interpret the supernatural? How do women construct religion? Looking for common threads linking groups as diverse as the Sande secret societies of West Africa, matrilineal spirit cults of northern Thailand, Christian Science, and the Feminist Spirituality movement, Sered asks whether there is anything particularly "womanly" about women's religions. She finds that women's concerns and identity as mothers play a vital role in these female-dominated groups. Nurturing and concern for others are at the center, as are healing arts and ways of dealing with illness and the death of children. Religion not only enables women to find sacred meaning in their daily lives, from the preparation of food to caring for their families, but can offer intense and personal relationships with deities and spirits - often through ecstatic possession trance. These religions provide women with opportunities to celebrate and mourn with other women, as well as forums for advancing women's social and economic rights and security. In all of these religions, women priestesses, shamans or ritual experts embody the spiritual power available to women. By examining the shared experiences of women across great cultural divides, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister offers a new understanding of the role gender plays in determining how individuals grapple with the ultimate questions of existence. In the process, it not only highlights the profound differences between men and women, but the equally important ways in which we are all alike.

This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which existing world views and economic systems give rise to particular ways of representing money. But this highly relativistic conclusion is qualified once we shift the focus from money to the system of exchange as a whole. One rather general pattern that then begins to emerge is of two separate but related transactional orders, the majority of systems making some ideological space for relatively impersonal, competitive and individual acquisitive activity. This implies that even in a non-monetary economy these features are likely to exist within a certain sphere of activity, and that it is therefore misleading to attribute them to money. By so doing, a contrast within cultures is turned into a contrast between cultures, thereby reinforcing the notion that money itself has the power to transform the nature of social relationships.

An intriguing study on families and their changing roles, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Families, Work, and Change provides fresh viewpoints on factors that have an impact on family life and relationships. This thematic volume, with chapters from scholars in Italy, Australia, Israel, Jordan, West Germany, Yugoslavia, Norway, and Finland, is truly international and covers a variety of substantive concerns. Among these is the concern for new familial models which will meld both the individual and the whole into a viable family entity capable of providing for the wishes, needs, and aspirations of the whole and individual members of a family. Discussing various concepts relating to family structure in lieu of the recent shift toward gender equity and the greater acceptance of varied forms of families and lifestyles, this book carefully links the most supportive and nurturing components of modern society with tried and true components of traditional cultures and systems. The chapters take a conceptual approach, focusing on applications and future needs, policies, and problems surrounding the family. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Families, Work, and Change represents the increasing shift of mothers to professionals with chapters on increasing female employment and its effect on family life. The much-needed search for explanations of family and society change and for new family models is a common thread throughout the book. In reading this insightful work, family and marriage counselors, students and academicians in family studies, researchers, social workers, and psychologists will see new ways of perceiving families in their critical roles over generations of time.