Anthropology Books

Book SynopsisAt War with Women reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for hearts and minds. Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women''s rights and celebrated women''s integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women''s incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterTrade ReviewAt War with Women examines how the US military, following 9/11, linked counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to development that targeted the household * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Doctrinal Turning Points in the New Imperial Wars 2. The "Social Work" of War: Techniques and Struggles to Remake Military Labor 3. Colonial "Lessons Learned": The Contemporary Soldier Becomes the Historical Colonizer 4. Soothing Occupation: Gender and the Strategic Deployment of Emotional Labor 5. A New Imperial Feminism: Color-Blind Racism and the Special Operation of Women's Rights Conclusion

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Book SynopsisDiaspora Space-Time explores the transformations of Pine Mansiona Shenzhen former emigrant communityand its members'' changing relationship with their diaspora around the world. For more than a century, inhabitants of Shenzhen''s villages have migrated to Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North and South America, and Europe. With China''s economic global ascendancy, these villages no longer consist of peasants dependent on their rich overseas relatives. As the villages have become part of the special economic zone of Shenzhen, the megacity that embodies China''s rise, emigration has waned.Lineage ties have long been central in choosing migration destinations and channeling donations to village projects. After China''s reopening, Shenzhen''s villagers used diaspora as a resource to participate in the city''s booming economy and to reestablish and protect their ritual sites against government plans. As overseas financial contributions diminish and diasporic relaTrade ReviewOverall, this book presents a compelling case study of Overseas Chinese and contributes to the field of diaspora studies in two signi!cant ways. * China Perspectives *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Shenzhen and the Diasporic Relationship 1. A Globalized Lineage 2. The Shifting Landscape of Donations 3. Collective Funds and the Moral Economy of Surplus 4. Saving the Ancestral Sites, Mobilizing for the Public Good 5. Reversed Feng Shui and Sociodicies of (Im)mobility 6. Ritual Renewal and Spatiotemporal Fusion 7. Returning to One's Roots through Journeys and Quests 8. Global Brotherhood without Close Kin Conclusion: Chinese Globalization and the Changing Value of Scales

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Book SynopsisThe Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state—both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance—rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.Trade Review"The Poverty of Privacy Rights pushes the conceptualization of legal rights into a new and useful direction, establishing a sturdy platform for intelligent advocacy on behalf of poor people and their dignity. Khiara Bridges' deep knowledge of the social welfare and healthcare system, and the conversations her book invites will bring more privacy concerns affecting the poor to the forefront." -- Anita Allen * University of Pennsylvania *"The Poverty of Privacy Rights is a provocative, courageous account of poor women's lives and the American healthcare system. One of the brightest stars of her generation, Khiara Bridges pushes against the traditional framings of sex-based privacy erosion to deftly articulate an urgent contemporary social concern—privacy rights filtered, constrained, and tampered by government. Bridges masterfully argues that to be poor in the United States and dependent on governmental assistance is to experience intrusions and violations of constitutional rights unrivaled by all others." -- Michele Goodwin * University of California, Irvine *"For those who hold dear, however naively, the idea that the proper application of constitutional law itself can create justice, Khiara Bridges's The Poverty of Privacy Rights is a devastating read....[Her] arguments are elegantly presented, thoroughly documented, and persuasive, and there is no doubt that any future work in this area will have to begin by citing this book." -- Wendy A. Bach * Review of Politics *"In The Poverty of Privacy Rights, Khiara Bridges presents an eloquent treatise detailing why Anthropology Matters! She artfully unravels the inevitable contradictions that stem from the aims of poverty policies in the United States between lowincome mothers who experience the policies in their use of social services and those who interpret policies and thereby provide access to or sanctions against services....As anthropologists, we have a responsibility and a platform to engage in moral and ethical knowledge making of the kind documented in Bridges's The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Readers interested in the anthropology of law, public policy, and poverty studies would greatly benefit from this manuscript." -- Sherri Lawson Clark * American Anthropologist *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction describes this book's thesis: Poor mothers have been deprived of family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Those who are empowered to interpret the Constitution have construed the document to bestow wealthier women with rights that protect their families from state regulation, prevent their most intimate information from being collected and disclosed to third parties, and provide them with a space to decide whether to become mothers without the government influencing their decisions. Simultaneously, the Constitution has been construed to deny poor mothers (and those facing the question of whether to become mothers) those same rights. Because privacy rights are thought to yield specific values, they are recognized and protected; and because it is assumed that these privacy rights will not yield these same values when individuals who are behaviorally and ethically deficient bear them, poor mothers have been denied these rights. 1The Moral Construction of Poverty chapter abstractThis chapter documents the ubiquitous voices throughout history that have rejected structural explanations of poverty and, instead, have argued that poverty is the result of individual shortcomings. This chapter shows that the discursive link between poverty and immorality continues to the present day: One can easily hear a narrative in political or popular discourse that links poverty with behavioral or ethical deficiencies. This chapter also shows that the Court's jurisprudence has come to reflect the moral construction of poverty, examining several cases in which the Court's rationale for refusing to limit the power of the government vis-à-vis poor individuals reveals an assumption about the pathology of the poor person—usually a poor mother—subject to privacy invasions. This chapter goes on to make the argument that positive rights are not the solution to poor mothers' predicament. 2The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine: Revealing, Yet Misleading chapter abstractThis chapter explores the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, which provides that it is unconstitutional for a state to premise the conferral of a benefit on the beneficiary's surrender of a constitutional right. The chapter argues that unconstitutional conditions cases reveal the justification for the state's denial of privacy rights to poor mothers, showing that the state denies individuals a right when it disbelieves that the individual will realize the value that the right is intended to generate. This chapter goes on to show that poor women lack privacy even when they do not receive a welfare benefit. It contextualizes the privacy invasions that poor mothers endure when receiving welfare benefits in a broader experience of privacy invasions endured by virtue of being poor. This contextualization demonstrates that poor mothers' lack of privacy rights is not a function of reliance on government assistance, but a function of their poverty. 3Family Privacy chapter abstractThis chapter explores various justifications for the family privacy right including instrumental, noninstrumental, and pragmatic justifications. It concludes that the moral construction of poverty counsels in favor of dispossessing poor mothers of the right because it suggests that poor mothers will not realize the value that the right is designed to yield. The chapter goes on to examine the overrepresentation of the poor as subjects of child welfare investigations and within the foster care system—two governmental interventions into the family that the family privacy right purports to allow only when the state suspects child maltreatment. It then shows that the fact of poverty itself gives the state reason to suspect child maltreatment. Accordingly, the state always has the authority to infringe on poor mothers' right to family privacy. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a right that is always already infringed is not right at all. 4Informational Privacy chapter abstractThis chapter explores the justification for the informational privacy right and concludes that poor mothers have been deprived of it because, as with family privacy rights, the informational privacy rights will not yield the value they aredesigned to yield when poor mothers bear them. This chapter goes on to describe a type of right to informational privacy that has not yet been conceptualized fully in the literature. This right, absent compelling circumstances, would prevent the state from coercing those who are marginalized culturally and socially to perform confessions that might be taken to justify their marginalization. This right would be the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against being compelled to be a witness against oneself, except it would apply in noncriminal contexts. 5Reproductive Privacy chapter abstractThis chapter explores reproductive privacy rights and concludes that poor women have been deprived of these rights because society does not trust their ability to make competent, moral decisions about reproduction without state oversight. This chapter documents how Medicaid, through the Hyde Amendment, intrudes into the domain that reproductive privacy rights are designed to protect by constraining the decisions that poor women make concerning abortion. This chapter also discusses how TANF family cap policies intrude into the domain that reproductive privacy rights are designed to protect by constraining poor women's decisions about giving birth to another child. This chapter notes the contradiction of the Hyde Amendment's pronatalism and TANF's antinatalism. It concludes that this contradiction reveals that the state is not interested in the precise decision that poor women make with respect to maternity, but rather is interested in overseeing that decision as she makes it. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion proposes that poor mothers will only enjoy the positive or negative privacy rights that are formally bestowed to them when an individual's economic failure is no longer thought to indicate a flawed character. It examines other historical moments where disenfranchised groups struggled for rights that had been denied to them, focusing on black people's struggle for the right to vote and sexual minorities' struggle for the right to marry. These precedents reveal that formerly disenfranchised groups were successful in acquiring the rights that they sought not because they appealed to the Court to interpret the Constitution differently, but because they shifted the cultural discourse. The law ultimately came to reflect that transformation of culture. The lesson of history is that poor mothers will only be granted privacy rights when our culture shifts, and the moral construction of poverty is unseated from its present discursive throne.

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Book SynopsisMicrofinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents. This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.Trade Review"Among the many critics of the World Bank's mantra that financial inclusion will solve the problems of the poor, few voices are as impactful as Sohini Kar's. With gripping stories, ethnographically-informed nuance, and the theoretically sophisticated way in which it 'joins the dots,' her book doesn't typify microfinance as simply good or bad. Rather, it shows how debt enfolds people into globalized financial networks, transforming them into little more than balance sheet figures to be reckoned by calculators of financial risk."—Deborah James, The London School of Economics and Political Science"In this fresh investigation that should prove fascinating for specialists and generalists alike, Sohini Kar has beautifully rendered much hard-won and intensely illuminating ethnographic data into compelling and jargon-free prose. She convincingly pushes us to see an 'emergent ethic of capitalism,' embodied in a variety of creditor techniques for enfolding—and seeking profit from—a vast 'informal' economy humming along in India."—Gustav Peebles, The New School"Kar's book, an ethnographic study of borrowers, debt collectors, and loan managers in Kolkata, one of India's most populated cities, provides grounds for skepticism. Loans are meant to create sustainable businesses, but the precariousness of the borrowers' existence inevitably leads to funds being diverted to alternative, less-productive activities. When repayment becomes tenuous, problems arise among borrower groups and between borrowers and debt collectors....Highly recommended."—S. Paul, CHOICE"[Financializing Poverty] is a critical study of microfinance, but it is not an assessment of whether microfinance works for large populations.It is, rather, a study about whom it works for, and how.It is a study about society rather than the optimal design of an economic institution. And as such, it is an original and significant contribution to the literature."––Tirthankar Roy, H-Asia"In this incisive book, Sohini Kar seeks to link processes and events in the world of global and national finance to credit regimes that shape the lives of urban poor on the periphery....her ethnographic insights combine extremely well with literature on the political economy and anthropology of finance."—M. Vijayabaskar, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction: Enfolding the Poor 1. Entrepreneurship and Work at the "Bottom of the Pyramid" 2. From Social Banking to Financial Inclusion 3. The Reluctant Moneylender 4. The Domestication of Microfinance 5. Financial Risk and the Moral Economy of Credit 6. Insured Death, Precarious Life Epilogue:

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Book SynopsisThis remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders—including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg—engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrary presents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates. Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO's 1947–48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary provides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows that the UNESCO human rights survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and practice. This volume contains letters and survey responses from Jacques Havet, Jacques Maritain, Arnold J. Lien, Richard P. Mckeon, Quincy Wright, Levi Carneiro, Arthur H. Compton, Charles E. Merriam, Lewis Mumford, E. H. Carr, John Lewis, Harold J. Laski, Serge Hessen, John Somerville, Boris Tchechko, Luc Somerhausen, Hyman Levy, Ture Nerman, R. Palme Dutt, Maurice Dobb, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Marcel De Corte, Pedro Troncoso Sánchez, Mahatma Gandhi, Chung-Shu Lo, Kurt Riezler, Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, Hubert Frère, M. Nicolay, W. Albert Noyes, Jr., Aldous Huxley, Ralph W. Gerard, Johannes M. Burgers, Humayun Kabir, A. P. Elkin, S. V. Puntambekar, Leonard Barnes, Benedetto Croce, Jean Haesart, F. S. C. Northrop, Peter Skov, Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Webb, John Macmurray, Julius Moór, L. Horváth, Alfred Weber, Don Salvador De Madariaga, Frank R. Scott, Jawaharlal Nehru, Margery Fry, Isaac Leon Kandel, René Maheu, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Morris L. Ernst, Arnold Schoenberg, W. H. Auden, Melville Herskovits, Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Ernest Henry Burgmann, Herbert Read, and T. S. Eliot.Trade Review"In this clever and timely book, Mark Goodale complicates the presumed universality of human rights, providing an alternative history of the UNESCO process. Besides representing a fabulous archival 'find,' Letters to the Contrary provides vital historical and anthropological analysis to illuminate these texts. This stellar book is novel in its focus on a largely overlooked episode in the history of UNESCO and rights and classic in the sense that rights and internationalism continue to be central to so many disciplines today. Unearthed letters from the likes of Eliot, Auden, Schoenberg, Carr, and Huxley form a veritable who's who of twentieth-century political thought. Lively, eminently readable, and utterly stimulating."—Lynn Meskell, Stanford University"Goodale's superb reconstruction of the history surrounding the UNESCO-sponsored survey of human rights demonstrates perfectly the political and contingent nature of the origins of the international human rights enterprise. It reveals both the centrality of philosophy to that enterprise, and the virtual impossibility of seeking a conception of human rights that is universal in philosophical analysis rather than political compromise."—Philip Alston, New York University"Human rights might survive our age of rupture if we cease to delude ourselves with myth-making about their historical origins. In this outstanding book, Mark Goodale shows unequivocally that the creation moment of 'the age of rights' was in no sense universal at all. Letters to the Contrary makes it impossible to defend the triumphalist vision of the postwar human rights story with the blithe assertion that everybody agreed human rights were now the only game in town."—Stephen Hopgood, SOAS, University of London"All international human rights lawyers concerned with the universality of human rights should read this book. Mark Goodale reveals how human rights comparison and distinction, not identification of a common denominator, were at the core of the UNESCO human rights survey and the resulting examination of the grounds of an international declaration of human rights. Rediscovering a differentiated and culturally sensitive philosophical discussion of human rights is not only humbling, it allows us to hope for reinvigorated universal debate."—Samantha Besson, University of FribourgTable of ContentsHistory: UNESCO in the Paradigmatic Transition Interpretations: From a "Hollow Sham" to a "Plurality of Cultural Values" Memorandum and Questionnaire Circulated by UNESCO on the Theoretical Bases of the Rights of Man The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights Foreword and Introduction to Human Rights, Comments and Interpretations, UNESCO 1949 Liberalism from the Ashes Beyond Egotistic Man: Communist, Socialist, and Social Democratic Challenges Rights in a Sacred Universe The Universal Declaration of Human Duties The Technological Society of the Future Universal Human Rights in a Colonial World Human Rights as History and Practice Specific Freedoms From Repudiation to the Play of Fancy

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Book SynopsisWar is one of the most lucrative job markets for an increasingly global workforce. Most of the work on American bases, everything from manning guard towers to cleaning the latrines to more technical engineering and accounting jobs, has been outsourced to private firms that then contract out individual jobs, often to the lowest bidder. An "American" base in Afghanistan or Iraq will be staffed with workers from places like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Turkey, Bosnia, and Nepal: so-called "third-country nationals." Tens of thousands of these workers are now fixtures on American bases. Yet, in the plethora of records kept by the U.S. government, they are unseen and uncounted—their stories untold. Noah Coburn traces this unseen workforce across seven countries, following the workers' often zigzagging journey to war. He confronts the varied conditions third-country nationals encounter, ranging from near slavery to more mundane forms of exploitation. Visiting a British Imperial training camp in Nepal, U.S. bases in Afghanistan, a café in Tbilisi, offices in Ankara, and human traffickers in Delhi, Coburn seeks out a better understanding of the people who make up this unseen workforce, sharing powerful stories of hope and struggle. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part retelling of the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of workers, Under Contract unspools a complex global web of how modern wars are fought and supported, narrating war stories unlike any other. Coburn's experience forces readers to reckon with the moral questions of a hidden global war-force and the costs being shouldered by foreign nationals in our name. Trade Review"In his vivid and insightful first-person account, Noah Coburn expands the scope and impact of modern warfare by unveiling the lives of subcontractors often supplied by human trafficking networks and always trapped in a shameful maze of greed and exploitation. Under Contract puts a human face on crucial issues in the prolonged U.S. war in Afghanistan, exposing the grim underworld of migrant workers." -- Ann Hagedorn * author of The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security *"In this highly readable and disturbing account of the American war effort in Afghanistan, Noah Coburn traces the complex transnational web that has snared individuals from various countries in the conflict. A Gurkha story as well as war story, Under Contract chronicles not valor and glory, but poverty, human trafficking, and institutional racism. It will prove a useful resource for anyone interested in international relations, migration, and conflict." -- Deepak Thapa * co-author of A Kingdom under Siege: Nepal's Maoist Insurgency, 1996 to 2004 *"With a vivid eye for detail, analytic lucidity, and compassion, Noah Coburn opens up a space between anthropology and investigative journalism. His journey to understand the human ripple effects of the war in Afghanistan takes him to Nepal, India, Turkey, the Republic of Georgia, and the U.K. in search of people who, often driven by economic desperation, worked for U.S. military contractors. A disturbing picture emerges: a world governed by massive inequalities and the brute realities of chance where some profit handsomely from war while others, dead or maimed for life, are treated as cheap, disposable, and conveniently invisible casualties of American intervention. An important account of a new neoliberal mode of warfare, vital reading for anyone interested in military affairs, Afghanistan, migration, and globalization." -- Hugh Gusterson * author of Drone: Remote Control Warfare *"An irreplaceable and beautifully written book. Under Contract is one of the richest and most straightforward ethnographic accounts of war yet written. In focusing on the long and difficult paths of the contractors of the latest Afghan war, Coburn is the first to truly demonstrate the transnational and profit-driven nature of most modern war." -- Catherine Lutz * Brown University *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: No Small War chapter abstractThis book begins with the political and economic changes brought to the area around Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan by the American invasion, comparing the author's experiences with those of a Nepali security guard who was imprisoned in Afghanistan for three years. It presents some of the less predictable consequences of the war, particularly for civilians working for the U.S. war effort. It looks at the wide range of actors who were part of the conflict in Afghanistan, from members of the NATO coalition to individual businessmen who were pulled in by the war economy, suggesting that far from a "small war," as most insurgencies are considered, the war in Afghanistan was truly a global affair. It concludes that understanding the consequences of the war in Afghanistan requires an anthropological approach and lays out the methods of the study that led to this book. 1Mercenaries, Contractors, and Other Hired Guns chapter abstractThis chapter recounts the experience of one Nepali security contractor in Afghanistan and the ways in which his experience, the money that he made, and the connections that he developed have reshaped his life. It looks at how this case is indicative of a wider trend by Western countries to outsource various aspects of war and international intervention. These practices, due largely to the secretive nature of private security firms, remain understudied and, as this chapter demonstrates, even attempting to do a census of such workers is nearly impossible. It also debunks the common myth that private security contractors are not put at the same risk that more typical military personnel are, suggesting that the wider nature of war has changed in ways that are not accounted for in most popular narratives. 2Nepalis at War chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the practice of recruitment of Nepalis into foreign militaries. The practice, which began under the East India Trade Company, eventually led hundreds of thousands of Nepalis to enlist in the British Imperial Army and, later, the Indian Army, the Singapore Police Force, and a range of other foreign bodies. This practice of relying on so-called Gurkha soldiers has shifted in recent years toward private security firms largely funded by the U.S. government. This neoliberal variation of earlier practices of labor migration has led to the commodification of the term Gurkha as these men and the symbols attached to them have been used to encourage orientalist appeals to the supposed martial nature of certain Nepali ethnic groups. 3One Blast, Many Lives chapter abstractThis chapter is the account of the 2013 suicide attack on a private security compound in Kabul through the experience of four Nepali guards who worked there. It looks at the difficulty of sorting out the details on an attack like this one, which was large enough to lead to several deaths, but since those killed were from non-Western countries, it garnered little media attention. Furthermore, the layers of contracting and subcontracting meant that the firm guarding and residing in the compound was not the same as the one that owned the compound, making liability and moral obligations difficult for those involved to sort out. The chapter explores how differently the attack affected the individuals we interviewed, with one being disabled for life with no future prospects, and another, with less severe injuries who used the compensation paid by his firm to start a new business. 4Costs and Compensation chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the various ways in which firms compensate those injured in attacks or other on-the-job injuries in conflict zones. In particular, it focuses on the U.S. Defense Base Act, which was set up to provide injured workers with compensation. While the wording of the law is expansive, many contractors from Nepal and other poor countries have struggled to take advantage of it, since they have limited legal knowledge and contracting companies often isolate them from the lawyers who could potentially help them file a claim. The chapter concludes by speculating about why attacks involving private security firms, particularly where there are non-Westerners killed, have been so easy to ignore and what this says about the current relationship between the media and the U.S. military. 5Manpower chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the process that Nepalis workers use to secure employment abroad. Usually they rely on a series of local brokers and, later, brokers in Kathmandu, who work with a labor firm to secure a contract and work permit abroad. The process has long been derided as corrupt, and most measures aimed at increasing transparency have, according to those going through the process, allowed officials and brokers to extract more bribes from potential migrants. It looks at the case of workers migrating to Afghanistan and how this practice, which was relatively limited following the initial U.S.-led invasion, rapidly expanded, attracting less reputable firms and leading to more bureaucracy. 6Two Hundred Years of Gurkhas chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the increase in employment of retired Gurkhas by international and American private security firms in the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It looks particularly at the experience of two retired Gurkhas who worked at the U.S. embassy for a firm that was later charged with gross negligence. It traces how companies expanded the definition of what a "genuine" Gurkha was, first hiring from those who served in the British Army, then hiring those who had been in the Indian or Nepali armies, and eventually hiring those with no military training at all in order to save costs. It also looks at the experiences of these various groups upon returning to Nepal and the changes (or lack thereof) in their socioeconomic status. 7"Who Will Be a Gurkha?" chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the ongoing practice of recruiting young Nepalis into the British army. It describes the selection process that choses 236 recruits from more than 6,000 applicants, and the rigorous physical tests and interviews that it includes. It looks at how the modern variation and the increased supply of young, unemployed Nepalis has given rise to an industry of training centers that charge for a variety of services. These centers rely on colonial myths about the promise of opportunities abroad, while misleading young Nepalis about the statistical improbability of success, leading many deep into debt and into the hands of manipulative brokers. 8Through the Colonial Looking Glass chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the ongoing practice of British military recruitment in Nepal and explores who this means for Britain's postcolonial relations with Nepal. It looks in particular at the Gurkha Welfare Scheme, which acts like a development organization, but instead of targeting the neediest communities, it focuses on those that tend to produce recruits for the British military. It explores the political campaign to award British citizenship to those serving in the British Army and asks what this means for young Nepalis who are successful in the selection process and those who fail, and the ways in which British practices continue to concentrate economic and political power in the hands of the Nepali elite. 9The Labor of War chapter abstractThis chapter compares and contrasts the experience of working at different companies in conflict zones, arguing that more than nationality, companies shaped the experience of war for various contractors. It looks at case studies from two of the largest contracting firms receiving U.S. funds in Afghanistan, DynCorp and Supreme, both of which hired private security contractors, but also Nepalis in a range of lesser positions, like mechanics and cooks. It tracks the hiring process of these companies and conditions that the workers experienced while in Afghanistan. Nepali workers at these companies judged them often not by using the language of Western human rights, but using more normative language that focused on day-to-day emotions, such as the perceived fairness of supervisors. 10A Protective Government? chapter abstractWas working in Afghanistan legal for Nepalis? This chapter looks at the deeply complex answer to this seemingly simple question. It examines the bureaucratic processes of securing work permits and the corruption associated with the process in both Kathmandu and Kabul. It looks at the ways in which the system was made purposely opaque, a process that helped brokers who facilitated the application for government documents and the officials who could slow down or speed up the process greatly. It explores the various ways countries supplying labor to Western countries at war have failed to protect their citizens and how donor countries have encouraged these practices. 11Of Roses and Revolutions chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the involvement of the Georgian military and Georgian civilian contractors in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It describes the experiences of several Georgian contractors in Afghanistan. It argues that the distinction between the experience of Georgia and Nepal in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq was that the Georgian government used involvement in these conflicts primarily to strengthen their alliances with the United States and EU countries. After the disastrous war in South Ossetia, it became clear that Georgia's allies were more concerned about relations with Russia than ties with the fledgling democracy, but officials interviewed still felt that participation in the wars had strengthened more informal ties between the militaries and ultimately contributed to the increase in foreign assistance to the country. 12Economic Ottomans chapter abstractTurkey's experience of the war in Afghanistan was deeply shaped by the shared religion, cultural, and linguistic similarities. Based on interviewees with Turkish military personnel, this chapter looks at how Turkish strategy and objectives differed from those of its NATO allies. It argues that the long-term goal of the Erdoğan government to reassert influence in the region was part of Turkey's attempts to cultivate new allies and distance itself from the decreasing likelihood of EU membership. In Afghanistan, this meant that the Turkish military and diplomats had a longer time horizon for their involvement in the country. The chapter explores the resulting military cooperation and economic investment, while arguing that the close personnel ties of Turkish officers to their NATO counterparts continues to ensure strong relations. 13Turkish Engineers and Other Heroes of the Intervention chapter abstractTurkey's relatively high education standards and low cost of living meant that contracting companies in Afghanistan often looked to Turkey to provide engineers and other blue-collar workers. This chapter looks at the various contractors and Turkish businesspeople who took advantage of Turkey's position in the global economy, taking business deals that Europeans and Americans were likely to turn down. The chapter explores a case study of a Turkish designer and his life history from his early adventures abroad to his eventual extensive contracting for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan. 14Building an Empire? chapter abstractDespite the presence of numerous Turks working in Afghanistan, the Turkish government made little effort to regulate or even promote Turkish business there. The Turkish companies that succeeded in securing contracts from the U.S. military ranged from handling tens of millions of dollars a year to small family businesses. This chapter argues that it was often the largest of these that were able to undercut their competitors, establish contacts with Afghan companies, and dominate certain industries, such as the construction of U.S. bases. It also looks at some of the lesser-studied industries that support the war in Afghanistan and link together various companies and countries across the region, such as the network of freight forwarding companies that move cargo from Europe to Afghanistan. 15Detained chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the experiences of contractors who were detained by the Afghan authorities. It argues that in contrast to the importance of company of employment in other aspects of the contracting process, nationality most clearly shaped how contractors were treated by the Afghan government. The chapter studies the case of a Nepali laborer who was imprisoned for three years on false charges and was released only after being aided by a journalist. It contrasts this man's experience with the experience of an American and Turk who were also detained. 16Kidnapped chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the experience of one Turkish contractor who was kidnapped by the Haqqani network with a group of other contractors while working in Afghanistan and taken into Pakistan, where he was held for a month before his release. It explores his background and how he came to be working on an isolated base near the Afghan-Pakistani border. The chapter looks how his treatment compared with a Russian contractor, kidnapped at the same moment, and how his religious identity as a fellow Muslim led to better treatment. The chapter examines the confusing attempts by the Turkish and Afghan governments to secure his release and the importance of good luck and self-preservation instincts during such incidents. 17Hom Bahadur chapter abstractFor workers in Afghanistan, visas and other forms of documentation were often the difference between liberty and confinement. This chapter is an in-depth case study of a Nepali contractor who, upon arriving in Afghanistan, was kidnapped and essentially held hostage for several months by an Afghan broker, with the aid of both a Nepali broker and the Afghan police. It was only through the kindness of other laborers, connected through social media, that the worker was eventually able to secure his release. The chapter looks at how brokers are able to take particular advantage of those workers who are poorest with few political and social connections. 18The Boredom of Being Trafficked chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the importance of New Delhi as a transit point for young Nepalis and other South Asians looking for work abroad. It explores the conditions that these young people endure while waiting for brokers to arrange visas, contracts, and other documentation for them. In particular, it studies how brokers promote certain narratives about the potential economic wealth of work abroad in order to keep these young people in limbo and encourage them not to speak with other laborers. Ambiguity becomes an effective economic strategy for these brokers. The chapter asks how assumptions about the involuntary nature of trafficking shape our views and policy on the concept. 19Accountants at Wars chapter abstractThe experiences of white-collar Indians contracting in conflict zones differed greatly from the experiences of poor laborers. This chapter expands the notion of labor migration and explores the importance of Indian administrators, particularly in the human resources and accounting offices of various contracting firms. These individuals often had better educations and connections than their other South Asian counterparts, and this gave them an agency that other contractors did not have. Through a series of case studies, this chapter explores the different experiences and security threats that these individuals faced, particularly in the form of targeting by Pakistani groups. 20Classes and Genders at War chapter abstractLabor migration is largely built on the narrative of economic promise abroad, but what happens when this promise does not materialize? This chapter looks at a series of case studies of Indian and Nepali contractors in Afghanistan to argue that while employment held the promise of upward mobility, instead it tended to solidify gender norms and economic divides. The hypermasculinized world of contracting allowed women to participate, but only in specific ways that further diminished their agency. The chapter also looks at how social media and other new technologies have allowed brokers to target and exploit poor workers. While the capitalist free market language of labor migration promises upward mobility, ultimately it enriched only the ruling class that controlled the mechanisms of migration. 21Returning Abroad chapter abstractIn the 2000s, the United Kingdom began granting citizenship to Nepalis who had served in the British army. This led to a growing population of Nepalis who settled in garrison towns in England, such as Aldershot. This chapter explores these communities, the effect of the war in Afghanistan, and the increasing pull of private security contracting that led many to leave the military. At the same time, this growing population has led to questions about Britain's place in a globalizing world and the legacy of colonialism. The chapter explores the contrast between the promise of a more globalized version of Britain that citizenship for Gurkhas provides, with the discrimination and nativist rhetoric that many Nepalis in the United Kingdom face. 22When You Can't Go Home chapter abstractFollowing the targeting of Iraqi and Afghan contractors who had worked as interpreters for the U.S. military, the U.S. government designed the Special Immigrant Visa program aimed at providing former contractors in danger with visas to settle in the United States. This chapter looks at the challenges that this program has faced and the bureaucracy it has created. It also looks at the lives of several Afghan interpreters who settled in the United States. These former contractors often face challenges far different from what they expected, living in poor, segregated neighborhoods in large American cities that they are ill equipped to navigate. 23Where the War Went chapter abstractAs the United States has increasingly subcontracted aspects of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these practices have spread globally, with countries in the Persian Gulf, for example, increasingly relying on mercenaries to staff their militaries. This chapter looks at the potential repercussions of these aspects of the war in Afghanistan. As contracts end, the result is a demobilized army of former contractors willing to fight for anyone willing to give them a paycheck. The chapter case study is of a group of young Nepalis who ended up working as bodyguards in western Russia for a mafia boss. Particularly as new technology and the Internet marketplace make such transactions easier, this chapter asks what the future of warfare might be.

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Book SynopsisMicrofinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents. This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.Trade Review"Among the many critics of the World Bank's mantra that financial inclusion will solve the problems of the poor, few voices are as impactful as Sohini Kar's. With gripping stories, ethnographically-informed nuance, and the theoretically sophisticated way in which it 'joins the dots,' her book doesn't typify microfinance as simply good or bad. Rather, it shows how debt enfolds people into globalized financial networks, transforming them into little more than balance sheet figures to be reckoned by calculators of financial risk."—Deborah James, The London School of Economics and Political Science"In this fresh investigation that should prove fascinating for specialists and generalists alike, Sohini Kar has beautifully rendered much hard-won and intensely illuminating ethnographic data into compelling and jargon-free prose. She convincingly pushes us to see an 'emergent ethic of capitalism,' embodied in a variety of creditor techniques for enfolding—and seeking profit from—a vast 'informal' economy humming along in India."—Gustav Peebles, The New School"Kar's book, an ethnographic study of borrowers, debt collectors, and loan managers in Kolkata, one of India's most populated cities, provides grounds for skepticism. Loans are meant to create sustainable businesses, but the precariousness of the borrowers' existence inevitably leads to funds being diverted to alternative, less-productive activities. When repayment becomes tenuous, problems arise among borrower groups and between borrowers and debt collectors....Highly recommended."—S. Paul, CHOICE"[Financializing Poverty] is a critical study of microfinance, but it is not an assessment of whether microfinance works for large populations.It is, rather, a study about whom it works for, and how.It is a study about society rather than the optimal design of an economic institution. And as such, it is an original and significant contribution to the literature."––Tirthankar Roy, H-Asia"In this incisive book, Sohini Kar seeks to link processes and events in the world of global and national finance to credit regimes that shape the lives of urban poor on the periphery....her ethnographic insights combine extremely well with literature on the political economy and anthropology of finance."—M. Vijayabaskar, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction: Enfolding the Poor 1. Entrepreneurship and Work at the "Bottom of the Pyramid" 2. From Social Banking to Financial Inclusion 3. The Reluctant Moneylender 4. The Domestication of Microfinance 5. Financial Risk and the Moral Economy of Credit 6. Insured Death, Precarious Life Epilogue:

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Book SynopsisContemporary feminist advocacy in human rights, international criminal law, and peace and security is gripped by the issue of sexual violence in conflict. But it hasn't always been this way. Analyzing feminist international legal and political work over the past three decades, Karen Engle argues that it was not inevitable that sexual violence in conflict would become such a prominent issue. Engle reveals that as feminists from around the world began to pay an enormous amount of attention to sexual violence in conflict, they often did so at the cost of attention to other issues, including the anti-militarism of the women's peace movement; critiques of economic maldistribution, imperialism, and cultural essentialism by feminists from the global South; and the sex-positive positions of many feminists involved in debates about sex work and pornography. The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict offers a detailed examination of how these feminist commitments were not merely deprioritized, but undermined, by efforts to address the issue of sexual violence in conflict. Engle's analysis reinvigorates vital debates about feminist goals and priorities, and spurs readers to question much of today's common sense about the causes, effects, and proper responses to sexual violence in conflict. Trade Review"The Grip of Sexual Violence is required reading for understanding how some powerful feminist approaches to international criminal law have produced more problems than solutions. Engle's brilliant and nuanced critique asks us to urgently reconsider the colonial, racial, and cultural assumptions and erasures of such feminism and offers a different path for feminist legal internationalism."—Inderpal Grewal, Yale University"Karen Engle provides a masterful critical account of the politics of 'common sense' that informs feminist interventions in international law. Her incisive analysis of how the discourse on sexual violence in conflict has come to be based on negative images of sex and sexuality and troubling assumptions about gender, war, and peace marks an invaluable and timely contribution to the field."—Ratna Kapur, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law"Engle's brilliant book shows how concern with sexual violence displaced and undermined feminist movements for geopolitical peace and equality, risking a regulatory vision for female bodies instead of a 'sex positive' one. Engle reopens fateful choices and closes with an inspiring vision of a different feminism and a different international law."—Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World"Karen Engle has long been a perceptive critic of the ways in which feminists call on international institutions to support feminist causes. Here, she offers a remarkable case study of how ideas and concepts travel and transform, making a powerful argument for a more nuanced account of gender, sex and conflict, which takes the complexity of human experience into account."—Hilary Charlesworth, Melbourne Law School and The Australian National University"Engle critiques the pattern of focusing on wartime sexual violence in order to call for more violence through military intervention.[This] book is well researched, creative, and provocative. Recommended."—D. P. Forsythe, CHOICE"Karen Engle is one of the most remarkable scholars of human rights movements today. Her work has long questioned what are generally perceived [as] some of the greatest successes of human rights and international law, not least in relation to indigenous rights, feminist advocacy and international criminal law....For its potential to inspire new activism and fresh research, The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict is doubtless a pivotal contribution to critical scholarship on human rights and feminism."—Mattia Pinto, London Review of International Law"Engle's work is an inspiring and groundbreaking analysis that deserves further in-depth discussions... [The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict] is a provocative analysis of the most controversial issues related to feminism, gender, and war that have preoccupied feminist scholars and legal practitioners alike over the past three decades. Engle touches sensitive issues relating to the essence of the book's central argument, and provides convincing answers to many questions, while sometimes leaving the door ajar on issues that were, and still are, under discussion."—Hilmi M. Zawati, Journal of International Criminal Justice

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when a seemingly rational state becomes paranoid and delusional? The Encrypted State engages in a close analysis of political disorder to shed new light on the concept of political stability. The book focuses on a crisis of rule in mid-20th-century Peru, a period when officials believed they had lost the ability to govern and communicated in secret code to protect themselves from imaginary subversives. The Encrypted State engages the notion of sacropolitics—the politics of mass group sacrifice—to make sense of state delusion. Nugent interrogates the forces that variously enable or disable organized political subjection, and the role of state structures in this process. Investigating the role of everyday cultural practices and how affect and imagination structure political affairs, Nugent provides a greater understanding of the conditions of state formation, and failure.Trade Review"This brilliant, inspired book reshapes the debate about 'the state' in a number of disciplines, challenging virtually all the prevailing orthodoxies about states in their relation to societies. Nugent's theoretical insights are hard-won, arising organically from deep immersion in empirical, archival research." -- Akhil Gupta * UCLA *"When states 'state' they often do so not as well-oiled rational bureaucratic machines but rather in hysterical, delusional, and paranoid ways. Based on fascinating archival sources, Nugent's study of a state ruled by fear sheds new light on the regional history of Chachapoyas and the political history of modern Peru. Above all, it makes a deeply original contribution to the literature on state formation." -- Paulo Drinot * University College London *"Nugent's deep and discerning dive in the archives has—and not for the first time—surfaced striking new conceptual treasures for the analysis of state-making. The Encrypted State enlarges and enriches our understanding of how 'flailing' states disguise their disorder with the pretense of routine and, behind the scenes, paranoia. A superb and lasting contribution." -- James C. Scott * author of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Routine and the Remarkable in State Formation chapter abstractThe Introduction provides an overview of current theories of state formation and shows how the book contributes to those debates. It does so by developing a conceptual framework that incorporates crisis into theories of order. It treats crisis as something other than a temporary aberration from the normal operation of the state. Instead, it focuses on the ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices undertaken in the name of the state that produce the illusion of the ordinary and the mundane. Chapter One also discusses why it is so important to maintain the illusion of the everyday and why it is so difficult to see behind the mask of the state. Central to the analysis are the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered rational and routine. Equally important are the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. 1Sacropolitics chapter abstractThis chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is "sacropolitics," the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a form of sovereignty that is distinct from biopolitics, necropolitics and the state of exception. Sacropolitics differs from biopolitics in the sense that it is not about the management of life. It differs from necropolitics in that it is not about the subjugation of life to death. Sacropolitics is neither about managing nor taking life but rather animating it. It is about bringing to life dead, dying or moribund populations and social formations. Sacropolitical efforts call upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice. These performances are intended to contribute to the creation of new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen. 2The Descent into Madness chapter abstractThis chapter offers an in-depth exploration of the crisis of rule that unfolded in the Chachapoyas region circa 1950. At this time officials came to believe that they were incapable of carrying out even the most basic of government functions. Furthermore, officials came to believe that their efforts to govern the region were being thwarted by APRA, the party they themselves had forced underground. In accounting for the failure of their own efforts to govern, officials attributed to APRA a subterranean party apparatus with all the powers of state that their own regime lacked. Indeed, the political authorities came to view their administration as a pale imitation of a sophisticated, complex state structure located somewhere deeply underground. They could not actually see the subterranean party state to which they attributed such power and influence. As a result, they were left to imagine the contours of their invisible enemy. 3The Consolidation of Casta Rule chapter abstractThis chapter explores the consolidation of a new form of political organization in the Chachapoyas region in the early decades of the twentieth century. Circa 1920 changes in the national social structure brought a new national leader to power—Augusto Leguía. Drawing upon huge sums of money borrowed from US banks, Leguía provided unprecedented support to his elite clients in the Chachapoyas. In so doing, he changed the balance of power between longstanding elite factions and allowed one faction to prevail over the rest. By the time Leguía fell from power in 1930 his clients in the Chachapoyas region—the Pizarro-Rubio—had done something that had not formerly been possible. They had eliminated the region's opposing elite factions. In so doing, they permanently transformed the region's class structure. Leguía and his administration had sacropoliticial ambitions and plans. 4Being (and Seeing) Like a State chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the efforts of the Pizarro-Rubio casta to implement the central government's sacropolitically-motivated plans to modernize the Chachapoyas region during the 1920s. The period is an interesting one for scholars of state formation because the developments of the 1920s provide a direct challenge to institutional understandings of the state. According to these views, state formation depends on the ability of central powers to eliminate violence-wielding competitors, who interfere with the monopoly on force the state seeks to establish. The ability of the central government to impose its will in Chachapoyas, however, was contingent not upon the elimination of violence-wielding actors but on their preservation. The fact that the Pizarro-Rubio had succeeded in eliminating all competing elite factions meant that the clients of the ruling casta were able to work together to ensure that government projects proceeded un a timely and efficient manner. 5Divided Elite and Disordered State chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the changes in the regional social structure that made it impossible for government officials to mobilize the workforce they needed to carry out modernization projects. Key in this regard was the breakdown of the castas. When the Pizarro-Rubio fell from power in 1930, there were no remaining elite coalitions that could take their place. Instead, the castas fragmented into a series of separate families, each having to fend for itself. This resulted in an unprecedented degree of infighting within the apparatus of government. For positions in government were the only way that elite families could maintain an elite station in life. From this point onward the apparatus of government became a terrain of conflict. This in turn undermined any and all efforts to modernize the Chachapoyas region. Those responsible for mobilizing the workforce became involved in bitter struggles with one another. 6The Sacropolitics of Military Conscription chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the increasingly futile efforts of government officials to conscript the regional population into the armed forces—a mundane activity they had undertaken with ease during the reign of the castas. The chapter shows the delusional nature of government plans, and how delusion was (mis)-represented as rationality and routine. The chapter also explores the authorities' growing confusion about their inability to conscript, and their sense that what had formerly seemed ordinary was anything but that. Chapter Seven also examines the explanations that government officials generated to explain their inability to carry out activities that had formerly been routine—in which their attribute their difficulties to a series of phantom figures that are said to haunt government efforts to rule. 7The Sacropolitics of Labor Conscription chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the authorities' mounting difficulties in conscripting the population for public works—a second "routine" activity they had previously undertaken with great success. The chapter shows the delusional nature of government plans, and how delusion was represented as rationality and routine. The chapter also explores officials' confusion about their inability to carry out the ordinary, everyday task of conscription, and their sense that what had formerly seemed ordinary was anything but that. Chapter Eight also examines the explanations that government officials generated to explain their inability to carry out activities that had formerly been routine—in which their attribute their difficulties to a series of phantom figures that are said to haunt government efforts to rule. 8Glimpses of Danger and Subversion chapter abstractThis chapter explores official efforts to understand why state activities that had formerly been ordinary and routine (conscription) become increasingly difficult to carry out. It focuses on the police investigation of clandestine Aprista activities, and what this discovery suggests to the authorities about the existence of an extensive underground network of subversion. The chapter also traces the emergence in official circles of an explanation that resolves official anxieties, even as it displaces responsibility for problems that were of the government's own making onto phantom forces that were regarded as hyper-real. The less the authorities were able to carry out everyday activities, the more extraordinary were the powers of subversion they attributed to these phantom forces. The most important of these forces was APRA. Conclusion: Behind the Mask of the State chapter abstractThe Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.

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Book SynopsisIn India, the eight states that border Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Tibetan areas of China are often referred to as just "the Northeast." In the Name of the Nation offers a critical and historical account of the country's troubled relations with this borderland region. Its modern history is shaped by the dynamics of a "frontier" in its multiple references: migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics. Partly as a result of this, the political trajectory of the region has been different from the rest of the country. Ethnic militias and armed groups have flourished for decades, but they coexist comfortably with functioning electoral institutions. The region has some of India's highest voter turnout rates, but special security laws produce significant democracy deficits that are now almost as old as the Republic. That these policies have been enforced to foment national unity while multiple alternative conceptions of the "nation" animate politics in the region forces us to reflect on the very foundations of the nation form. Sanjib Baruah offers a nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions. Trade Review"In this book, Sanjib Baruah provides scholars and students up-to-date facts, new revelations, astute analysis, and basic background for understanding history and politics in northeast India. This is also essential reading for anyone concerned with the quality of sovereignty in India, where national state territorialism is rife with contradictions, ambiguities, militarism, and conflicting allegiances."—David Ludden, New York University"With In the Name of the Nation, Sanjib Baruah completes an impressive trilogy of books on India's Northeast. This book unravels the paradoxes of postcolonial life in the periphery of the nation-state with theoretical elegance, intimate knowledge, and political commitment. It is a wonderful read that sets a new standard for South Asian scholarship."—Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University"Elegantly written and cogent, Baruah's simultaneous 'insider-outsider' analysis of the region known generically as 'India's Northeast' is rich, nuanced, and multilayered. It captures the long-lasting impact of colonial policies and their present-day legacies, particularly in terms of how the 'center' and the 'peripheries' were imagined. A superb book for anyone wishing to understand how issues of citizenship, identity, and nation-making play out in the region today."—Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India"This is an important, accessibly written scholarly work that illuminates what democracy means by viewing it from the margins. A must-read for those interested in the contemporary politics of the Indian northeast and for those interested in the theory, history, and practice of democracy."—Kanchan Chandra, New York University"Carefully composed in a highly readable style, this book is an important contribution to the study of democracy, nationalism and vernacular politics on the Indian subcontinent and beyond."—Ashild Kolas, Journal of Peace Research"Baruah offers enormous insights into the causes of intensifying resistance, armed or otherwise, to harshly centralised political decision-making in India. The grasp of comparative politics that informs the author's analyses also contributes towards an understanding of increasing authoritarianism in South Asia and beyond."—Siddiq Wahid, India Today"This survey of [northeastern India] is an excellent guide to its diversity and complexity and is characterized by a heartfelt criticism of the actions of the Indian government, guided by Baruah's scholarly authority and personal experiences. Highly recommended."—R. D. Long, CHOICE"This is a rare gem of a book....While grappling with contentious issues of present politics, Sanjib Baruah provides depth, context and perspective."—Mahesh Rangarajan, The Indian Express"This is a reflective book, borne out of several decades of engagement[It] can be read as a prescient ledger of how things came to pass in Northeast India."—Sanjay Barbora, The India Forum"Baruah's intimate history and ethnography shows how neglect, corruption, uneven development, and repression—and recently the rise of Hindu nationalism at the federal level—have intensified the Northeast's alienation from the rest of the country."—Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs"[This] deceptively slim volume condenses a lifetime of deep intellectual, scholarly and normative engagement with the Northeast into an erudite and insightful analysis. It is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the violent and chequered career of postcolonial nationalism in India, and the complex details of the history and present of its Northeast."—Sankaran Krishna, South Asia"[A] magnificent work of scholarship and is most timely....The author's main contribution lies in raising awareness about the issues faced by the Northeast and its people and in highlighting the need for alternative politics in the region. It is indispensable for social scientists interested in understanding the society and politics of the region and for policymakers dealing with the issues of Northeast India."—Ganeshdatta Poddar, Journal of Contemporary Asia"In the Name of the Nationis a stellar exposure of the fractal nature of the relationship between India and its Northeast, one rich in insights for anyone seeking to understand not just contemporary India, but also the pitfalls of postcolonial, would-be nation-states. It will be read for a long time yet."—Berenice Guyot-Rechard, H-Net Reviews"In the Name of the Nation is an essential read that helps us better understand how ordinary people can reclaim moral sovereignty in the face of state violence. In the process, Northeast India is reconceived as central, not peripheral, to the history of Indian territorial sovereignty." –Ahona Panda, The Indian Economic and Social History Review"This monograph will be of particular interest to scholars of Asian political economy who wish to better understand the legacy of colonialism in postcolonial societies. The lucidity of the prose makes the monograph amenably suitable for general readership as well."—Tathagata Dutta, New Zealand Journal of Asian StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. The Invention of Northeast India 2. Partition's Long Shadow: Nation and Citizenship in Assam 3. Development and the Making of a Postcolonial Resource Frontier 4. The Naga Conflict: Ceasefire Politics and Elusive Peace 5. Discourse of Insurgency and the Pedagogy of State Violence 6. The Strange Career of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act Conclusion:

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Book SynopsisIn India, the eight states that border Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Tibetan areas of China are often referred to as just "the Northeast." In the Name of the Nation offers a critical and historical account of the country's troubled relations with this borderland region. Its modern history is shaped by the dynamics of a "frontier" in its multiple references: migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics. Partly as a result of this, the political trajectory of the region has been different from the rest of the country. Ethnic militias and armed groups have flourished for decades, but they coexist comfortably with functioning electoral institutions. The region has some of India's highest voter turnout rates, but special security laws produce significant democracy deficits that are now almost as old as the Republic. That these policies have been enforced to foment national unity while multiple alternative conceptions of the "nation" animate politics in the region forces us to reflect on the very foundations of the nation form. Sanjib Baruah offers a nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions. Trade Review"In this book, Sanjib Baruah provides scholars and students up-to-date facts, new revelations, astute analysis, and basic background for understanding history and politics in northeast India. This is also essential reading for anyone concerned with the quality of sovereignty in India, where national state territorialism is rife with contradictions, ambiguities, militarism, and conflicting allegiances."—David Ludden, New York University"With In the Name of the Nation, Sanjib Baruah completes an impressive trilogy of books on India's Northeast. This book unravels the paradoxes of postcolonial life in the periphery of the nation-state with theoretical elegance, intimate knowledge, and political commitment. It is a wonderful read that sets a new standard for South Asian scholarship."—Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University"Elegantly written and cogent, Baruah's simultaneous 'insider-outsider' analysis of the region known generically as 'India's Northeast' is rich, nuanced, and multilayered. It captures the long-lasting impact of colonial policies and their present-day legacies, particularly in terms of how the 'center' and the 'peripheries' were imagined. A superb book for anyone wishing to understand how issues of citizenship, identity, and nation-making play out in the region today."—Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India"This is an important, accessibly written scholarly work that illuminates what democracy means by viewing it from the margins. A must-read for those interested in the contemporary politics of the Indian northeast and for those interested in the theory, history, and practice of democracy."—Kanchan Chandra, New York University"Carefully composed in a highly readable style, this book is an important contribution to the study of democracy, nationalism and vernacular politics on the Indian subcontinent and beyond."—Ashild Kolas, Journal of Peace Research"Baruah offers enormous insights into the causes of intensifying resistance, armed or otherwise, to harshly centralised political decision-making in India. The grasp of comparative politics that informs the author's analyses also contributes towards an understanding of increasing authoritarianism in South Asia and beyond."—Siddiq Wahid, India Today"This survey of [northeastern India] is an excellent guide to its diversity and complexity and is characterized by a heartfelt criticism of the actions of the Indian government, guided by Baruah's scholarly authority and personal experiences. Highly recommended."—R. D. Long, CHOICE"This is a rare gem of a book....While grappling with contentious issues of present politics, Sanjib Baruah provides depth, context and perspective."—Mahesh Rangarajan, The Indian Express"This is a reflective book, borne out of several decades of engagement[It] can be read as a prescient ledger of how things came to pass in Northeast India."—Sanjay Barbora, The India Forum"Baruah's intimate history and ethnography shows how neglect, corruption, uneven development, and repression—and recently the rise of Hindu nationalism at the federal level—have intensified the Northeast's alienation from the rest of the country."—Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs"[This] deceptively slim volume condenses a lifetime of deep intellectual, scholarly and normative engagement with the Northeast into an erudite and insightful analysis. It is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the violent and chequered career of postcolonial nationalism in India, and the complex details of the history and present of its Northeast."—Sankaran Krishna, South Asia"[A] magnificent work of scholarship and is most timely....The author's main contribution lies in raising awareness about the issues faced by the Northeast and its people and in highlighting the need for alternative politics in the region. It is indispensable for social scientists interested in understanding the society and politics of the region and for policymakers dealing with the issues of Northeast India."—Ganeshdatta Poddar, Journal of Contemporary Asia"In the Name of the Nationis a stellar exposure of the fractal nature of the relationship between India and its Northeast, one rich in insights for anyone seeking to understand not just contemporary India, but also the pitfalls of postcolonial, would-be nation-states. It will be read for a long time yet."—Berenice Guyot-Rechard, H-Net Reviews"In the Name of the Nation is an essential read that helps us better understand how ordinary people can reclaim moral sovereignty in the face of state violence. In the process, Northeast India is reconceived as central, not peripheral, to the history of Indian territorial sovereignty." –Ahona Panda, The Indian Economic and Social History Review"This monograph will be of particular interest to scholars of Asian political economy who wish to better understand the legacy of colonialism in postcolonial societies. The lucidity of the prose makes the monograph amenably suitable for general readership as well."—Tathagata Dutta, New Zealand Journal of Asian StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. The Invention of Northeast India 2. Partition's Long Shadow: Nation and Citizenship in Assam 3. Development and the Making of a Postcolonial Resource Frontier 4. The Naga Conflict: Ceasefire Politics and Elusive Peace 5. Discourse of Insurgency and the Pedagogy of State Violence 6. The Strange Career of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act Conclusion:

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Book SynopsisPerpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambodia and Argentina, Antonius Robben and Alex Hinton explore how researchers go about not just interviewing and writing about perpetrators, but also processing their own emotions and considering how the personal and interpersonal impact of this sort of research informs the texts that emerge from them. Through interlinked ethnographic essays, methodological and theoretical reflections, and dialogues between the two authors, this thought-provoking book conveys practical wisdom for the benefit of other researchers who face ruthless perpetrators and experience turbulent emotions when listening to perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators rarely regard themselves as such, and fieldwork with perpetrators makes for situations freighted with emotion. Research with perpetrators is a difficult but important part of understanding the causes of and creating solutions to mass violence, and Robben and Hinton use their expertise to provide insightful lessons on the epistemological, ethical, and emotional challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the wake of atrocity.Trade Review"In Robben and Hinton's 'encounter with humanity's dark side' the perpetrator researcher and the evildoer become inextricably intertwined. Researchers' intimate fieldwork contact with perpetrators of mass atrocity sullies them, they feel dirty. And, yet, it reveals complex and contradictory human beings that unsettle facile assumptions about their monstrosity. How do researchers incorporate cognitive and affective empathy to understand the 'priming' that make atrocities possible, while condemning those acts? Perpetrators establishes the craft for doing so."—Leigh Payne, Oxford University"Written as a sustained conversation between two foundational figures in the field of perpetrator studies, this book offers a rich exploration of the individuals who operate the machinery of mass murder. The authors combine profound insights into universal phenomena, while demonstrating the importance of understanding local specificities and moral economies. This unsettling book charts a future research agenda for those who seek to understand the disturbing, unholy mixture of humanity among those who engage in lethal violence."—Kimberly Theidon, Tufts University"Perpetrators[:] Encountering Humanity's Dark Side provides a therapeutic and rewarding read for anthropologists and social scientists who have come into contact with agents of violence through their research, as well as for those who expect to do so."—Sergen Bahceci, Anthropology Book Forum"The book offers a curative reading: healing and, at the same time, crafting together pieces to be displayed in search of meaning. A necessary and exceptional book not only for anthropologists researching genocide and mass violence but also for a broader audience interested on how to approach and write about violence."—Corina Tulbure, Conflict and Society"Robben and Hinton set out to at once impart insights they acquired through decades of ethnographical research into genocide and mass violence, which they call phronesis following the ancient Greeks, and to do so in experimental and thought-provoking ways. Perpetrators is more of a guide than a 'how-to' manual, and yet it manages to provide the reader with practical and suggestive ideas for conducting ethnographic research and writing in a way that avoids the rigidity imposed by academia."—Stevan Bozanich, H-Genocide"In writing this book, Robben and Hinton provide a comprehensive and original contribution to the scholarly research on perpetrators of mass violence.... This is a must-read book. Highly recommended."—A. Kolin, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Approaching Perpetrator Research 1. Spectacular Perpetrators 2. Seductive Perpetrators Interlude: The Perpetrator and the Witness Interlude: "They Were No More. None of Them. They Had Become Disappeared." 3. The Night Stalkers 4. Ruin Interlude: For the Sake of the Fatherland Interlude: Interrogation: Comrade Duch's Abecedarian 5. Nearing the Paradox 6. Curation Conclusion: Six Guideposts for Perpetrator Research

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Book SynopsisGrounded in extensive interviews, longitudinal methods, historical analysis, and archival work, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland shows how two distinct groups of working young people in Lima, Peru have become political protagonists, resisting and critiquing the daily inequality and injustice they face. She details the ways these young people interpret and address a range of issues affecting their lives—from environmental degradation to second-rate public facilities, gender-based violence to dangerous working conditions—and reveals a range of ways they make sense of their systematic marginalization and their own labor, and in doing so, how they navigate everyday state violence. By attending to the affect, longing, and desires that animate these young people's politics, Luttrell-Rowland conveys the meaning of their lives and work in an economy that invokes their subjectivity and rights while rendering them non-participatory subjects. Though the lives of young people are often imagined as far from politics, these "political children" expose the contradictions of public policy narratives in which the Peruvian state is cast as a neutral site for engagement and action. Through their criticism and activism, the young people in this book demonstrate that such narratives divorce state power from the very places in which it is experienced as structural violence.Trade Review"This powerful ethnography provides a rich account of how the Peruvian state is lived, felt, and understood, demonstrating just how much we can learn when we really listen to children. Through a careful and sensitive analysis of their words and drawings, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland sheds new light on the enduring legacies of state violence, the affective dimensions of state power, and the neoliberal dynamics of disinvestment and depoliticization. By engaging with two different groups of working children, one organized as a social movement and one not, Luttrell-Rowland reveals how all children—not just those who are activists—are political children."—Jessica K. Taft, University of California, Santa Cruz"In her clear yet nuanced analysis of state power, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland masterfully foregrounds the political subjectivity and demands of youth. Political Children is a valuable contribution to our understanding of youth as agents and of the contradictions embedded in living in and fighting against injustices informed by legacies of colonialism, war, and economic inequities."—M. Cristina Alcalde, Miami University"From the first to the last page, Political Children makes a powerful call for us to stop, and to listen properly, to what marginalised children have to say about interlocking forms of environmental, structural, historical, and political violence. Zooming in on Lima, Perú but equally relevant to many other settings in the Global South and beyond, the book is a testament to the way in whichin-depth interviews, longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials can all be harnessed to give agency to children while delivering insights into both the working of state power and the experience of translocal patterns of capital and environmental inequity. Far from being the silent receivers of rights, or just belonging to their families and hence located 'far from politics', Political Children breaks new ground in demonstrating that children are indeed the carriers of key political insights, which they articulate not simply in the mainstream language of rights but also inthe affective language of longing and desire. Methodologically impressive and theoretically sophisticated, Political Children is a must-read to overcome unexamined assumptions about children and learn what powerful socio-legal research can uncover if we stop and listen to them."—Luis Eslava, Kent Law School"As a lawyer and law professor, Luttrell-Rowland brings a different perspective than that of a typical social scientist to this study of working young people in Lima, Peru.... Recommended."—D. L. Browman, CHOICETable of ContentsContents and Abstracts

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Book SynopsisGrounded in extensive interviews, longitudinal methods, historical analysis, and archival work, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland shows how two distinct groups of working young people in Lima, Peru have become political protagonists, resisting and critiquing the daily inequality and injustice they face. She details the ways these young people interpret and address a range of issues affecting their lives—from environmental degradation to second-rate public facilities, gender-based violence to dangerous working conditions—and reveals a range of ways they make sense of their systematic marginalization and their own labor, and in doing so, how they navigate everyday state violence. By attending to the affect, longing, and desires that animate these young people's politics, Luttrell-Rowland conveys the meaning of their lives and work in an economy that invokes their subjectivity and rights while rendering them non-participatory subjects. Though the lives of young people are often imagined as far from politics, these "political children" expose the contradictions of public policy narratives in which the Peruvian state is cast as a neutral site for engagement and action. Through their criticism and activism, the young people in this book demonstrate that such narratives divorce state power from the very places in which it is experienced as structural violence.Trade Review"This powerful ethnography provides a rich account of how the Peruvian state is lived, felt, and understood, demonstrating just how much we can learn when we really listen to children. Through a careful and sensitive analysis of their words and drawings, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland sheds new light on the enduring legacies of state violence, the affective dimensions of state power, and the neoliberal dynamics of disinvestment and depoliticization. By engaging with two different groups of working children, one organized as a social movement and one not, Luttrell-Rowland reveals how all children—not just those who are activists—are political children."—Jessica K. Taft, University of California, Santa Cruz"In her clear yet nuanced analysis of state power, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland masterfully foregrounds the political subjectivity and demands of youth. Political Children is a valuable contribution to our understanding of youth as agents and of the contradictions embedded in living in and fighting against injustices informed by legacies of colonialism, war, and economic inequities."—M. Cristina Alcalde, Miami University"From the first to the last page, Political Children makes a powerful call for us to stop, and to listen properly, to what marginalised children have to say about interlocking forms of environmental, structural, historical, and political violence. Zooming in on Lima, Perú but equally relevant to many other settings in the Global South and beyond, the book is a testament to the way in whichin-depth interviews, longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials can all be harnessed to give agency to children while delivering insights into both the working of state power and the experience of translocal patterns of capital and environmental inequity. Far from being the silent receivers of rights, or just belonging to their families and hence located 'far from politics', Political Children breaks new ground in demonstrating that children are indeed the carriers of key political insights, which they articulate not simply in the mainstream language of rights but also inthe affective language of longing and desire. Methodologically impressive and theoretically sophisticated, Political Children is a must-read to overcome unexamined assumptions about children and learn what powerful socio-legal research can uncover if we stop and listen to them."—Luis Eslava, Kent Law School"As a lawyer and law professor, Luttrell-Rowland brings a different perspective than that of a typical social scientist to this study of working young people in Lima, Peru.... Recommended."—D. L. Browman, CHOICETable of ContentsContents and Abstracts

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Book SynopsisThe field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.Trade Review"Written in a lively, well-informed style, this book offers an important introduction to an interdisciplinary field that will be of interest to anthropologists, media scholars, and others who are trying to understand what it means to live in the digital age for people and communities across the globe, from the Arctic to the global south."Faye Ginsburg, New York University "An extremely useful elucidation of the specific contribution of anthropologists in our understanding of the social and cultural significance of media and digital technologies around the world. Anna Pertierra has done the field a huge service by providing a clear and comprehensive overview of media anthropology and how it relates to adjacent fields such as cultural studies and media and communication studies." Ien Ang, University of Western SydneyTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Worlds Collide: The Meeting of Mass Media and Anthropology Chapter 2: Anthropologists Embrace the Media in Earnest Chapter 3: Cultural and Media Studies Embraces Ethnography Chapter 4: Ethnography in the Digital Age: The Internet and Virtual Worlds Chapter 5: Digital Intimacies: Mobile Cultures and Social Media Chapter 6: Anthropologists Making Media Chapter 7: Divided by a Common Language: More on Ethnography Conclusion References Index

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Book SynopsisThe field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.Trade Review"Written in a lively, well-informed style, this book offers an important introduction to an interdisciplinary field that will be of interest to anthropologists, media scholars, and others who are trying to understand what it means to live in the digital age for people and communities across the globe, from the Arctic to the global south."Faye Ginsburg, New York University "An extremely useful elucidation of the specific contribution of anthropologists in our understanding of the social and cultural significance of media and digital technologies around the world. Anna Pertierra has done the field a huge service by providing a clear and comprehensive overview of media anthropology and how it relates to adjacent fields such as cultural studies and media and communication studies." Ien Ang, University of Western SydneyTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Worlds Collide: The Meeting of Mass Media and Anthropology Chapter 2: Anthropologists Embrace the Media in Earnest Chapter 3: Cultural and Media Studies Embraces Ethnography Chapter 4: Ethnography in the Digital Age: The Internet and Virtual Worlds Chapter 5: Digital Intimacies: Mobile Cultures and Social Media Chapter 6: Anthropologists Making Media Chapter 7: Divided by a Common Language: More on Ethnography Conclusion References Index

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Book SynopsisHumanity is at a crossroads. We face mounting inequality, escalating political violence, warring fundamentalisms and an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. How can we fashion a world that has room for everyone, for generations to come? What are the possibilities, in such a world, of collective human life? These are urgent questions, and no discipline is better placed to address them than anthropology. It does so by bringing to bear the wisdom and experience of people everywhere, whatever their backgrounds and walks of life.In this passionately argued book, Tim Ingold relates how a field of study once committed to ideals of progress collapsed amidst the ruins of war and colonialism, only to be reborn as a discipline of hope, destined to take centre stage in debating the most pressing intellectual, ethical and political issues of our time. He shows why anthropology matters to us all.Introducing Polity’s Why It Matters series: In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.Trade Review"Ingold, one of the most original and radical thinkers alive, presents his unique vision in a crystal-clear and passionate way. The book deserves a wide readership inside and outside the discipline."—Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo "Anthropology: Why It Matters is both an introduction to and a profound meditation on the classic questions of anthropology. It is a model of what I would call 'companionable thinking.'"—Veena Das, Johns Hopkins UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Chapter 1: On taking others seriously Chapter 2: Similarity and difference Chapter 3: A discipline divided Chapter 4: Rethinking the social Chapter 5: Anthropology for the future Further reading Index

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Book SynopsisRural people and communities continue to play important social, economic, and environmental roles at a time when societies are rapidly urbanizing. This unrivaled critical introduction, now in a comprehensively updated second edition, examines the causes and consequences of major social and economic transformations affecting rural populations in recent decades, explores policies developed to ameliorate problems or enhance opportunities, and highlights the resilience of rural people and communities. In an engaging, reader-friendly style, the book explores both socio-demographic and political economic aspects of rural transformation through an accessible and up-to-date blend of theory and empirical analysis, with each chapter’s discussion grounded in real-life case-study materials. The new edition has been completely revised throughout, with new data and literature, and carefully updated to address emerging issues of direct relevance to rural people and places, including a whole new chapter on rural politics. Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century will continue to be the standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural sociology, community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development, and population studies.Trade Review“Rural America finally has a textbook. David Brown and Kai Schafft provide an even-handed examination of rural American society that cuts through the mythology and stereotypes, documenting the processes and issues facing rural peoples and communities. This expanded new edition helps us understand not only what rural America is, but also what it means to be rural in an urbanizing and polarizing world.”Jeffrey Jacquet, The Ohio State University “The 2016 U.S. presidential election made it obvious that the experience of people in rural areas matters for the political, social, and economic wellbeing of the nation. For anyone wanting to get up to speed on the nature of life in rural places, this book is a goldmine."Katherine Cramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison"Deservedly marketed as a standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural and/or community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development and other related courses."Progress in Development StudiesTable of Contents Part I. Thinking About Rural Places in Metropolitan Society 1. Rurality in Metropolitan Societies 2. Urbanization and Population Redistribution 3. Rural Politics and Governance Part II. Rural Communities, Institutions and Environments 4. Understanding Community in Rural Society 5. Community Institutions in Rural Society 6. Natural Resources and Social Change Part III. Rural Populations 7. Youth, Aging, and the Life Course 8. Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas Part IV. Rural Economy and Socioeconomic Wellbeing 9. Making a Living in Rural Communities 10. Farms, Farmers, and Farming in Contemporary Rural Society 11. Poverty Across Rural People and Places Part V. Conclusions 12. A Transformed Rural Society: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future

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Book SynopsisRural people and communities continue to play important social, economic, and environmental roles at a time when societies are rapidly urbanizing. This unrivaled critical introduction, now in a comprehensively updated second edition, examines the causes and consequences of major social and economic transformations affecting rural populations in recent decades, explores policies developed to ameliorate problems or enhance opportunities, and highlights the resilience of rural people and communities. In an engaging, reader-friendly style, the book explores both socio-demographic and political economic aspects of rural transformation through an accessible and up-to-date blend of theory and empirical analysis, with each chapter’s discussion grounded in real-life case-study materials. The new edition has been completely revised throughout, with new data and literature, and carefully updated to address emerging issues of direct relevance to rural people and places, including a whole new chapter on rural politics. Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century will continue to be the standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural sociology, community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development, and population studies.Trade Review“Rural America finally has a textbook. David Brown and Kai Schafft provide an even-handed examination of rural American society that cuts through the mythology and stereotypes, documenting the processes and issues facing rural peoples and communities. This expanded new edition helps us understand not only what rural America is, but also what it means to be rural in an urbanizing and polarizing world.”Jeffrey Jacquet, The Ohio State University “The 2016 U.S. presidential election made it obvious that the experience of people in rural areas matters for the political, social, and economic wellbeing of the nation. For anyone wanting to get up to speed on the nature of life in rural places, this book is a goldmine."Katherine Cramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison"Deservedly marketed as a standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural and/or community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development and other related courses."Progress in Development StudiesTable of Contents Part I. Thinking About Rural Places in Metropolitan Society 1. Rurality in Metropolitan Societies 2. Urbanization and Population Redistribution 3. Rural Politics and Governance Part II. Rural Communities, Institutions and Environments 4. Understanding Community in Rural Society 5. Community Institutions in Rural Society 6. Natural Resources and Social Change Part III. Rural Populations 7. Youth, Aging, and the Life Course 8. Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas Part IV. Rural Economy and Socioeconomic Wellbeing 9. Making a Living in Rural Communities 10. Farms, Farmers, and Farming in Contemporary Rural Society 11. Poverty Across Rural People and Places Part V. Conclusions 12. A Transformed Rural Society: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future

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Book SynopsisIn Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.Trade Review"A theoretically well-informed, engaging account... Its comparative approach and theoretical richness will make it a worthwhile read not only for anthropologists of Iran, the Middle East, and Central Asia, but also for those in other disciplines working on such themes as youth culture, under- or unemployment, neoliberalism, inequality, gender and the family, crime and criminalization, and class." * Anthropological Quarterly *"Professor Khosravi has provided detailed, well written accounts of the lives of ordinary Iranians, as well as analysis of some contemporary film and artistic endeavors. His narrative gives welcome prominence to the Iranian middle and lower economic classes, with some additional material from areas outside of Tehran, including his native Bakhtiari region, where members of his family still reside. This book thus departs from other recent works that have focused on more elite populations, with heavy attention to the wealthier residents of northern Tehran." * The Middle East Journal *"Shahram Khosravi's elegant new book weaves together his two substantive areas-urban Iranian youth culture and migration and border studies-to narrate stories of social lives carved out of multiple precarities, ever-present waitings, but also, the need to hope. Dispensing with facile dichotomies that caricature contemporary Iran, Khosravi's rich and granular storytelling breathes life, in all of its complexity and contradiction, into depictions of Iran's most vulnerable populations." * Arzoo Osanloo, University of Washington *"In his second important anthropological accounting of social tensions in contemporary Iran, Shahram Khosravi deftly brings Iran into the conversation about the transformations affecting countries across the globe: precarity and the criminalization of youth; neoliberal practices of 'blaming the victims' of increased poverty; and street-level performances of resistance and demands for rights. Engaging with film, photography, painting, and street performativity, Khosravi shows Iran is not as 'other' as either Western or Iranian media portray it, and calls to mind comparative phenomena such as Japanese shut ins, American incarceration culture, and European migrant detention camps." * Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry *"Shahram Khosravi writes brilliantly about the unintended consequences of the Iranian Revolution on the traditional family, on the social lives of young people, on the 'street' as a space of free expression and protest, and on public walls as places of political expression. Precarious Lives is a thoroughly researched analysis of the 'precarious' society that is contemporary Iran, a country at war with its own youth." * Paul Stoller, author of The Sorcerer's Burden and 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology *"There is so much social theory incisively deployed by Shahram Khosravi, and so many pertinent anthropological works about other places used for comparative purposes, that Precarious Lives will appeal to more readers than those interested in Iran, or those interested in the anthropology of time and space." * Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne *

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Book SynopsisA fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today. Cover alt text:Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.Trade Review"From start to finish, Gut Anthro demonstrates how relations are integral to science. With bold, page-turning prose, Amber Benezra traces microbiokinships from kitchen tables to scientific laboratories, offering a refreshingly honest analysis of how knowledge and process are one and the same. Miscarriage. Diarrhea. Career ambitions. Humanitarian hubris. Anthropological complicity. We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, this is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are."—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala"This is an utterly arresting ethnographic examination of a networked bioscience project that stretches from sample collection in Bangladesh to data analysis at a U.S. university. Amber Benezra offers an account—rigorous, revelatory, wrenching—of the vexed promises of acting as both participant and observer in the contact zones of today’s international biomedical research."—Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. Olson’s book shifts our attention from space’s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies. Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth’s surface, Olson’s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments—whether terrestrial or beyond.Trade Review"This captivating book tells the story of how 'outer space' is being reimagined and remade in the key of the environmental, as a cosmic ecosystem. Drawing on fieldwork with scientists at an undersea space-analog habitat, at NASA mission control, and at a center for space medicine, Valerie Olson artfully demonstrates how our human home planet is the scale and place from which a habitable cosmos is made and imagined."—Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond"In this seminal ethnographic study, Valerie Olson offers nothing less than a new anthropological object: the system—solar, living, artificial, conceptual—for showing how ‘future space’ is being made on the horizons of the contemporary ecopolitical moment. Traveling alongside her, we come into close contact with knowledge that unEarthed entities are uniquely placed to reveal, and with questions that closed and semi-open systems pose to timeworn discliplinary limits."—Debbora Battaglia, author of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces"Olson’s ethnography sheds light on the everyday practices that go into the creation not only of specific systems and environments, but also of a general way of thinking about relations."—CHOICE"Into the Extreme is a testament to Olson’s comprehensive and creative reading practices and skillful ability to identify and synthesize concerns stretching across a diverse set of fields, histories, and genres."—Anthropological QuarterlyTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Space Systems1. Metasystem2. Connection3. Separation4. Transhabitation5. Solar EcosystemConclusion: Future SpaceAcknowledgmentsBibliography

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Book SynopsisWhat might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.Trade Review"In Stuart McLean’s brave and beautiful book, the question is how do we live now. But here, living is a social-aesthetic-political-material fabulation of virtualities, events, and singularities. Context and history are not givens but modes of engagement, expressive media exceed human intentions, and anthropology carries forward the worlding of alternatives."—Kathleen C. Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects"Fictionalizing Anthropology productively and creatively extends, expands, revitalizes, and modifies a very old and long abandoned anthropological tradition: comparison. Stuart McLean creates a vibrant theoretical framework to rethink representation in literary and anthropological theory."—Eduardo Kohn, McGill University"Fictionalizing Anthropology asks us to jump into the void and apprehend the puzzling, unlimited repository of philosophical concepts given by the universe, individuated itself through myths, metaphors, performance art, bodily fluids, Inuit spirits and cunning trickery." —European Association of Social AnthropologistsTable of ContentsContentsProloguePart I. Anthropology: A Fabulatory Art1. An Encounter in the Mist2. Talabot3. Fake4. Anthropologies and Fictions5. Knud Rasmussen6. The Voice of the Thunder7. Metaphor and/or Metamorphosis8. “They Aren’t Symbols—They’re Real”Part II. In Between9. Liminality: An Old Story?10. The Dead Have Never Been Modern11. The God Who Comes12. Between the Times13. Anthropology ≠ Ethnography14. Fabulatory ComparativismPart III. Gyro Nights: Inhuman Culture/Inhuman Nature15. Islands before and after History16. Papay Gyro Nights17. The Time of the Ancestors?18. In the Beginning Were the Giants19. Tiamaterialism20. Blubberbomb21. A Globe of Fire22. NighttimeAfterword: Anthropology Is Art Is FrogAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.Trade Review"In Stuart McLean’s brave and beautiful book, the question is how do we live now. But here, living is a social-aesthetic-political-material fabulation of virtualities, events, and singularities. Context and history are not givens but modes of engagement, expressive media exceed human intentions, and anthropology carries forward the worlding of alternatives."—Kathleen C. Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects"Fictionalizing Anthropology productively and creatively extends, expands, revitalizes, and modifies a very old and long abandoned anthropological tradition: comparison. Stuart McLean creates a vibrant theoretical framework to rethink representation in literary and anthropological theory."—Eduardo Kohn, McGill University"Fictionalizing Anthropology asks us to jump into the void and apprehend the puzzling, unlimited repository of philosophical concepts given by the universe, individuated itself through myths, metaphors, performance art, bodily fluids, Inuit spirits and cunning trickery." —European Association of Social AnthropologistsTable of ContentsContentsProloguePart I. Anthropology: A Fabulatory Art1. An Encounter in the Mist2. Talabot3. Fake4. Anthropologies and Fictions5. Knud Rasmussen6. The Voice of the Thunder7. Metaphor and/or Metamorphosis8. “They Aren’t Symbols—They’re Real”Part II. In Between9. Liminality: An Old Story?10. The Dead Have Never Been Modern11. The God Who Comes12. Between the Times13. Anthropology ≠ Ethnography14. Fabulatory ComparativismPart III. Gyro Nights: Inhuman Culture/Inhuman Nature15. Islands before and after History16. Papay Gyro Nights17. The Time of the Ancestors?18. In the Beginning Were the Giants19. Tiamaterialism20. Blubberbomb21. A Globe of Fire22. NighttimeAfterword: Anthropology Is Art Is FrogAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTwo previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, “Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,” discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lévi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne—and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Désveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne à Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lévi-Strauss’s talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary. Trade Review"To learn from such a guileless mind, perhaps we have to reverse background and figure in the already inverted approach to reading applied to philosophers by looking for the answers rather than the questions—for statements so transparent that they become enigmas upon scrutiny—and then find or imagine their missing interrogative mates."—Peter Skafish, from the Introduction

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Book SynopsisTwo previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, “Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,” discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lévi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne—and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Désveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne à Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lévi-Strauss’s talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary. Trade Review"To learn from such a guileless mind, perhaps we have to reverse background and figure in the already inverted approach to reading applied to philosophers by looking for the answers rather than the questions—for statements so transparent that they become enigmas upon scrutiny—and then find or imagine their missing interrogative mates."—Peter Skafish, from the Introduction

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Book SynopsisA methodological follow-up to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet The environmental and climatic crises of our time are fundamentally multispecies crises. And the Anthropocene, a time of “human-made” disruptions on a planetary scale, is a disruption of the fabric of life as a whole. The contributors to Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene argue that understanding the multispecies nature of these disruptions requires multispecies methods.Answering methodological challenges posed by the Anthropocene, Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene retools the empirical study of the socioecological chaos of the contemporary moment across the arts, human science, and natural science. Based on critical landscape history, multispecies curiosity, and collaboration across disciplines and knowledge systems, the volume presents thirteen transdisciplinary accounts of practical methodological experimentation, highlighting diverse settings ranging from the High Arctic to the deserts of southern Africa and from the pampas of Argentina to the coral reefs of the Western Pacific, always insisting on the importance of firsthand, “rubber boots” immersion in the field.The methodological companion to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minnesota, 2017), this collection puts forth empirical studies of the multispecies messiness of contemporary life that investigate some of the critical questions of our time.Contributors: Filippo Bertoni, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin; Harshavardhan Bhat, U of Westminster; Nathalia Brichet, U of Copenhagen; Janne Flora, Aarhus U, Denmark; Natalie Forssman, U of British Columbia; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Kirsten Hastrup, U of Copenhagen; Colin Hoag, Smith College; Joseph Klein, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andrew S. Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Daniel Münster, U of Oslo; Ursula Münster, U of Oslo; Jon Rasmus Nyquist, U of Oslo; Katy Overstreet, U of Copenhagen; Pierre du Plessis, U of Oslo; Meredith Root-Bernstein; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, U of California,Santa Cruz; Stine Vestbo.Trade Review "From snorkel fins to worn sneakers, drip torches, boats, dogsleds, and the hooves of a horse, Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene is a bold essay collection that pays attention to the ambulatory prosthetics that we wear or carry into particular fields (ocean, forest, savannah, university) and their many histories—material, colonial, multispecies. Situated knowledge has found its footing."—Melody Jue, author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater "Explicitly cross-disciplinary, [Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene] will be of wide interest to colleges and universities with larger libraries."—CHOICE "Where [Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene] really shines—and offers something new—is in its ethical and political imperative to develop novel methodologies to understand our current moment."—H-Net Reviews

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Book SynopsisA study of Palestine-Israel through the unexpected lens of nature conservation Settling Nature documents the widespread ecological warfare practiced by the state of Israel. Recruited to the front lines are fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—on the Israeli side—against goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub—which are affiliated with the Palestinian side. These nonhuman soldiers are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment as such.​Drawing on more than seventy interviews with Israel’s nature officials and on observations of their work, this book examines the careful orchestration of this animated warfare by Israel’s nature administration on both sides of the Green Line. Alongside its powerful protection of wildlife biodiversity, the territorial reach of Israel’s nature protection is remarkable: to date, nearly 25 percent of the country’s total land mass is assigned as a park or a reserve. Settling Nature argues that the administration of nature advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space.Trade Review"This remarkable book expertly covers a neglected part of the planet’s most commented-on conflict, the central role of nature protection in Palestine-Israel. Combining rich empirics and eye-opening theoretical insights, Irus Braverman presses a highly ‘unsettling’ yet profoundly important point: how the conservation of critical more-than-human natures sits at the heart of many of the most consequential and distressing power struggles of our time."—Bram Büscher, author of The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism"Irus Braverman’s fascinating account of the formulation and enforcement of conservation policies in Palestine-Israel examines a series of cases that exemplify tensions that emerge around attempts to conserve species, landscapes, and ecosystems. As it illuminates the environmental and political history of Palestine-Israel, Settling Nature will also engage those interested in the conflicts surrounding conservation movements in many other places."—Harriet Ritvo, author of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England

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Book SynopsisA journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urban One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the planet, and cities are replete with nonhuman life. Yet current accounts of the urban remain resolutely anthropocentric. Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making.From macaques and cattle in Delhi to the invasive parakeet colonies in London, Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. He reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure, the built environment, design, habitation, and everyday practices of dwelling and provides a critical intervention in animal and urban studies. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how human and nonhuman actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways.Through novel combinations of ethnography and ethology, and focusing on interlocutors that are not the usual suspects animating urban theory, Barua’s work considers nonhuman lifeworlds and the differences they make in understanding urbanicity. Lively Cities is an agenda-setting intervention, ultimately proposing a new grammar of urban life.Trade Review "Urbanities are the intersection and always provisional conjunctions of multiple inhabitations negotiated across a heterogeneity of agencies and forces—engendering dispositions always unsettled in their everyday encounters and unruly ecologies. This text is an unparalleled exploration of the liveliness that other-than-human beings infuse into a sociality extended beyond biopolitical conceptualization and control, underlining an urban economy more attuned to its natural surrounds. An essential excursion across the shifting landscapes of incipient sustenance."—AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law. What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade. A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "The Cactus Hunters takes us into the fascinating world of succulent collecting. Jared D. Margulies skillfully traces the consequential ways in which people and cacti move one another, remaking possibilities for life, desire, wealth, extinction, and more in the process. This book offers a powerful example of the value of close attention to the entangled lives of plants and their people."—Thom van Dooren, author of A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions "Follow Jared D. Margulies and his infectious curiosity on a riveting global tour starring charismatic cacti and the people who desire them. In moving plants and the unconscious to center stage, The Cactus Hunters is a deeply felt and nuanced reckoning with desire as a structurally produced and world-making force—a unique and major contribution to political ecology."—Rosemary Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade "An esoteric deep dive into the illegal cactus trade."—Publishers Weekly Table of Contents Contents Preface Abbreviations Introduction: Cactus, Be My Desire 1. On Collecting and Caring for Cacti 2. Illicit Encounters with Succulent Collectors 3. Between the Iron Curtain and the Glass House 4. Confronting Extinction Anxiety in Cactus Country 5. A New Illicit Trade 6. Learning to Know a Plant 7. Disentangling Succulent Desires 8. For a Flourishing Geography of Succulent Life Acknowledgments Additional Resources Notes Index

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Book SynopsisEPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization. Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.Table of Contents1. Introduction - Alan Wiig, Kevin Ward, Theresa Enright, Mike Hodson, Hamil Pearsall and Jonathan Silver 2. Infrastructure and the Tragedy of Development - Kafui Attoh 3. Temporalities of the Climate Crisis: Maintenance, Green Finance and Racialized Austerity in New York City and Cape Town - Patrick Bigger and Nate Millington 4. Emerging Techno-ecologies of Energy: Examining Digital Interventions and Engagements with Urban Infrastructure - Andrés Luque-Ayala and Jonathan Rutherford 5. Infrastructural Reparations: Reimagining Reparative Justice in Haiti and Puerto Rico - Mimi Sheller 6. Making Shit Social: Combined Sewer Overflows, Water Citizenship and the Infrastructural Commons - Mark Usher 7. More than ‘Where You Do Football’: Reconceptualizing London’s Urban Green Spaces through Green Infrastructure Planning - Meredith Whitten 8. Global Infrastructure and Urban Futures: London’s Transforming Royal Albert Dock - Jonathan Silver and Alan Wiig Afterword 1: On Fetishes, Fragments and Futures: Regionalizing Infrastructural Lives - Michael Glass, Jen Nelles and Jean-Paul Addie Afterword 2: Incomplete Futures of Urban Infrastructure - Prince Guma

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Book SynopsisBased on the author’s eight years of fieldwork with the United Nations-led Conference of Parties (COP), In Quest of a Shared Planet offers an illuminating first-person ethnographic perspective on climate change negotiations. Focusing on the Paris Agreement, anthropologist Naveeda Khan introduces readers to the only existing global approach to the problem of climate change, one that took nearly thirty years to be collectively agreed upon. She shares her detailed descriptions of COP21 to COP25 and growing understanding of the intricacies of the climate negotiation process, leading her to ask why countries of the Global South invested in this slow-moving process and to explore how they have maneuvered it. With a focus on the Bangladeshi delegation at the COPs, Khan draws out what it means to be a small, poor, and dependent country within the negotiation process. Her interviews with negotiators within country delegations uncover their pathways to the negotiating tables. Through observations of training sessions of negotiators of the Global South, Khan seeks to reveal understandings of what is or is not achievable within negotiated texts and the power of deal-making and deferrals. She profiles individuals who had committed themselves to the climate negotiation process, moving between the Secretariat, Parties, activists, and the wider UN system to bring their principles, strategies, emotions, and visions into view. She explores how the newest pillar of climate action, loss and damage, emerged historically and how developed countries attempted to control it in the process. Khan suggests that we understand the Global South’s pursuit of loss and damage not only as a politics of forcing the issue of a conjoined future upon the Global North, but as a gift to the youth of the world to secure that future. With this book Khan hopes to rekindle an older way of doing politics through the tenets of diplomacy upheld by the UN that have been overshadowed of late by the politics of confrontation. She stresses that while the tension between efforts of equity and solidarity and global economic competition, which have run through the negotiation process, might undercut the urgency to carry out climate mitigation, it needs to be addressed for meaningful and sustainable climate action. Deeply insightful and highly readable, In Quest of a Shared Planet is a stirring call to action that highlights the key role responsive and active youth have in climate negotiations. It is an invitation not only to understand the climate negotiation process, but also to navigate it (for those planning to attend sessions themselves) and to critique it—with, the author hopes, sympathy and an eye to viable alternatives. In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.Table of ContentsList of Acronyms and Abbreviations | ix Bodies under the UNFCCC | xiii Introduction: The Climate Regime | 1 1 How to COP | 11 2 The Voice of Bangladesh | 38 3 Who Wants to Be a Negotiator? | 59 4 Politics in Between-Spaces | 78 5 Accounting for Change in the Paris Agreement | 104 6 A Thrice-Told Tale of Negotiations | 123 7 The House of Loss and Damage | 154 Conclusion: The Gift of the Global South | 173 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 195 Index | 219

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Book SynopsisBased on the author’s eight years of fieldwork with the United Nations-led Conference of Parties (COP), In Quest of a Shared Planet offers an illuminating first-person ethnographic perspective on climate change negotiations. Focusing on the Paris Agreement, anthropologist Naveeda Khan introduces readers to the only existing global approach to the problem of climate change, one that took nearly thirty years to be collectively agreed upon. She shares her detailed descriptions of COP21 to COP25 and growing understanding of the intricacies of the climate negotiation process, leading her to ask why countries of the Global South invested in this slow-moving process and to explore how they have maneuvered it. With a focus on the Bangladeshi delegation at the COPs, Khan draws out what it means to be a small, poor, and dependent country within the negotiation process. Her interviews with negotiators within country delegations uncover their pathways to the negotiating tables. Through observations of training sessions of negotiators of the Global South, Khan seeks to reveal understandings of what is or is not achievable within negotiated texts and the power of deal-making and deferrals. She profiles individuals who had committed themselves to the climate negotiation process, moving between the Secretariat, Parties, activists, and the wider UN system to bring their principles, strategies, emotions, and visions into view. She explores how the newest pillar of climate action, loss and damage, emerged historically and how developed countries attempted to control it in the process. Khan suggests that we understand the Global South’s pursuit of loss and damage not only as a politics of forcing the issue of a conjoined future upon the Global North, but as a gift to the youth of the world to secure that future. With this book Khan hopes to rekindle an older way of doing politics through the tenets of diplomacy upheld by the UN that have been overshadowed of late by the politics of confrontation. She stresses that while the tension between efforts of equity and solidarity and global economic competition, which have run through the negotiation process, might undercut the urgency to carry out climate mitigation, it needs to be addressed for meaningful and sustainable climate action. Deeply insightful and highly readable, In Quest of a Shared Planet is a stirring call to action that highlights the key role responsive and active youth have in climate negotiations. It is an invitation not only to understand the climate negotiation process, but also to navigate it (for those planning to attend sessions themselves) and to critique it—with, the author hopes, sympathy and an eye to viable alternatives. In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.Table of ContentsList of Acronyms and Abbreviations | ix Bodies under the UNFCCC | xiii Introduction: The Climate Regime | 1 1 How to COP | 11 2 The Voice of Bangladesh | 38 3 Who Wants to Be a Negotiator? | 59 4 Politics in Between-Spaces | 78 5 Accounting for Change in the Paris Agreement | 104 6 A Thrice-Told Tale of Negotiations | 123 7 The House of Loss and Damage | 154 Conclusion: The Gift of the Global South | 173 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 195 Index | 219

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Book SynopsisThe Origins of Human Society traces the development of human culture from its origins over 2 million years ago to the emergence of literate civilization. In addition to a global coverage of prehistoric life, the book pays specific attention to the origins and dispersal of anatomically-modern humans, the development of symbolic expression, the transition from mobile foraging bands to sedentary households, early agriculture and its consequences, the emergence of social differentiation and hereditary ranking, and the prehistoric roots of ancient states and empires. The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.Trade Review"Bogucki has succeeded admirably in his attempt to review the most up-to-date findings and interpretive issues in world prehistory ... This book will enlarge and modify our understanding of prehistory." Journal of World History Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables. Series Editor's Preface. Preface. A Note on Dating. 1. The Gateway to Human Prehistory. 2. The Earliest Human Societies. 3. The Human Diaspora. 4. After the Ice Age. 5. Seeds for Civilization. 6. Pathways to Inequality. 7. Elites and Commoners. 8. Early States and Chiefdoms in the Shadow of States. Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award 1999 Winner of the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize 1998 This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the United States.Trade Review"Growing up Bilingual is a profoundly compelling account of what it means to come of age in an economically impoverished but linguistically rich cultural environment.Without romanticising an often grim situation, Zentella tells a story that has long needed to be told. It should be read by every teacher and social worker who deals with Puerto Rican children. It should also occupy a prominent spot on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in language policy, ethnolinguistics, applied linguistics, bilingual education, ethnic identity or Hispanic studies."—Alicia Pousada, University of Puerto Rico "Along with her splendid sense of the need to portray memory and history, she brings wit, grace, and intelligence to her intimate and detailed portrayals of the life and language of Puerto Rican children and their families in New York."—Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University "Zentella's book achieves its goal of describing the social and linguistic realities of New York Perto Ricans...those who advocate for an English-only society and the elimination of bilingual education, as well as their foes, should read this work and consider the significance of language for those who are subject to domination by a different culture."—Yolanda Rivera-Castillo, University of Alabama-TuscaloosaTable of Contents1. Hablamos Los Dos. We Speak Both: Studying Bilingualism in the Community Context. 2. The Community: El Bloque. 3. The Bilingual/Multidialectal Repertoire of El Bloque. 4. Bilingualism En Casa. 5. The Hows and Whys of "Spanglish". 6. The Grammar of "Spanglish". 7. Life and Language in Young Adulthood. 8. Isabel: A Special Case. 9. Spanish Competence. 10. Raising the Next Generation of New York Puerto Ricans. 11. Maria: Learning to Defenderse. 12. Expanding Repertoires: Linking Language, Education, and the New Diversity. References. Tables. Figures.

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Book SynopsisIn this fascinating collection of essays, the 'fissured terrain' of the Sociology of Culture is charted as never before. Covering a wide range of subjects and a diversity of approaches, this volume demonstrates how far contemporaray sociologists of culture have come in challenging the way that culture has been and is perceived within mainstream sociology.Table of ContentsList of figures. Contributors. Preface. 1. Introduction: The Challenge of the Sociology of Culture to Sociology as a Discipline: Diana Crane (University of Pennsylvania). 2. Culture and the Integration of National Societies: Michael Schudson (University of California, San Diego). 3. 'Cultural Pluralism' in Historical Sociology: Recent Theoretical Directions: Ewa Morawska and Willfried Spohn (University of Pennsylvania; University of Washington). 4. Fissured Terrain: Methodological Approaches and Research Styles in Culture and Politics: Mabel Berezin (University of Pennsylvania). 5. Cultural Theories of Organizational Behavior: The Social Construction of Rational Organizing Principles: Frank R. Dobbin (Princeton University). 6. Toward a Sociology of Material Culture: Science Studies, Cultural Studies and the Meanings of Things: Chandra Mukerji (University of California, San Diego). 7. Culture Studies Through the Production Perspective: Progress and Prospects: Richard A. Peterson (Vanderbilt University). 8. Cultural Production as 'Society in the Making': Architecture as an Exemplar of the Social Construction of Cultural Artifacts: David Brain (New College of the University of South Florida). 9. The Sociology of Cultural Reception: Notes Toward an Emergin Paradigm: Andrea Press (University of Michigan). 10. Methodological Dilemmas in the Sociology of Art: Anne Bowler (University of Delaware). 11. Cultural Conceptions of Human Motivation and Their Significance for Culture Theory: Steve Derne (SUNY-Genesco). References. Index.

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Book SynopsisIn 1987, Professor Richard Stivers was the recipient of an Earhart Foundation research fellowship to undertake a study of American morality. The Culture of Cynicism is the result. It is not only the most wide-ranging book yet written on the subject, tracing the intellectual history of American morality from its European origins in the Middle Ages to the 1990s, but alos by far the most thought-provoking.Trade Review"A bitingly powerful critique of American morality: Stivers's analysis is keen, penetrating, devastating." Professor Andrew M. Greeley, The University of Chicago Table of ContentsPreface. 1. The Absence of Morality, or Morality Assumes New Forms. 2. Success Morality: From Economic to Political Ideology. 3. A Morality of Happiness and Health: Advertising as Liturgy. 4. From the Moral to the Technical: the Necessary. 5. From the Moral to the Normal: the Ephemeral. 6. From the Moral to the Visual: the Compensatory. 7. A Morality of Power, A Morality Without Meaning. 8. Against the New Morality.

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Book SynopsisThe modernity and postmodernity debates of recent years have tended to direct attention towards frameworks of periodization, and away from the social and cultural processes currently at work in the world. This volume reverses the emphasis, to focus on modes of authority and identity, and to examine the roles which existing and new traditions may play in our epoch. It announces a new agenda for contemporary social theory, moving beyond current debates over (post)modernity. The contributors include Mark Poster, Richard Sennett, Ulrich Beck, Margaret Archer, Mary Douglas and Thomas Luckmann.Trade Review"Essential reading for any scholar interested in what it means to be modern today." David Ingram, Loyola University of ChicagoTable of ContentsPreface. 1. Introduction: Detraditionalization and its Rivals: Paul Heelas. Part I: Losing the Traditional:. 2. Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms': Perspectives and Controversies of a Subject-Oriented Sociology: Ulrick Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 3. Morality in the Age of Contingency: Zygmunt Bauman. 4. Complexity, Structural Contingencies and Value Conflicts: Niklas Luhmann. 5. The Privatization of Religion and Morality: Thomas Luckmann. Part II: Detraditionalization and Traditions Today:. 6. Tradition and Self in a Mediated World: John B. Thompson. 7. Identity, Meaning and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression: Thomas W. Luke. 8. Detraditionalization and the Certainty of Uncertain Futures: Barbara Adam. 9. Detraditionalization, Character and the Limits to Agency: Colin Campbell. Part III: Detraditionalization, Human Values and Solidarity: . 10. The Foreigner: Richard Sennett. 11. On Things not Being Worse and the Ethic of Humanity: Paul Heelas. 12. Community Beyond Tradition: Paul Morris. 13. Tradition and the Limits of Difference: Scott Lash. Part IV: Dissolving Detraditionalization: . 14. Databases as Discourse, or Electronic Interpretations: Mark Poster. 15. Authority and Genealogy of Subjectivity: Nikolas Rose. Index.

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Book SynopsisThe modernity and postmodernity debates of recent years have tended to direct attention towards frameworks of periodization, and away from the social and cultural processes currently at work in the world. This volume reverses the emphasis, to focus on modes of authority and identity, and to examine the roles which existing and new traditions may play in our epoch. It announces a new agenda for contemporary social theory, moving beyond current debates over (post)modernity. The contributors include Mark Poster, Richard Sennett, Ulrich Beck, Margaret Archer, Mary Douglas and Thomas Luckmann.Trade Review"Essential reading for any scholar interested in what it means to be modern today." David Ingram, Loyola University of ChicagoTable of ContentsPreface. 1. Introduction: Detraditionalization and its Rivals: Paul Heelas. Part I: Losing the Traditional:. 2. Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms': Perspectives and Controversies of a Subject-Oriented Sociology: Ulrick Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 3. Morality in the Age of Contingency: Zygmunt Bauman. 4. Complexity, Structural Contingencies and Value Conflicts: Niklas Luhmann. 5. The Privatization of Religion and Morality: Thomas Luckmann. Part II: Detraditionalization and Traditions Today:. 6. Tradition and Self in a Mediated World: John B. Thompson. 7. Identity, Meaning and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space-Time Compression: Thomas W. Luke. 8. Detraditionalization and the Certainty of Uncertain Futures: Barbara Adam. 9. Detraditionalization, Character and the Limits to Agency: Colin Campbell. Part III: Detraditionalization, Human Values and Solidarity: . 10. The Foreigner: Richard Sennett. 11. On Things not Being Worse and the Ethic of Humanity: Paul Heelas. 12. Community Beyond Tradition: Paul Morris. 13. Tradition and the Limits of Difference: Scott Lash. Part IV: Dissolving Detraditionalization: . 14. Databases as Discourse, or Electronic Interpretations: Mark Poster. 15. Authority and Genealogy of Subjectivity: Nikolas Rose. Index.

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Book SynopsisThis is an examination of one of the most puzzling and important issues in western economic analysis - corporate inertia in the face of known threats to survival. The book is part synthetic, part based on intensive case studies, and part theoretical.Trade Review"In The Cultural Crisis of the Firm Erica Schoenberger has produced a thoughtful and accessible book that begins to address the much neglected questions of why firms sometimes get it wrong (and sometimes disastrously wrong) when they try to respond to change in their operational environments." Michael Taylor, University of Portsmouth "The Cultural Crisis of the Firm was an enjoyable, stimulating and all-too-short read ... it should appeal both to geographers and non-geographers alike. Buy it and read it!" A.Tickell, University of Southampton "Schoenberger's work presents a credible retheorization of the firm and the nature of industrial decline that deserves further reading and debate." Karen Bakker, University of OxfordTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. Part I. Competition, Time, and Space. 1. The End of an Industrial Era. 2. Competition, Time, and Space in Industrial Change. 3. The New Competition and the Recalibration of Time and Space. 4. The Sources of Industrial Rigidity. Part II. Corporate Culture, Strategy, and Change. 5. Corporate Culture and Strategy. 6. Culture, Identity, and Corporate Transformations: case Studies. Part III. The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. Bibliography. Index

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Book SynopsisSociocultural evolution is the most important concept that has guided social science thought over the past 300 years. Throughout this time it has, however, been fiercely contested and has changed as it has slowly discarded the providential concerns that originally characterized it. This book traces the gradual development of the concept of sociocultural evolution and relates how it is currently understood, and misunderstood, to the major political and cultural debates of the present day. The author examines, in particular, issues relating to neo-conservative socioeconomic policy and postmodernism, which he regards as the chief cultural expression of transnational capitalism. He argues that continued sociocultural development requires a greater degree of planning than ever before in human history and far more general participation in the planning process than has been possible or attempted in the past. Sociocultural Evolution will be welcomed by students of anthropology, history, and archaeology, as well as general readers interested in the concerns surrounding further technological development and social change.Trade Review"Trigger writes about sociocultural evolution in clear, authoritative prose, informed by a marvelous breadth of scholarship in archaeology, anthropology and history. His historical essay stands as a powerful reminder that diverse social theorists have in common compelling issues and unsolved problems; equally, it is a vigorous tribute to the analytical and moral strengths of the Enlightenment heritage. It is a book to savor, debate, teach, and press on colleagues, students and friends alike." Professor Bruce Winterhalder, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillTable of ContentsSeries Editor's Preface. Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Reversing Utopia. 3. Enlightenment Evolution. 4. Romantic Reaction. 5. Racist Evolution. 6. Revolution and Solidarity. 7. Western Evolutionary Counterpoint. 8. American Neoevolutionism. 9. Evolution Attacked Again. 10. The Planning Imperative. 11. Evolution and the Future. 12. Conclusion. Bibliographic Note. References. Index.

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Book SynopsisThis is the first volume of an interdisciplinary publication, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history and English. Manuscripts focus on the intersection of interpretive critical theory, qualitative inquiry, culture, media, history, biography and social structure.Table of ContentsForeword - opening up cultural studies, Norman K. Denzin. Part 1 Sociology and cultural studies: relativizing sociology - the challenge of cultural studies, Steven Seidman; postmodernism, cultural studies and contemporary social inquiry, David R. Dickens; postponing the postmodern, Ben Agger. Part 2 Feminist discourse: anorexia nervosa - rereading the stories that became me, Paula Saukko; my story of anorexia nervosa - new discourses for change and recovery, Mary Walstrom; it's just a female thing, Lisa M. Sammiguel; what's wrong with this picture? comparing lived experience and textual representations of endometriosis, Lisa M. Sammiguel. Part 3 Race, popular culture and the media: race, suburban resentment and the representation of the inner city in contemporary film and television, Cameron McCarthy et al; look - it's the NBAs showtime - visions of race and popular imagery, Cheryl L. Cole and David L. Andrews; where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? discourses of nation, family and masculinity in Dyersville, IA, Charles Fruehling Springwood; Oliver Stone's Vietnam trilogy - pseudo-realist narratives and male hegemony, Andrea Fontana and Claudia Collins; the new childhood - home alone as a way of life, Joe Kincheloe; the emergence of contemporary sport forms - paintball, Robert Rinehart. Part 4 Critical pedagogy and interventionist texts: mobilizing meaning, demobilizing critique? dilemmas in the deconstruction of educational discourse, Maggie Maclure and Ian Stronach; from a privileged position - teachers, research and popular culture, Chris Richards; death (an assemblage), Steven Wiley.

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Book SynopsisSub-Saharan Africa is one of the most linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse regions of the world. As in the rest of the world, deaf people live throughout sub-Saharan communities. This is a research on sub-Saharan signed languages and deaf community - organizing has created the opportunity to gather together the perspectives presented herein. Eighteen contributors illuminate the circumstances pertaining to cross-border, cross-regional, and global engagements in sub-Saharan deaf communities.

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Book SynopsisThe Maya are the single largest group of indigenous people living in North and Central America. Beginning in the early 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Maya fled the terror of Guatemalan civil strife to safety in Mexico and the U.S. This ethnography of Mayan immigrants who settled in Indiatown, a small agricultural community in south central Florida, presents the experiences of these traditional people, their adaptations to life in the U.S., and the ways they preserve their ancestral culture. For more than a decade, Allan F. Burns has been researching and doing advocacy work for these immigrant Maya, who speak Kanjobal, Quiche, Maman , and several other of the more than thirty distinct languages in southern Mexico and Guatemala. In this fist book on the Guatemalan Maya in the U.S, he uses their many voices to communicate the experience of the Maya in Florida and describes the advantages and results of applied anthropology in refugee studies and cultural adaptation. Burns describes the political and social background of the Guatemalan immigrants to the U.S. and includes personal accounts of individual strategies for leaving Guatemala and traveling to Florida. Examining how they interact with the community and recreate a Maya society in the U.S., he considers how low-wage labor influences the social structure of Maya immigrant society and discusses the effects of U.S. immigration policy on these refugees. Author note: Allan F. Burns is Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. The author of "An Epoch of Miracles", he has produced four video programs on Maya refugees in Florida.Trade Review"Effectively interweaving ethnography and applied anthropology, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the complex issues involving resettlement. The inclusion of Maya voices is particularly evocative, helping to personalize the challenges associated with changing family roles, community structure, and ethnic identities."—James Loucky, Professor of Anthropology, Western Washington UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction Jeronimo Camposeco 1. Maya Refugees and Applied Anthropology 2. Escape and Arrival 3. Life Crisis and Ritual 4. The Maya in Community and Ethnic Context 5. Work and Changes in Social Structure 6. Conflict and the Evolution of a New Maya Identity 7. Visual Anthropology and the Maya 8. Always Maya Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment. Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.Trade Review"[A] thought provoking account of the history of Hawai'i's indigenous people.... [Buck] examines the transformations of successive social structures and the various relationships of power and domination in Hawaiian history before and after contact with the West. Buck uses the changing contexts of the production, practice and meaning of the chant and hula, and the later emergence of Hawaiian music, to inform our understanding of the cultural and social implication of political and economic change.... Well worth reading."—Journal of American History"Buck has written an exemplary theoretical meditation on the politics of cutlure and of history, embedded in a richly nuanced and evocative study of Hawai'i's past."—American Studies"Betty Buck has a rare gift. She reads, understands, and processes a wide array of political, philosophical, and literary theory well enough to apply the ideas to specific cases, phenomena, or processes and to ask questions of that material that less theoretically informed researchers are far less likely to find interesting, or to even ask."—Virginia R. Dominguez, University of California, Santa-CruzTable of Contents1. Introduction Competing Myths of Hawai'I * History and the Politics of Culture * Hawaiian Historiography 2. Thinking about Hawaiian History Conceptualizing Structural Change: Marxist Perspectives * Language and Power: Poststructuralist Perspectives * 3. Hawai'i before Contact with the West * The Hawaiian Social Structure * Ideological Reproduction * Chant and Hula: At the Ideological Center * Structure and Change before Contact 4. Western Penetration and Structural Transformation The Penetration of Capitalism * Transformation to Capitalism: The Mahele * The New Political-Economy of Sugar * Hawaiian Sovereignty at Risk 5. Transformations in Ideological Representations: Chant and Hula Cultural Interaction in Hawai'I * The Intrusion of Western Culture * Changes in Hawaiian Chant and Hula * New Forms of Hawaiian Music * Music and Resistance 6. Transformations in Language and Power The Movement from Orality to Literacy * The Power of Writing * The Displacement of Hawaiian by English * Discourses about Chang and Hula 7. Contending Representations of Hawaiian Culture The Political-Economy of Hawai'i in the Twentieth Century * Hawaiian Music and the Industries of Culture * Tourism and Paradise: Appropriating Hawaiian Culture * The Politics of Culture-Hawai'i Style * Hawaiians and the Politics of Culture Notes Glossary Index

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Book SynopsisIn a small, locally owned Trinidadian factory that produces household goods, 80 percent of the line workers are women, almost all black or East Indian. The supervisors are all men, either white or East Indian. Kevin Yelvington worked for a year in this factory to study how ethnicity and gender are integral elements of the class structure, a social and economic structure that permeates all relations between men and women in the factory. These primary divisions determine the way the production process is ordered and labor divided. Unlike women in other industries in "underdeveloped" parts of the world who are recruited by foreign firms, Caribbean women have always contributed to the local economy. Within this historical context, Yelvington outlines the development of the state, and addresses exploitation and domination in the labor process. Yelvington also documents the sexually charged interactions between workers and managers and explores how both use flirting and innuendo to their advantage. Weddings and other social events outside the factory provide insightful details about how the creation of social identities carries over to all aspects of the local culture. Author note: Kevin A. Yelvington teaches anthropology at the University of South Florida and is editor of Trinidad Ethnicity.Trade Review"With a lively interplay of theory and ethnography, Producing Power reaches the high watermark of Caribbean studies. Anthropologists and social scientists hungry for texts that contextualize ethnicity will find in Yelvington's work the keen insight and sensitivity necessary to document the ways ethnicity, gender, and class are defined and revised in relation to one another as they influence the production process." --David Griffith, East Carolina University "Kevin Yelvington's astute participant observer eyes allow the reader to venture onto the factory floor and listen to workers, particularly women workers, to management, and to the owner. Another valuable aspect is Yelvington's sophisticated, in-depth theoretical discussion of race and class in Trinidad. The richness of this work rests on the interplay of sound ethical fieldwork, and superior theory building. Yelvington carefully interprets factory workers words, insights, philosophical treatises, wit, charm, and everyday lives. Moving from trade union busting efforts to birthday celebrations, the workplace becomes a site of contestation for power and various forms of cultural identity." --A. Lynn Bolles, Department of Women's Studies University of Maryland "In this volume, Kevin Yelvington undertakes an ambitious project: to examine class, race, and gender inequalities as facets of the same unitary structure by contrast to earlier approaches that envisioned capitalism and patriarchy as separate systems. The result is a richly textured analysis which succeeds where others have failed... [H]e reveals the strains between the intentions of workers and those of employers, between resistance and compliance, between pleasure and alienation... [T]he book provides a model for research and analysis whose implications are far reaching." --M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, from the ForewordTable of ContentsList of Tables and Illustrations Acknowledgments Forewords -- M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly Introduction 1. Ethnicity, Gender, Class, and the Politics of Power 2. Locating the Ethnography in History, Economy, and Society 3. The Site of Production: A Trinidadian Factory 4. Ethnicity at Work 5. Gender at Work 6. Class at Work Conclusion Appendix: The EUL Supervisors and Line Workers Notes References Index

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