Social and cultural anthropology Books

8126 products


  • The Archive of Loss

    Duke University Press The Archive of Loss

    Book SynopsisMaura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers in Mumbai—who are assumed to not exist—to live during a period of deindustrialization, showing how mills and workers' bodies constitute an archive of Mumbai's history that challenge common thinking about the city's past, present, and future.Trade Review"Finkelstein’s work is very refreshing. . . . The data involved is rich, and the theoretical framings and arguments very persuasive." -- Sinead D'Silva * LSE Review of Books *"Tackling the question of power, of the structure of domination in post-colony, and of the lives lived among the imperial debris makes The Archive of Loss an engaging reading for those willing to advance the project started by Maura Finkelstein and to approach ethnographically both the official records and the alternative archives. . . . The book offers a detailed description of decay and ruination as a prolonged process that follows its own logic and unfolds according to its own rules, supporting a ghostly presence of the past that refuses to die down." -- Natalia Kovalyova * Anthropology Book Forum *“In each chapter-archive, Finkelstein urges the reader to reflect on how some forms of work in contemporary capitalist society are rendered meaningless in order to sustain others.... Researchers studying the history of Mumbai’s textile mills, the processes of deindustrialization, storytelling, and archiving, and affect theory will find value in engaging with this book.” -- Saumya Pandey * Society for the Anthropology of Work *“The conceptual framing of the book is refreshingly original, the prose elegant and the structure convincing.... By carefully spelling out phenomena that do not fit into established narratives, the book illuminates the blind spot of dominant explanations.” -- Pablo Holwitt * South Asia *“The significance of this powerful book goes beyond being an ethnography of the urban or the spatial.... Archives of Loss is a must-read for understanding urban transition.” -- Sarasij Majumder * Journal of Anthropological Research *“Maura Finkelstein’s book is a wonderful ethnographic study.... [The Archive of Loss] is an important addition to studies of urban workers and the textile industry and is important for anthropology, ethnography, human geography, urban history and labour studies.” -- Vicki Crinis * Asian Studies Review *“The Archive of Loss is an exemplary ethnography of a world in transition, caught as it is between an industrial past and post-industrial present, and the unexpected openings—material, social, political—of seeing this world otherwise.” -- Waqas H. Butt * Anthropological Quarterly *“Maura Finkelstein’s The Archive of Loss is a finely theorized ethnographic archive of what she calls lively ruination that pushes methodological boundaries in novel ways.” -- Preeti Sampat * American Ethnologist *“Archive of Loss is fascinating. It is an original, remarkable, and admirable account of other sides of the glossy coins of Mumbai as a post-industrial city aiming to reach world-class status (whatever that may mean). It is moreover a convincing ‘first-hand’ account of the working and social lives of those Mumbaikars who live somewhere in the shadows of ‘development.’” -- Hans Schenk * IIAS Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii A Note on Intimate Geographies xi Introduction: The Archive of Industrial Debris 1 1. The Archive of the Mill 29 2. The Archive of the Worker 57 3. The Archive of the Chawl 85 4. The Archive of the Strike 117 5. The Archive of the Fire 149 Epilogue: The Archive of Futures Lost 181 Notes 193 References 225 Index 247

    £76.50

  • Experiments with Empire

    Duke University Press Experiments with Empire

    Book SynopsisIn Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.Trade Review"Experiments with Empire deserves an audience beyond the academic. Izzo makes some perceptive points about how seeing the connections between ethnography and fiction can help us reimagine the world." -- Emilie de Brigard * The Arts Fuse *“The book’s scope is bold and impressive…. Izzo’s study is an important contribution to research on the French Atlantic and on speculative forms in general, and it offers a fresh look at the crossings between ethnography and fiction that go beyond questions of truth and veracity, mimicry and resistance.” -- Christina Kullberg * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1 1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17 2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55 3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98 4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134 5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169 Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 257 Index 273

    £98.60

  • Ecologics

    Duke University Press Ecologics

    Book SynopsisCymene Howe traces the complex relationships between humans, nonhuman beings and objects, and geophysical forces that shaped the Mareña Renovables project in Oaxaca, Mexico, which had it been completed, would have been Latin America's largest wind power installation.Trade Review"Research included interviews carried out with key representatives of international, national, regional, and local interests, supporting a richly nuanced account of often emotionally charged encounters. Howe balances multiple viewpoints, ranging from those gained though formal appointments and official press conferences in Mexico City to those observed in restaurant meetings and confrontations between protesters and police on the Isthmus. The chapters oscillate between chronological telling of events—from wind power anticipated, to the project interrupted and ultimately suspended—and consideration of three other-than-human forces that played key roles in the unfolding of events: wind, trucks, and species. Recommended. All readers." -- C. Hendrickson * Choice *"Howe and Boyer look back on the past with fresh eyes. . . . Howe and Boyer’s project has many virtues. For one, it articulates the perils of corporate wind economies. For another, it positions Indigenous communities (like the Zapotec) not as outmoded objects for anthropological inquiry, but (á la Gayatri Spivak) as 'active [producers] of culture.' Most importantly, perhaps, is how Wind and Power in the Anthropocene documents alternatives to corporate wind ventures like Mareña. The book highlights, for example, community-based initiatives that also seek to harness the awesome power of istmeño wind—projects that promote communal welfare and environmental justice." -- Stacey Balkan * Public Books *"The duograph is an interesting and novel way to approach collaborative writing, which I enjoyed engaging with. . . . Howe discusses, through her vivid writing style, what happens when distinct imaginaries of environmental care and environmental harm come into conflict, examining how wind energy—an antidote to the Anthropocene—became both failure and success." -- Anna G. Sveinsdóttir * Journal of Latin American Geography *“In Wind and Power in the Anthropocene, a two-volume ‘duograph,’ Cymene Howe, in Ecologics, and Dominic Boyer, in Energopolitics, explore the development of wind parks during the early twenty-first century on the isthmus of Tehuantepec…. One of the most refreshing components of their collaborative and individual writing is the clarity of their position as researchers in this project as they circulated among politicians, indigenous peoples, and corporate officials. It is a necessary exercise, as they argue, for appreciating the entrenchment of the wind in local political and social relations.” -- Nathan Kapoor * Technology and Culture *“Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer have crafted two eloquent accounts of the turbulent, aeolian politics that unfolded during their 16-month-long field research in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, between 2009 and 2013.... Ecologics...is perhaps the most evocative half of the duograph.” -- Chakad Ojani * Anthropology Book Forum *“[Ecologics and Energopolitics] make strong arguments on political processes in the field of wind energy in Mexico...[and] are important contributions to an anthropology of energy, a still growing field within the discipline.” -- Oliver D. Liebig * Anthropos *Table of ContentsJoint Preface to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene / Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer ix Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. Wind 23 2. Wind Power, Anticipated 43 3. Trucks 73 4. Wind Power, Interrupted 103 5. Species 137 6. Wind Power, in Suspension 170 Joint Conclusion to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene / Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer 191 Notes 197 References 223 Index 243

    £25.19

  • A Future History of Water

    Duke University Press A Future History of Water

    Book SynopsisFocusing on Costa Rica and Brazil, Andrea Ballestero examines the legal, political, economic, and bureaucratic history of water in the context of the efforts to classify it as a human right, showing how seemingly small scale devices such as formulas and lists play large role in determining water's status.Trade Review"Through the brilliant selection of the devices to exhibit her ideas, the author invites readers to think deeply beyond courts or treaties establishing a human right to water and shows how many other factors also contribute to and shape this." -- Gayathri D Naik * LSE Review of Books *"[Ballestero's] insightful analysis convinces the reader that such apparently mundane technical devices are indeed wonderful in their capacities to compose the water worlds of the future." -- Veronica Strang * PoLAR *“Throughout her ethnography, Ballestero emphasizes the messiness and oftentimes mundane work it takes to make access to water a human right within capitalist society…. A Future History of Water showcases how everyday technolegal devices perform the essential work of creating a future in which water is accessible to all.” -- Kelsey Kim * Catalyst *“Ballestero’s elegant formulation allows for an anthropology of water not found elsewhere. It is an account attentive to both ethnographic detail and to the insight that anthropology can bring to larger debates over water’s value, management, and meaning. A Future History of Water should be on shelves of water scholars interested in the intersections of politics, economics, and the material relations of water. It will make an excellent contribution to courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in anthropology and critical social sciences.” -- Jeremy J. Schmidt * Anthropos *“A Future History of Water is an important contribution to the literature on urban infrastructure, water policy and the urbanisation of the global south, as well as to environmental anthropology. The book reveals how widespread global water policy is; the policy of water pipes, the functioning of local policy and the unforeseen consequences of economic reforms…. Through a careful choice of devices, the author encourages the reader to think globally about the human right to water and shows how many factors, outside of laws and treaties, still contribute to supporting and shaping the recognition of water as a human right.” -- Simona Zupanc * Anthropological Notebooks *“Dense and beautifully detailed, Ballestero’s story shows how government bureaucrats and regulators moved beyond the declarative to the actual performance of the exacting work that a commitment to rights demands. In the process, the book unravels a set of seemingly uncharismatic devices, such as the consumer price index. Ballestero makes these technical tools appear as exuberant microcosms of technopolitical craftiness, unexpected historical depth, and ethical future-making." -- Andrea Muehlebach * Public Works *“After many years of relative abandonment, the topic of water has flooded back into anthropology.... At the forefront of this renovated interest in the topic of water is Andrea Ballestero, and her excellent book A Future History of Water.” -- Casey Walsh * Luso-Brazilian Review *“Proportions and bifurcations play a central role in Andrea Ballestero’s mesmerizing and indispensable monograph on the practical futures of water governance.... Such is the virtue of this wondrous book :an ethnography of proportions that is disproportionately rewarding." -- Alberto Corsin-Jimenez * Allegra Lab *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. Formula 36 2. Index 75 3. List 109 4. Pact 144 Conclusion 185 Notes 201 References 211 Index 225

    £18.89

  • The Licit Life of Capitalism

    Duke University Press The Licit Life of Capitalism

    Book SynopsisThe Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist projectU.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guineaand a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalismpractices that are legTrade Review“A brilliant and deeply ethical rumination on the emancipatory potential and limitations of ethnographic critiques of capitalism, this searing ethnography delves into the very making of landscapes of exploitation and subordination. It is a theoretically and methodologically breathtaking investigation into the conditions of possibility that allow global capitalism to self-represent as ‘aboveboard’ and ‘transparent.’ By delving into the muck of what constitutes ‘the licit’ in the architecture of capitalism, Hannah Appel notices and refuses ‘comp-licit’ normative assumptions. The Licit Life of Capitalism thus achieves what few ethnographies have: it shows how capitalist abstractions are culturally deliberate and painstakingly reproduced.” -- Karen Ho, author of * Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street *“In this compelling and engaging work Hannah Appel ethnographically captures a big thing: capitalism as a project. Asking after the fulsomeness with which capitalism powerfully does all the things it is supposed to do, Appel sets out a new path for grappling with this dominant force in contemporary politics and economics. Her book exemplifies the best critical writing on the workings of capitalism in anthropology, geography, sociology, and allied fields.” -- Bill Maurer, author of * How Would You like to Pay?: How Technology is Changing the Future of Money *"This book deserves a very wide audience. Scholars and activists engaged with the impact of multinational corporations in African countries, neoliberal efforts to control the movement of bodies while endorsing unlimited flows of capital and uneven distributions of blame, and the limits of neoliberal calls for political reform really need to read The Licit Life of Capitalism." -- Jeremy Rich * African Studies Quarterly *"Appel’s study of US oil companies in Equatorial Guinea is revelatory for its theoretical contributions to the anthropology of capitalism (beyond the rather more niche anthropology of oil), with a critical recentring of attention on the role of industry in shaping the politics and economics of resource extraction. With enviable access to the internal operations of these transnational corporations, Appel provides key insights into the assumptions and worldmaking strategies of what has long been an ethnographic black box." -- Wen Zhou * LSE Review of Books *“The Licit Life of Capitalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of oil or the itinerant infrastructures of global capitalism. While Appel’s subject matter is complex, the book’s clear, compelling, and approachable prose make it an excellent addition to graduate-level geography courses focused on political economy, political ecology, infrastructure, or racial capitalism. Portions of the book, particularly ‘The Enclave’ and ‘The Economy,’ would also be appropriate for upper-division undergraduate courses on global development, postcolonial geography, and natural resource geographies.” -- Kendra Kintzi * Geographical Review *“The Licit Life of Capitalism is an outstanding work of scholarship that combines theoretical innovation with incisive ethnographic detail.... Appel’s text makes for essential reading for anyone concerned about the energy industry, multinational corporations, and the lopsided exchanges between the global South and North.” -- Tanmoy Sharma * Society for the Anthropology of Work *“The Licit Life of Capitalism is an energetic and polemical read. Appel’s account brings to life the seemingly yawn-worthy artefacts of the oil industry—contracts, budgets, corporate housing, conferences, sub-contracts—and reveals how these objects depend on and re-create the global, racialized inequality which itself doubles as one of this book’s central themes.” -- James Christopher Mizes * Society & Space *“Appel’s scholarship has helped define anthropology’s infrastructural turn. Here, she expands her portrayal of oil not through money alone—the narrow prerogative of resource curse theories—but as an industry dependent on material infrastructures, racialized labor regimes, technical expertise, and capitalist fantasies.” -- Geoffrey Aung * Focaal *“The Licit Life of Capitalism is above all a sophisticated study of capitalist world-making at different levels.... The book holds the tension between the ethnographic ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’ exceptionally well.” -- Gisa Weszkalnys * Anthropological Quarterly *“The Licit Life of Capitalism is incredibly informative. . . . The finely detailed ethnographic particulars in each chapter do an excellent job of illustrating contemporary life in Equatorial Guinea.” -- Jerry K. Jacka * Africa *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Offshore 37 2. The Enclave 79 3. The Contract 137 4. The Subcontract 172 5. The Economy 204 6. The Political 247 Afterword 279 Notes 285 References 295 Index 317

    £25.19

  • The Fernando Coronil Reader

    Duke University Press The Fernando Coronil Reader

    Book SynopsisThis posthumously published collection of Fernando Coronil's most important work highlights his deep concern with the global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach.Trade Review“I highly recommend this Reader, and hope that it can contribute to make the work of Fernando Coronil even better known and appreciated among scholars, hopefully beyond the circles of metropolitan academia too. And I am sure that a translation into Spanish would be very well received among readers in Latin American and Caribbean countries.” -- Luis Angosto-Ferrández * Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research *“The Fernando Coronil Reader is an invaluable addition to the field of Latin American Studies from a myriad of perspectives–e.g. anthropology, history, cultural studies. Coronil’s work challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions.” -- Gianfranco Selgas * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Transcultural Paths and Utopian Imaginings / Mariana Coronil, Laurent DuBois, Julie Skurski, and Gary Wilder 1 Part I. Labyrinths of Critique: The Promise of Anthrohistory Introduction / David Pedersen 47 1. Pieces for Anthrohistory: A Puzzle to be Assembled Together 53 2. Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint 69 3. Foreword to Close Encounters of Empire 118 4. Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado 123 5. The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989–2010) 128 Part II. Geohistorical States: Latin American Counterpoint Introduction / Edward Murphy 165 6. Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela 171 7. Transitions to Transitions: Democracy and Nation in Latin America 231 8. Venezuela's Wounded Bodies: Nation and Imagination during the 2002 Coup 250 9. Oilpacity: Secrets of History in the Coup against Hugo Chávez 262 10. Crude Matters: Seizing the Venezuelan Petro-state in Times of Chávez 266 Part III. Beyond Occidentalism, Beyond Empire Introduction / Paul Eiss 309 11. Occidentalism 315 12. Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories 323 13. Listening to the Subaltern: The Poetics of Neocolonial States 368 14. Smelling Like a Market 385 15. Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization 399 16. After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Américas 425 Credits 457 Index 459

    £27.90

  • The Archive of Loss

    Duke University Press The Archive of Loss

    Book SynopsisMaura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers in Mumbai—who are assumed to not exist—to live during a period of deindustrialization, showing how mills and workers' bodies constitute an archive of Mumbai's history that challenge common thinking about the city's past, present, and future.Trade Review"Finkelstein’s work is very refreshing. . . . The data involved is rich, and the theoretical framings and arguments very persuasive." -- Sinead D'Silva * LSE Review of Books *"Tackling the question of power, of the structure of domination in post-colony, and of the lives lived among the imperial debris makes The Archive of Loss an engaging reading for those willing to advance the project started by Maura Finkelstein and to approach ethnographically both the official records and the alternative archives. . . . The book offers a detailed description of decay and ruination as a prolonged process that follows its own logic and unfolds according to its own rules, supporting a ghostly presence of the past that refuses to die down." -- Natalia Kovalyova * Anthropology Book Forum *“In each chapter-archive, Finkelstein urges the reader to reflect on how some forms of work in contemporary capitalist society are rendered meaningless in order to sustain others.... Researchers studying the history of Mumbai’s textile mills, the processes of deindustrialization, storytelling, and archiving, and affect theory will find value in engaging with this book.” -- Saumya Pandey * Society for the Anthropology of Work *“The conceptual framing of the book is refreshingly original, the prose elegant and the structure convincing.... By carefully spelling out phenomena that do not fit into established narratives, the book illuminates the blind spot of dominant explanations.” -- Pablo Holwitt * South Asia *“The significance of this powerful book goes beyond being an ethnography of the urban or the spatial.... Archives of Loss is a must-read for understanding urban transition.” -- Sarasij Majumder * Journal of Anthropological Research *“Maura Finkelstein’s book is a wonderful ethnographic study.... [The Archive of Loss] is an important addition to studies of urban workers and the textile industry and is important for anthropology, ethnography, human geography, urban history and labour studies.” -- Vicki Crinis * Asian Studies Review *“The Archive of Loss is an exemplary ethnography of a world in transition, caught as it is between an industrial past and post-industrial present, and the unexpected openings—material, social, political—of seeing this world otherwise.” -- Waqas H. Butt * Anthropological Quarterly *“Maura Finkelstein’s The Archive of Loss is a finely theorized ethnographic archive of what she calls lively ruination that pushes methodological boundaries in novel ways.” -- Preeti Sampat * American Ethnologist *“Archive of Loss is fascinating. It is an original, remarkable, and admirable account of other sides of the glossy coins of Mumbai as a post-industrial city aiming to reach world-class status (whatever that may mean). It is moreover a convincing ‘first-hand’ account of the working and social lives of those Mumbaikars who live somewhere in the shadows of ‘development.’” -- Hans Schenk * IIAS Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii A Note on Intimate Geographies xi Introduction: The Archive of Industrial Debris 1 1. The Archive of the Mill 29 2. The Archive of the Worker 57 3. The Archive of the Chawl 85 4. The Archive of the Strike 117 5. The Archive of the Fire 149 Epilogue: The Archive of Futures Lost 181 Notes 193 References 225 Index 247

    £25.19

  • Experiments with Empire

    Duke University Press Experiments with Empire

    Book SynopsisIn Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.Trade Review"Experiments with Empire deserves an audience beyond the academic. Izzo makes some perceptive points about how seeing the connections between ethnography and fiction can help us reimagine the world." -- Emilie de Brigard * The Arts Fuse *“The book’s scope is bold and impressive…. Izzo’s study is an important contribution to research on the French Atlantic and on speculative forms in general, and it offers a fresh look at the crossings between ethnography and fiction that go beyond questions of truth and veracity, mimicry and resistance.” -- Christina Kullberg * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1 1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17 2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55 3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98 4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134 5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169 Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 257 Index 273

    £25.19

  • Demanding Images

    Duke University Press Demanding Images

    7 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn this ethnography of Indonesia's post-authoritarian public sphere, Karen Strassler explores the role of public images as they gave visual form to the ideals, aspirations, and anxieties of democracy.Trade Review“Karen Strassler convincingly links ideologies of transparency that are associated with new media forms with political and social concepts. Especially valuable is her attentiveness to both the ideological valence of new media and the pragmatic implications of what it can and cannot do in practice. Smart, stylish, and sophisticated, Demanding Images is absolutely superb.” -- Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan“An inspiring account of the demands made upon images (to testify and endure) and the complex demands images make in turn upon those who use them. Establishing the conflictual politics of the visual, Karen Strassler dissects the ambivalence and volatility of image-events in prose that is both analytically precise and poetically rich. This is a learned contribution to the study of contemporary Indonesia and an ominous handbook illuminating the convulsive nature of new media landscapes that are changing lives everywhere.” -- Christopher Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, University College London"Demanding Images encourages readers to adopt a valuable new perspective on post-authoritarian Indonesian politics." -- Megan Brankley Abbas * PoLAR *"Demanding Images is a fascinating, entertaining, and insightful read. A one-of-a-kind book on Indonesia, it will appeal to those interested in Indonesian media, politics, and society, as well as those who want to understand how images affect politics in our more complex media environment." -- Colm Fox * Pacific Affairs *"As an interdisciplinary work that draws from a number of sophisticated analytical frameworks, this accessible study holds value far beyond the immediate topic of Indonesian visual culture and public discourse in recent decades." -- S. G. Jug * Choice *"Karen Strassler is highly regarded in Indonesian studies, and . . . her ideas and theories have incredible depth and should be relevant to a larger audience critically engaged with photography and visual culture, those actively trying to grapple with the complexity of images within our social and political experience." -- Brian Arnold * Afterimage *"An engaging and thought-provoking book, which certainly demands attention from anyone with an interest in Media, Cultural, and Area Studies." -- Edward Jurriens * Anthropos *"Strassler's notion of the 'image-event' elegently draws attention to the permeability between static and mobile, enduring and fleeting, picture and performance, making her work relevant well beyond the limits of Indonesian studies and her disciplinary home in visual anthropology." -- Krishna Sen * Journal of Anthropological Research *"Whether one is interested in contemporary Indonesian politics, in understanding the role of images in public spheres more generally, or in the production and life of images themselves, this book will certainly be a valuable read." -- Jonathan Kraemer * Anthropology Book Forum *Table of ContentsPreface VII Acknowledgments XI Introduction. The Eventfulness of Images 3 1. Face Value 33 2. The Gender of Transparency 67 3. The Scandal of Exposure 95 4. Naked Effects 133 5. Street Signs 169 Conclusion. The Eye of the Crowd 221 Notes 247 Bibliography 299 Index 319

    7 in stock

    £140.25

  • Our Own Way in This Part of the World

    Duke University Press Our Own Way in This Part of the World

    Book SynopsisKwasi Konadu centers the life of Ghanaian healer, spiritual leader, and farmer Kofi D?nk? (19131995) to tell the biography of his community and how they navigated the changes from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth.Trade Review"Konadu refers to his work as a 'communography' and offers a portrait of the community of which Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a hub. This approach creates a deeply grounded history... [in which] he tries to present the world as Dᴐnkᴐ might have seen it, offering a refreshing perspective. This innovative study is recommended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students." -- G. Mann * Choice *"A compelling history of people and their community in twentieth century Ghana. Konadu has gathered an impressive archive, based on which he succeeds to capture societal changes and dynamics in their lived refractions and complexities. ... Konadu makes an important contribution to an everyday and social history of twentieth century Ghana." -- Benedikt Pontzen * African Studies Quarterly *“Kwasi Konadu’s Our Own Way in This Part of the World...provides us with a powerful model for thinking within and thus beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, viewing the past through the lens of extraordinary individuals and communities. We all have lessons to learn here.” -- Jennifer Hart * American Historical Review *“By revealing Dɔnkɔ’s story, Konadu has accomplished something innovative, a book worth reading for anyone who wants to challenge themselves to rethink the field of African Studies.” -- Jonathan Roberts * Journal of African History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Libation: Matters Connected with Our Culture 17 2. Homelands: In Search of Past Events 44 3. Tools of the Trade: I was a Blacksmith . . . Before I Became [a Healer] 73 4. Medicine, Marriage, and Politics: Assist this State to have Progress 107 5. Independences: Never Mingled Himself in Local Politics 137 6. Anthropologies of Medicine and Africa: When the Whiteman First Came 166 7. Uncertain Moments and Memory: Our Ancestral Spirits, Come and Have Drink 195 Epilogue 228 Notes 239 Bibliography 287 Notes 307

    £98.60

  • Blood Work

    Duke University Press Blood Work

    Book SynopsisJanet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia, showing how those meanings provide a gateway to understanding the social, political, and cultural dynamics of modern life.Trade Review“As Janet Carsten shows, blood is a thick moral substance: it can be bagged and tagged, but its powerful associations with vitality, connection, personhood, and life are not easily shed. Strikingly original, beautifully and often poetically written, Blood Work not only makes an important set of contributions to science and technology studies, anthropology, and Southeast Asian studies; it takes the long-standing themes in Carsten's career to a new level of conceptual innovation.” -- Sarah Franklin, author of * Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship *“Blood Work, based on fieldwork in hospital labs and surgeries, blood banks, and blood drives in Penang over ten years (2005–2015), draws on a deep well of insights springing from Janet Carsten’s innovative research on kinship, marriage, and migration in rural Malaysia in the 1980s. One of the most valuable contributions of Carsten’s distinctive sensitivity to the particulars of living and dying in this longtime global crossroads, combined with her keen comparative perspective, is her elucidation of the paradoxical capacity of blood everywhere to unite and divide simultaneously.” -- Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Michigan“Through a rich ethnographic portrait of medical labs and blood banks at hospitals in Penang, Malaysia, Janet Carsten successfully meets Blood Work’s twofold aim: to offer a fresh perspective on social and cultural lives in a modern Malay city and to explore the general nature of blood and its capacity for figurative elaboration. She reveals that, on the one hand, ethnic, religious, and kinship ties permeate the seemingly isolated techno-scientific environment of the labs in Penang, while on the other, it is the quality of animation that lies at the heart of blood’s aptness for symbolization and capacity for naturalization.” -- Jaehwan Hyun * Journal of Asian Studies *“With Blood Work, Carsten joins an important and expanding group of scholars extending work in the anthropology of science beyond the Western settings typically associated with what Donna Haraway identified as technoscience. Blood Work is distinctive even within this group in that Carsten’s focus on technoscience builds on deep familiarity with Malaysia rooted in her prior long-term ethnographic engagement in the country. She thus brings substantial nuance to her analysis, repeatedly drawing the reader’s attention to the tensions between assumptions about the universality of medical technologies and the distinctively Malaysian dimensions of the ways such technologies are taken up in the laboratories in which she works.” -- Karen-Sue Taussig * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *“Blood Work is a superbly written, thickly ethnographic exploration of those spaces in the multi-ethnic Malaysian state where human blood is collected, tested, processed and used…. One of Carsten’s major contributions, in my view, to the recent surge in anthropological literature on blood and blood economies lies in her insistence on collapsing the imagined dichotomy between the symbolic potential of blood and its material properties and uses, addressing both of these qualities in equal measure, while heeding to their ongoing effect on one another.” -- Ben Belek * Cambridge Journal of Anthropology *“Carsten faithfully focuses on what people think, talk and do about blood and how such engagement indeed makes it so alive. Blood Work is indeed a call to attentiveness to human agency that transmutes the inert into the living and the technical into the social. It beautifully illustrates the animating force emerging from our everyday routine practices of working, eating and living together…. This will be an inspirational read for those interested in richer ethnographic accounts of science and technology and of Malaysia. It is also a work of theoretical mastery that will be an outstanding teaching resource on modernity, medical anthropology, material culture and the anthropology of work.” -- Bo Kyeong Seo * Sojourn *“Historians have in Carsten’s Blood Work a finely crafted ethnography that has far-reaching explanatory significance—like blood itself.... Her book should also serve as a model for anyone willing to consider that blood cultures may teach us as much about kinship as cultural analyses of organs, genes, or genomes.” -- Stephen Pemberton * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *Table of ContentsForeword / Thomas Gibson ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 The Public Life of Blood I: Donation in the News 35 1. Blood Donation 43 The Public Life of Blood II: Newspapers and Laboratory Life 75 2. Lab Spaces and People: Categories and Distinctions at Work 79 The Public Life of Blood III: Elections and Their Aftermath 116 3. The Work of the Labs 125 The Public Life of Blood IV: Medical, Supernatural, and Moral Matters 158 4. "Work is Just Part of the Job": Ghosts, Food, and Relatedness in the Labs 165 Conclusion 200 Notes 209 References 217 Index 233

    £98.60

  • Bomb Children

    Duke University Press Bomb Children

    Book SynopsisLeah Zani considers how the people and landscape of Laos have been shaped and haunted by the physical remains of unexploded ordnance from the CIA's Secret War.Trade Review“Bomb Children is a riveting and reflexive account of war remains, military waste, and ‘development’ in contemporary Laos. As a document it bears/bares the hazardous conditions of its making, poised on the edge of blasts in the margins of safety zones that are never safe, in the collision and convergence between social ecologies riddled with minefields, and between remains and (economic) revival. Tacking between these ‘paired conceptual frames’ and a set of parallelisms that collapse war and peace and life and death, Bomb Children labors in an ethnographic mode that eschews the pornography of detailing mutilated bodies and instead looks to the war damages that are not over and that remain viscerally present in the everyday of people's lives.” -- Ann Laura Stoler, author of * Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *“Bomb Children is nothing short of breathtaking. Leah Zani presents little-known and incredibly important material on the everyday aftermath of the Secret War for the people of Laos. Her topic is not only ethnographically underexplored, but has been deliberately concealed by the U.S. government for decades. In Zani's hands, fieldwork becomes a flexible toolkit, selectively and strategically deployed to grasp the object of military wasting in a revealing and ethically responsible way.” -- Joshua O. Reno, author of * Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill *"A thoroughly original work, Bomb Children is likely to become a useful reference for students and scholars alike, and indeed anyone interested in the social consequences of airstrikes. It is also an arresting personal account of the hazards of fieldwork in a highly monitored and dangerous country." -- Erin LIn * Pacific Affairs *"The book is a compelling study of the multifarious hazards haunting former war landscapes in Laos and a fascinating literary project. As an innovative and creative reflection of anthropological methods and epistemologies, the book is an excellent contribution to the discipline." -- Oliver Tappe * Sojourn *“This is a daring, adventurous and inspiring ethnography of a kind rarely seen in this region. Zani’s book will be a must-read for scholars of military waste and provides a valuable contribution to ongoing conversations about power in Lao PDR.” -- Holly High * South East Asia Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Note on the Lao Language ix Fieldpoem 30: Postwar 1 Introduction: The Fruit Eaters 3 Fieldpoem 11: The Fruit Eaters 36 1. The Dragon and the River 37 Fieldpoem 15: "The Rice Is More Delicious after Bomb Clearance" 64 2. Ghost Mine 65 Fieldpoem 23: Blast Radius 97 3. Blast Radius 98 Fieldpoem 26: House Blessings 130 Conclusion: Phaseout 131 Fieldpoem 18: Children 149 Appendix: Notes on Fieldpoems 151 References 155 Index 165

    £86.70

  • Sounds of Vacation

    Duke University Press Sounds of Vacation

    Book SynopsisThe contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encoTrade Review“Illuminating the ways that the sonic environment of inclusive resorts inform tourists' experiences of pleasure, postcolonial spaces, and colonial histories, Sounds of Vacation represents an exciting new approach to studying tourism, the politics of sound and listening, and the sonic and musical construction of space and fantasy.” -- Colleen Ballerino Cohen, author of * Take Me to My Paradise: Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands *“Sounds of Vacation takes Caribbean music studies, and music and tourism studies more broadly, to the next level. Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen’s learned and comprehensive introduction paves the way for fresh and compelling case studies by leading scholars from a variety of fields who show us how vacations work in a world increasingly disfigured by neoliberal capitalism.” -- Timothy D. Taylor, author of * Music in the World: Selected Essays *“The book achieves its central goal of offering new perspectives on musical performances in the Caribbean region while also calling for further studies on the political economy of music within the tourism industry.… Sounds of Vacation presents a range of voices from scholars with a diversity of perspectives that will help the book speak to audiences interested in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sound studies beyond the Caribbean.” -- Jessica C. Hajek * Ethnomusicology Forum *“Clearly, mass tourism has become ubiquitous throughout the Caribbean (and beyond), and ethnographers of sound and music should pay serious attention to the ways in which this phenomenon influences musico-cultural production—a project for which this book wonderfully lays the groundwork…. This trailblazing book provides many starting points for exciting research to come.” -- Amalia C. Mora * MUSICultures *“This volume makes a convincing case for the value of listening methodologies to provide insights into understanding the relationship between capital and cultural practises. I found this volume insightful, stimulating, and highly quotable.” -- Carlo A. Cubero * Anthropos *“Sounds of Vacation is an important contribution to studies of Caribbean musics and sounds.... Through the focus on labor and economy in these all-inclusive hotels, the authors offer some excellent starting points for further studies.” -- Ruth Hellier-Tinoco * Latin American Music Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Prologue / Steven Feld 1 Introduction. The Political Economy of Music and Sound: Case Studies in the Caribbean Tourism Industry / Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen 9 1. It Sounds Better in the Bahamas: Musicians, Management, and the Markets in Nassau's All-Inclusive Hotels / Timothy Rommen 41 2. Touristic Rhythms: The Club Remix / Jerome Camal 77 3. Listening for Noise: Seeking Disturbing Sounds in Tourist Spaces / Susan Harewood 107 4. All-Inclusive Resorts in Sint Maarten and Our Common Decolonial State: On Butterflies That Are Caterpillars Still in Chrysalis / Francio Guadeloupe and Jordi Halfman 134 5. Sound Management: Listening to Sandals Halcyon in Saint Lucia / Jocelyne Guilbault 161 Epilogue. The Political Economy of Music and Sound / Percy C. Hintzen 193 References 207 Contributors 227 Index 229

    £90.10

  • Our Own Way in This Part of the World

    Duke University Press Our Own Way in This Part of the World

    Book SynopsisKwasi Konadu centers the life of Ghanaian healer, spiritual leader, and farmer Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ (1913–1995) to tell the biography of his community and how they navigated the changes from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth.Trade Review"Konadu refers to his work as a 'communography' and offers a portrait of the community of which Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a hub. This approach creates a deeply grounded history... [in which] he tries to present the world as Dᴐnkᴐ might have seen it, offering a refreshing perspective. This innovative study is recommended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students." -- G. Mann * Choice *"A compelling history of people and their community in twentieth century Ghana. Konadu has gathered an impressive archive, based on which he succeeds to capture societal changes and dynamics in their lived refractions and complexities. ... Konadu makes an important contribution to an everyday and social history of twentieth century Ghana." -- Benedikt Pontzen * African Studies Quarterly *“Kwasi Konadu’s Our Own Way in This Part of the World...provides us with a powerful model for thinking within and thus beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, viewing the past through the lens of extraordinary individuals and communities. We all have lessons to learn here.” -- Jennifer Hart * American Historical Review *“By revealing Dɔnkɔ’s story, Konadu has accomplished something innovative, a book worth reading for anyone who wants to challenge themselves to rethink the field of African Studies.” -- Jonathan Roberts * Journal of African History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Libation: Matters Connected with Our Culture 17 2. Homelands: In Search of Past Events 44 3. Tools of the Trade: I was a Blacksmith . . . Before I Became [a Healer] 73 4. Medicine, Marriage, and Politics: Assist this State to have Progress 107 5. Independences: Never Mingled Himself in Local Politics 137 6. Anthropologies of Medicine and Africa: When the Whiteman First Came 166 7. Uncertain Moments and Memory: Our Ancestral Spirits, Come and Have Drink 195 Epilogue 228 Notes 239 Bibliography 287 Notes 307

    £25.19

  • Blood Work

    Duke University Press Blood Work

    Book SynopsisWhat is blood? How can we account for its enormous range of meanings and its extraordinary symbolic power? In Blood Work Janet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia. She tells the stories of blood donors, their varied motivations, and the paperwork, payment, and other bureaucratic processes involved in blood donation, tracking the interpersonal relations between lab staff and revealing how their work with blood reflects the social, cultural, and political dynamics of modern Malaysia. Carsten follows hospital workers into factories and community halls on blood drivesand brings readers into the operating theater as a machine circulates a bypass patient''s blood. Throughout, she foregrounds blood''s symbolic power, uncovering the processes that make the hospital, the blood bank, the lab, and science itselfwork. In this way, blood becomes a privileged lens for understanding the entanglements ofTrade Review“As Janet Carsten shows, blood is a thick moral substance: it can be bagged and tagged, but its powerful associations with vitality, connection, personhood, and life are not easily shed. Strikingly original, beautifully and often poetically written, Blood Work not only makes an important set of contributions to science and technology studies, anthropology, and Southeast Asian studies; it takes the long-standing themes in Carsten's career to a new level of conceptual innovation.” -- Sarah Franklin, author of * Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship *“Blood Work, based on fieldwork in hospital labs and surgeries, blood banks, and blood drives in Penang over ten years (2005–2015), draws on a deep well of insights springing from Janet Carsten’s innovative research on kinship, marriage, and migration in rural Malaysia in the 1980s. One of the most valuable contributions of Carsten’s distinctive sensitivity to the particulars of living and dying in this longtime global crossroads, combined with her keen comparative perspective, is her elucidation of the paradoxical capacity of blood everywhere to unite and divide simultaneously.” -- Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Michigan“Through a rich ethnographic portrait of medical labs and blood banks at hospitals in Penang, Malaysia, Janet Carsten successfully meets Blood Work’s twofold aim: to offer a fresh perspective on social and cultural lives in a modern Malay city and to explore the general nature of blood and its capacity for figurative elaboration. She reveals that, on the one hand, ethnic, religious, and kinship ties permeate the seemingly isolated techno-scientific environment of the labs in Penang, while on the other, it is the quality of animation that lies at the heart of blood’s aptness for symbolization and capacity for naturalization.” -- Jaehwan Hyun * Journal of Asian Studies *“With Blood Work, Carsten joins an important and expanding group of scholars extending work in the anthropology of science beyond the Western settings typically associated with what Donna Haraway identified as technoscience. Blood Work is distinctive even within this group in that Carsten’s focus on technoscience builds on deep familiarity with Malaysia rooted in her prior long-term ethnographic engagement in the country. She thus brings substantial nuance to her analysis, repeatedly drawing the reader’s attention to the tensions between assumptions about the universality of medical technologies and the distinctively Malaysian dimensions of the ways such technologies are taken up in the laboratories in which she works.” -- Karen-Sue Taussig * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *“Blood Work is a superbly written, thickly ethnographic exploration of those spaces in the multi-ethnic Malaysian state where human blood is collected, tested, processed and used…. One of Carsten’s major contributions, in my view, to the recent surge in anthropological literature on blood and blood economies lies in her insistence on collapsing the imagined dichotomy between the symbolic potential of blood and its material properties and uses, addressing both of these qualities in equal measure, while heeding to their ongoing effect on one another.” -- Ben Belek * Cambridge Journal of Anthropology *“Carsten faithfully focuses on what people think, talk and do about blood and how such engagement indeed makes it so alive. Blood Work is indeed a call to attentiveness to human agency that transmutes the inert into the living and the technical into the social. It beautifully illustrates the animating force emerging from our everyday routine practices of working, eating and living together…. This will be an inspirational read for those interested in richer ethnographic accounts of science and technology and of Malaysia. It is also a work of theoretical mastery that will be an outstanding teaching resource on modernity, medical anthropology, material culture and the anthropology of work.” -- Bo Kyeong Seo * Sojourn *“Historians have in Carsten’s Blood Work a finely crafted ethnography that has far-reaching explanatory significance—like blood itself.... Her book should also serve as a model for anyone willing to consider that blood cultures may teach us as much about kinship as cultural analyses of organs, genes, or genomes.” -- Stephen Pemberton * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *Table of ContentsForeword / Thomas Gibson ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 The Public Life of Blood I: Donation in the News 35 1. Blood Donation 43 The Public Life of Blood II: Newspapers and Laboratory Life 75 2. Lab Spaces and People: Categories and Distinctions at Work 79 The Public Life of Blood III: Elections and Their Aftermath 116 3. The Work of the Labs 125 The Public Life of Blood IV: Medical, Supernatural, and Moral Matters 158 4. "Work is Just Part of the Job": Ghosts, Food, and Relatedness in the Labs 165 Conclusion 200 Notes 209 References 217 Index 233

    £25.19

  • Bomb Children

    Duke University Press Bomb Children

    Book SynopsisHalf a century after the CIA's Secret War in Laos-the largest bombing campaign in history-explosive remnants of war continue to be part of people's everyday lives. In Bomb Children Leah Zani offers a perceptive analysis of the long-term, often subtle, and unintended effects of massive air warfare. Zani traces the sociocultural impact of cluster submunitions-known in Laos as bomb children-through stories of explosives clearance technicians and others living and working in these old air strike zones. Zani presents her ethnography alongside poetry written in the field, crafting a startlingly beautiful analysis of state terror, authoritarian revival, rapid development, and ecological contamination. In so doing, she proposes that postwar zones are their own cultural and area studies, offering new ways to understand the parallel relationship between ongoing war violence and postwar revival.Trade Review“Bomb Children is a riveting and reflexive account of war remains, military waste, and ‘development’ in contemporary Laos. As a document it bears/bares the hazardous conditions of its making, poised on the edge of blasts in the margins of safety zones that are never safe, in the collision and convergence between social ecologies riddled with minefields, and between remains and (economic) revival. Tacking between these ‘paired conceptual frames’ and a set of parallelisms that collapse war and peace and life and death, Bomb Children labors in an ethnographic mode that eschews the pornography of detailing mutilated bodies and instead looks to the war damages that are not over and that remain viscerally present in the everyday of people's lives.” -- Ann Laura Stoler, author of * Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *“Bomb Children is nothing short of breathtaking. Leah Zani presents little-known and incredibly important material on the everyday aftermath of the Secret War for the people of Laos. Her topic is not only ethnographically underexplored, but has been deliberately concealed by the U.S. government for decades. In Zani's hands, fieldwork becomes a flexible toolkit, selectively and strategically deployed to grasp the object of military wasting in a revealing and ethically responsible way.” -- Joshua O. Reno, author of * Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill *"A thoroughly original work, Bomb Children is likely to become a useful reference for students and scholars alike, and indeed anyone interested in the social consequences of airstrikes. It is also an arresting personal account of the hazards of fieldwork in a highly monitored and dangerous country." -- Erin LIn * Pacific Affairs *"The book is a compelling study of the multifarious hazards haunting former war landscapes in Laos and a fascinating literary project. As an innovative and creative reflection of anthropological methods and epistemologies, the book is an excellent contribution to the discipline." -- Oliver Tappe * Sojourn *“This is a daring, adventurous and inspiring ethnography of a kind rarely seen in this region. Zani’s book will be a must-read for scholars of military waste and provides a valuable contribution to ongoing conversations about power in Lao PDR.” -- Holly High * South East Asia Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Note on the Lao Language ix Fieldpoem 30: Postwar 1 Introduction: The Fruit Eaters 3 Fieldpoem 11: The Fruit Eaters 36 1. The Dragon and the River 37 Fieldpoem 15: "The Rice Is More Delicious after Bomb Clearance" 64 2. Ghost Mine 65 Fieldpoem 23: Blast Radius 97 3. Blast Radius 98 Fieldpoem 26: House Blessings 130 Conclusion: Phaseout 131 Fieldpoem 18: Children 149 Appendix: Notes on Fieldpoems 151 References 155 Index 165

    £22.79

  • Sounds of Vacation

    Duke University Press Sounds of Vacation

    Book SynopsisThe contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encoTrade Review“Illuminating the ways that the sonic environment of inclusive resorts inform tourists' experiences of pleasure, postcolonial spaces, and colonial histories, Sounds of Vacation represents an exciting new approach to studying tourism, the politics of sound and listening, and the sonic and musical construction of space and fantasy.” -- Colleen Ballerino Cohen, author of * Take Me to My Paradise: Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands *“Sounds of Vacation takes Caribbean music studies, and music and tourism studies more broadly, to the next level. Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen’s learned and comprehensive introduction paves the way for fresh and compelling case studies by leading scholars from a variety of fields who show us how vacations work in a world increasingly disfigured by neoliberal capitalism.” -- Timothy D. Taylor, author of * Music in the World: Selected Essays *“The book achieves its central goal of offering new perspectives on musical performances in the Caribbean region while also calling for further studies on the political economy of music within the tourism industry.… Sounds of Vacation presents a range of voices from scholars with a diversity of perspectives that will help the book speak to audiences interested in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sound studies beyond the Caribbean.” -- Jessica C. Hajek * Ethnomusicology Forum *“Clearly, mass tourism has become ubiquitous throughout the Caribbean (and beyond), and ethnographers of sound and music should pay serious attention to the ways in which this phenomenon influences musico-cultural production—a project for which this book wonderfully lays the groundwork…. This trailblazing book provides many starting points for exciting research to come.” -- Amalia C. Mora * MUSICultures *“This volume makes a convincing case for the value of listening methodologies to provide insights into understanding the relationship between capital and cultural practises. I found this volume insightful, stimulating, and highly quotable.” -- Carlo A. Cubero * Anthropos *“Sounds of Vacation is an important contribution to studies of Caribbean musics and sounds.... Through the focus on labor and economy in these all-inclusive hotels, the authors offer some excellent starting points for further studies.” -- Ruth Hellier-Tinoco * Latin American Music Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Prologue / Steven Feld 1 Introduction. The Political Economy of Music and Sound: Case Studies in the Caribbean Tourism Industry / Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen 9 1. It Sounds Better in the Bahamas: Musicians, Management, and the Markets in Nassau's All-Inclusive Hotels / Timothy Rommen 41 2. Touristic Rhythms: The Club Remix / Jerome Camal 77 3. Listening for Noise: Seeking Disturbing Sounds in Tourist Spaces / Susan Harewood 107 4. All-Inclusive Resorts in Sint Maarten and Our Common Decolonial State: On Butterflies That Are Caterpillars Still in Chrysalis / Francio Guadeloupe and Jordi Halfman 134 5. Sound Management: Listening to Sandals Halcyon in Saint Lucia / Jocelyne Guilbault 161 Epilogue. The Political Economy of Music and Sound / Percy C. Hintzen 193 References 207 Contributors 227 Index 229

    £22.49

  • SelfDevouring Growth

    Duke University Press SelfDevouring Growth

    Book SynopsisUnder capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the cTrade Review“Highly engaging, deeply thoughtful, and beautifully written, Self-Devouring Growth helps us to understand the environmental dangers the planet faces not as something to be avoided or prevented, but as something to expect and to live through. Julie Livingston's thinking about environmental and other futures is a breath of fresh air and cuts across stale debates around economic development and environmental sustainability in a very original way.” -- James Ferguson, author of * Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution *“Julie Livingston's concept of ‘self-devouring growth’ will become an essential tool across many forms of scholarship—and for concerned earth dwellers across the planet. As Livingston puts it, “GROW! is a mantra so powerful that it obscures the destruction it portends.” Self-Devouring Growth tells of the failure of Botswana's public water system, strained by failing rains and pumped dry by mining and commercial beef rearing for export. Regarded as a success of development, Botswana is the ideal site for a parable of the Anthropocene.” -- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coeditor of * Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene *"Livingston has written a beautiful book, which speaks from Tswana cosmology towards the complexities of global problems, and that points towards forms of activism that we can all take forward." -- Shannon Morreira * Africa Is a Country *"An imaginative parable about human society and life on Earth. . . . The author notes that everyone cries foul when poorer countries achieve a standard of living enjoyed elsewhere, yet the global inequality reflected in this complaint suggests the need for collective creative thinking about new forms of growth for life on Earth to survive. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- E. P. Renne * Choice *"I find self-devouring growth a powerful and clarifying concept. I’m more accustomed to thinking about the climate change emergency through numbers, like the temperature beyond which the earth must not warm, or the number of tons of carbon we can safely put into the atmosphere. Instead, Livingston illuminates our way of life. She is asking a lot of the reader: she is asking us to understand that many of the things that make us feel well, prosperous, and secure are the very things that are killing us. . . . It is deeply unsettling to live with." -- Emily Callaci * Dissent *"Livingston has forged a path into an anthropology of futures, one responsive to and reflective of the Anthropocene and the threats to human survival we witness daily on our ever-more vulnerable planet. She offers methodological and conceptual tools that will enable other scholars to grapple with futures, those that are unfolding now because of self-devouring growth, and those we want to imagine differently. This book is for everyone." -- Sharon R. Kaufman * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *“I like reading Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth as a push against the consumption of modernist time—that is, against the suspension of historical flux, imaginative possibility, and alter-social development.... The book so convincingly dispels efforts to reduce the planetary condition to a matrix problem begging for technological solutions....” -- Alex Blanchette * Somatosphere *“It is a testament to the distilled clarity and prescience of Julie Livingston’s parable of a book that its title, Self-Devouring Growth, can strike one immediately as both so true and suddenly so evident....” -- Abou Farman * Somatosphere *“[Self-Devouring Growth is] a book that offers an elegant and important argument about industrial capitalism and growth that is devouring the world in which we live.... It is a book firmly grounded in critical medical anthropology, which has for a long time dug into the political economy of health and the structural violence of capitalism....” -- Fanny Chabrol * Somatosphere *Only Julie Livingston could write this book because of the sources, sensibilities, and experiences from which she draws.... [She] leads us to think about the biggest burning question of our common era: What kind of future is possible when our ways of living are literally invested in our collective destruction?” -- Juno Salazar Parreñas * Somatosphere *“Through the realist genre of the parable, this marvelous little book discusses an interconnected world organized by ‘self-devouring growth’.... This immensely readable book will appeal to a broad audience of academics, policymakers and practitioners in international development....” -- Tanya Matthan * Progress in Development Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Prologue: A Planetary Parable 1 1. Rainmaking and Other Forgotten Things 11 2. In the Time of Beef 35 Cattle to Beef: A Photo Essay of Abstraction 61 3. Roads, Sand, and the Motorized Cow 85 4. Power and Possibility, or Did You Know Aesop Was Once a Slave? 121 Notes 129 Index 153

    £67.15

  • Concrete Dreams

    Duke University Press Concrete Dreams

    Book SynopsisNicholas D'Avella offers an ethnographic reflection on the value of buildings in post-crisis Buenos Aires, showing how everyday practices transform buildings into politically, economically, and socially consequential objects, and arguing that such local forms of value and practice suggest possibilities for building better futures.Trade Review“Concrete Dreams is a beautifully written ethnography that focuses on how the specific everyday practices of lay investors, real estate analysts, and architects produce divergent forms of value in the volatile political and economic landscape of recent Argentine history. The ethnographic narratives show exactly how ‘buildings’ emerge as partially connected conceptual and concrete entities that hold value as investments, as objects of design, and as homes. The power of the analysis lies in the combination of a deep understanding of dominant economic modes of valuation with a sensitivity to the fragile relational spaces where alternative possibilities are kept alive.” -- Penny Harvey, University of Manchester“Nicholas D’Avella has managed to take a topic central to the historical sweep of Argentine political economy and written an intimate, engaging portrait of quotidian life amid economic uncertainty. He makes real estate markets and municipal zoning understandable at the macro-scale with which they crash economies and at the micro-scale that causes people to strap money to their bodies. Ambitious and weighty, subtle and intimate, Concrete Dreams is an exceptional urban ethnography.” -- Kregg Hetherington, editor of * Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene *“...Concrete Dreams is a welcome contribution to the study of contemporary urban transformation in Latin America.... At a time when Buenos Aires is confronting the growth of high-rise luxury developments and mega real estate projects, D’Avella offers a glimmer of hope amid the threats to green spaces, heritage and barrio life.” -- Cecilia Dinardi * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *“The book develops an innovative approach to comprehending broad historical shifts in political economy from an ethnographic perspective. D’Avella’s writing is eloquent and engaging.... [Concrete Dreams] is definitely a rewarding read for a broad interdisciplinary social science audience.” -- Virág Molnár * American Journal of Sociology *“Concrete Dreams is an engaging and rigorous ethnographic exploration of built environments within post-crisis Buenos Aires.... Any reader ... who wishes to know more about the built environments of Buenos Aires, the people in them, and the history of them, would do well to pick it up.” -- Jeremy R. Grossman * Journal of Cultural Economy *“Taking an anthropological approach to everyday life in post-crisis Buenos Aires, Concrete Dreams does not reduce practices to a market-centered matrix.... D’Avella’s book allows us to avoid oversimplifying ways of living in the city.” -- Gonzalo Saavedra * American Anthropologist *“[Concrete Dreams] one of the best and most nuanced studies on Buenos Aires, Argentina, and urban Latin America.... [D’Avella’s] examination of the prelude and aftermath of the 2001 crisis is dexterous, insightful, and relevant in cultural, political economy, and affective terms.” -- Juan M. del Nido * Bulletin of Latin American Research *“D’Avella brings to life the everyday experiences of residents of single-floor homes as high-rise buildings blocked the sun, casting shadows over urban gardens.” -- Denisa Jashari * Latin American Research Review *

    £98.60

  • Militarization

    Duke University Press Militarization

    Book SynopsisMilitarization: A Reader offers a range of critical perspectives on the dynamics of militarization as a social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental phenomenon. It portrays militarism as the condition in which military values and frameworks come to dominate state structures and public culture both in foreign relations and in the domestic sphere. Featuring short, readable essays by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, cultural theorists, and media commentators, the Readerprobes militarism''s ideologies, including those that valorize warriors, armed conflict, and weaponry. Outlining contemporary militarization processes at work around the world, the Reader offers a wide-ranging examination of a phenomenon that touches the lives of billions of people. In collaboration with Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Catherine Lutz, Katherine T. McCaffrey, Austin Miller, David H. Price, David VineTrade Review“This wonderfully innovative, distinctive, and timely book has the additional value of taking an anthropological approach to militarism. Its editors have been among the key actors in crafting sharp and valuable critiques of the creeping militarization of their disciplines, particularly as practiced by U.S.-based scholars. This volume offers some of the most cogent explorations of the many-layered workings of militarism.” -- Cynthia Enloe, author of * Globalization and Militarism *“Militarism's reach extends far beyond the weapons and armed police and soldiers prowling our streets and deployed around the world, as its rhetoric normalizes violence and war. This deeply intersectional collection insists on the vantage point of militarism's victims, historically and today, while exposing those who profit from it. This volume provides an astonishingly comprehensive introduction to the globalized systems threatening not only individuals, but whole nations, peoples, and cultures, all captured by a profoundly militarized United States.” -- Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies, author of * Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror *“At just over 400 pages, including a very useful twenty-seven-page bibliography, [Militarization] reflects an enormous and dedicated effort. . . . The book offers us a path to think past our disciplinary fetishization of the lone wordsmith in knowledge production.” -- Keith Brown * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *“The editors bring a compelling and timely ethic of demilitarization to our discipline. . . . The volume’s strength is its comprehensive coverage and intersectional, multidisciplinary approach to militarization and its impacts.” -- Leah Zani * Anthropological Quarterly *Table of ContentsEditors' Note xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction / Roberto J. González and Hugh Gusterson 1 Section I. Militarization and Political Economy Introduction / Catherine Lutz 27 1.1. The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending / John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney 29 1.2. Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961 / Dwight D. Eisenhower 36 1.3. The Militarization of Sports and the Redefinition of Patriotism / William Astore 38 1.4. Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contemporary West Africa / Daniel Hoffman 42 1.5. Women, Economy, War / Carolyn Nordstrom 51 Section II. Military Labor 2.1. Soldiering as Work: The All-Volunteer Force in the United States / Beth Bailey 59 2.2. Sexing the Globe / Sealing Cheng 62 2.3. Military Monks / Michael Jerryson 67 2.4. Child Soldiers after War / Brandon Kohrt and Robert Koenig 71 2.5. Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire / Paul H. Kratoska 73 2.6. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry / P. W. Singer 76 Section III. Gender and Militarism Introduction / Katherine T. McCaffery 83 3.1. Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War / Kimberly Theidon 85 3.2. The Compassionate Warrior: Wartime Sacrifice / Jean Bethke Elshtain 91 3.3. Creating Citizens, Making Men: The Military and Masculinity in Bolivia / Lesley Gill 95 3.4. One of the Guys: Military Women and the Argentine Army / Máximo Badaró 101 Section IV. The Emotional Life of Militarism Introduction / Catherine Lutz 109 4.1. Militarization and the Madness of Everyday Life / Nancy Scheper-Hughes 111 4.2. Fear as a Way of Life / Linda Green 118 4.3. Evil, the Self, and Survival / Robert Jay Lifton (Interviewed by Harry Kreisler) 127 4.4. Target Audience: The Emotional Impact of U.S. Governmental Films on Nuclear Testing / Joseph Masco 130 Section V. Rhetorics of Militarism Introduction / Andrew Bickford 141 5.1. The Militarization of Cherry Blossoms / Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 143 5.2. The "Old West" in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country / Stephen W. Silliman 148 5.3. Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War / Naoko Shidusawa 154 5.4. The Military Normal: Feeling at Home with Counterinsurgency in the United States / Catherine Lutz 157 5.5. Nuclear Orientalism / Hugh Gusterson 163 Section VI. Militarization, Place, and Territory Introduction / Roberto J. González 167 6.1. Making War at Home / Catherine Lutz 168 6.2. Spillover: The U.S. Military's Sociospatial Impact / Mark L. Gillen 175 6.3. Nuclear Landscapes: The Marshall Islands and Its Radioactive Legacy / Barbara Rose Johnston 181 6.4. The War on Terror, Dismantling, and the Construction of Place: An Ethnographic Perspective from Palestine / Julie Peteet 186 6.5. The Border Wall Is a Metaphor / Jason de León (Interviewed by Micheline Aharońian Marcom) 192 Section VII. Militarized Humanitarianism Introduction / Catherine Besteman 197 7.1. Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories / Mariella Pandolfi 199 7.2. Armed for Humanity / Michael Barnett 203 7.3. The Passions of Protection: Sovereign Authority and Humanitarian War / Anne Orford 208 7.4. Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish? / Mahmood Mamdani 212 7.5. Utopias of Power: From Human Security to the Presponsibility to Protect / Chowra Makaremi 218 Section VIII. Militarism and the Media Introduction / Hugh Gusterson 223 8.1. Pentagon Pundits / David Barstow (Interview by Amy Goodman) 224 8.2. Operation Hollywood / David L. Robb (Interviewed by Jeff Fleischer) 230 8.3. Discipline and Publish / Mark Pedelty 234 8.4. The Enola Gay on Display / John Whittier Treat 239 8.5. War Porn: Hollywood and War, from World War II to American Sniper / Peter van Buren 243 Section IX. Militarizing Knowledge Introduction / David H. Price 249 9.1. Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and International and Area Studies during and after the Cold War / Bruce Cumings 251 9.2. The Career of Cold War Psychology / Ellen Herman 254 9.3. Scientific Colonialism / Johan Galtung 259 9.4. Research ni Foreign Areas / Ralph L. Beals 265 9.5. Rethinking the Promise of Critical Education / Henry A. Giroux (Interviewed by Chronis Polychroniou) 270 Section X. Militarization and the Body Introduction / Roberto J. González 275 10.1. Nuclear War, the Gulf War, and the Disappearing Body / Hugh Gusterson 276 10.2. The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injuried Bodies and Unanchored Issues / Elaine Scarry 283 10.3. The Enhanced Warfighter / Kenneth Ford and Clark Glymour 291 10.4. Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua / James Quesada 296 Section XI. Militarism and Technology Introduction / Hugh Gusterson 303 11.1. Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879 / Noel Perrin 305 11.2. Life Underground: Building the American Bunker Society / Joseph Masco 307 11.3. Militarizing Space / David H. Price 316 11.4. Embodiment and Affect in a Digital Age: Understanding Mental Illness among Military Drone Personnel / Alex Edney-Browne 319 11.5. Land Mines and Cluster Bombs: "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Slow Motion" / H. Patricia Hynes 324 11.6. Pledge of Non-Participation / Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright 328 11.7. The Scientists' Call to Ban Autonomous Lethal Robots / International Committee for Robot Arms Control 329 Section XII. Alternatives to Militarization Introduction / David Vine 333 12.1. War Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity / Margaret Mead 336 12.2. Reflections on the Possibility of a Nonkilling Society and a Nonkilling Anthropology / Leslie E. Sponsel 339 12.3. U.S. Bases, Empire, and Global Response / Catherine Lutz 344 12.4. Down Here / Julian Aguon 347 12.5. War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency / Roberto J. González, Hugh Gusterson, and David H. Price 349 12.6. Hope in the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities / Rebecca Solnit 350 References 355 Contributors 383 Index 389 Credits 403

    £112.20

  • Affective Trajectories

    Duke University Press Affective Trajectories

    Book SynopsisThe contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in aTrade Review“This amazing collection of highly evocative and sophisticated essays makes a cutting-edge intervention into current debates on the role of emotions and affect in religious practice as well as the study of urbanity in African studies and beyond. There is no doubt that Affective Trajectories will be of keen interest to those researching African urbanities and religion and urban studies more broadly.” -- Birgit Meyer, author of * Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana *“Providing a diverse range of case studies of how religious experience plays out and is expressed affectively, this unique and timely volume pushes forward the study of affect and emotion in religious contexts. An innovative and original contribution.” -- Kai Kresse, author of * Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience *"Linking affect, emotion, and religion in urban African settings, this volume contributes to studying how new modes of existence may emerge in Africa. Published before the emergence of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Affective Trajectories is particularly useful for considering its consequences on the continent." -- E. P. Renne * Choice *“Affective Trajectories is a clarion call for more systematic engagement by scholars of religion with affect and the importance and vitality of such efforts in the African context.... Affective Trajectories and its many unique contributions provide an impressive point of departure for such work.” -- Nathanael J. Homewood * Journal of Africana Religions *“This collective work offers very rich and original reflections and case studies embracing diverse theoretical and conceptual challenges.... This book leaves a very inspiring mark for further research in other big or small African cities and beyond—revealing the potentialities of the intertwinement of emotion, (im)materiality and spirituality to see and navigate cities.” -- Édith Nabos * Connections *“... [A]n intriguing image emerges out of the diversity of the case studies and contributions, leaving the reader with original insights but also exciting new questions about the changing nature of, and relationship between, religious practices, personhood, and urban life. This makes Affective Trajectories a valuable contribution to the study of religion in Africa.” -- Yotam Gidron * Reading Religion *“Clearly written, with a feast of new concepts and insights of broader relevance to anthropological theory, Affective Trajectories does scholars in religion, affect and urban studies an invaluable service by richly mediating these three terrains.” -- Ray Qu * Social Anthropology *“The strength of [Affective Trajectories] resides in the rich ethnographic descriptions, and these have led to a number of novel concepts, which are likely to generate new analytical discussions.... This volume will speak to anyone interested in religious subjectivities or in urban African mobilities.” -- Katrien Pype * Journal of Southern African Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Affective Trajectories in Religious African Cityscapes / Hansjörg Dilger, Marian Burchardt, Mathew Wilhelm-Solomon, and Astrid Bochow 1 Part I. Affective Infrastructures 1. Affective Regenerations: Intimacy, Cleansing, and Mourning in and around Johannesburg's Dark Buildings / Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon 29 2. Emotions as Affective Trajectories of Belief in Mwari (God) among Masowe Apostles in Urban Zimbabwe / Isabel Mukonyora 52 3. The Sites of Divine Encounter: Affective Religious Spaces and Sensational Practices in Christ Embassy and NASFAT in the City of Abuja / Murtala Ibrahim 77 4. Religious Sophistication in African Pentecostalism: An Urban Spirit? Rijk Van Dijk 98 Part II. Emotions on the Move 5. Affective Routes of Healing: Navigating Paths of Recovery in Urban and Rural West Africa / Isabelle L. Lange 119 6. The Cleansing Touch: Spirits, Atmospheres, and Attouchment in a "Japanese" Spiritual Movement in Kinshasa / Peter Lambertz 138 7. Learning How to Feel: Emotional Repertoires of Nigerian and Congolese Pentecostal Pastors in the Diaspora / Rafael Cazarin and Marian Burchardt 160 Part III. Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Belonging 8. "Those Who Pray Together": Religious Practice, Affect, and Dissent among Muslims in Asante (Ghana) / Benedikt Pontzen 185 9. Longing for Connection: Christian Education and Emerging Urban Lifestyles in Botswana / Astrid Bochow 202 10. "Here, Here Is a Place Where I Can Cry": Religion in a Context of Displacement: Congolese Churches in Kampala / Alessandro Gusman 222 11. Men of Love? Affective Conversions on Township Streets / Hans Reihling 243 Bibliography 263 Contributors 299 Index 303

    £98.60

  • The Complete Lives of Camp People

    Duke University Press The Complete Lives of Camp People

    Book SynopsisRudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of internees of two twentieth-century concentration camps and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to and reveal the fundamental logics of modernity.Trade Review“The Complete Lives of Camp People is quite simply an extraordinary, provocative, challenging, and brilliant work. Offering an audacious theorization of modernity via modernity's twin forms of violence—colonialism and the camp—Rudolf Mrázek has written perhaps the finest book I have read this decade.” -- Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University“The Complete Lives of Camp People is a stunning collage assembled from witness testimonies, administrative instructions, philosophical reflections, and poetic illuminations. By juxtaposing the stories of two ‘model camps’—Boven Digoel and Theresienstadt—Rudolf Mrázek explores the sensory, material, experiential, and spatial dimensions of twentieth-century internment camps. This is the ‘thickest description’ of camp life yet to appear in print, providing valuable insights into a ubiquitous feature of modernity.” -- Iris Rachamimov, Tel Aviv University"A strength of this work is its emphasis on portraying the lives of camp people as they lived them. Mrázek leads his reader through the quotidian activities of the camps, touching on theatre, music, study—even the geography of the camps in their block arrangements. . . . Mrázek has provided the means of developing entirely new analyses of the history of concentration camps." -- Brenda Melendy * International Social Science Review *"This book offers an urgent reminder, and its remarkable range of engagement with thinkers—from Levinas to Isaac Bashevis Singer—gives it the energy of a living conversation. A useful intervention into holocaust and genocide studies, this work should be included in courses on empire and colonization more generally . . . plus chapters could serve as productive additions to a range of classroom conversations." -- Spencer Dew * Religion and Law *"With this book, Mrázek offers readers a rich, complex picture that greatly enhances existing knowledge of concentration camps in the previous century. . . . Supported by rigorous research and the author's lucid writing style, this volume is an interesting read. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- Q. E. Wang * Choice *"This book offers a well-rounded perspective on camp lives that are often overlooked and unimagined. . . . [Mrázek's] portrayal of the internees is also humanizing and compassionate. All in all, this book is recommended for those interested in exploring more on the everyday life in the camps." -- Amrina Rosyada * Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia *"Brilliant, moving and deeply disturbing . . ." -- Danilyn Rutherford * Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia *"This book offers an urgent reminder, and its remarkable range of engagement with thinkers—from Levinas to Isaac Bashevis Singer—gives it the energy of a living conversation. A useful intervention into holocaust and genocide studies, this work should be included in courses on empire and colonization more generally." -- Spencer Dew * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Part I. Fashion 1. Clothes 11 2. Beauty Spots 27 3. Pink Bodies 43 4. Sport 72 Part II. Sound 5. Noise 83 6. Voice 91 7. Music 104 8. Radio 119 Part III. Light 9. Clearing 143 10. Enlightenment 169 11. Limelight 189 Part IV. City 12. Blocks 211 13. Streets 239 14. Suburbs 265 Part V. Scattering 15. Nausea 297 16. Escape 319 17. Dust, or Memory 349 Notes 379 Bibliography 451 Index

    £112.20

  • Invisibility by Design

    Duke University Press Invisibility by Design

    Book SynopsisGabriella Lukács traces how young Japanese women's unpaid labor as bloggers, net idols, girly photographers, online traders, and cell phone novelists was central to the development of Japan's digital economy in the 1990s and 2000s.Trade Review“Addressing crucial issues for our time, Gabriella Lukács brings an ethnographic perspective to young Japanese women who aspire to lucrative careers in day trading and beyond. Through a writing style filled with warmth and empathy, she portrays how these women often face disappointment in their entrepreneurial endeavors, and analyzes how these women's desires for better careers can sometimes be self-defeating. A deeply insightful and thought-provoking book.” -- Ian Condry, author of * The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story *“Stunningly powerful, Invisibility by Design tracks the movement of young Japanese women into the digital economy where, ‘seduced’ into imagining its possibilities for meaningful work, most found instead that they labored too hard for little pay-off or gendered advancement. Indicting the capitalism that drove digital economy's rapid expansion in 2000s Japan by exploiting and invisibilizing women's affective labor, Gabriella Lukács has given us a book that is at once theoretically profound and ethnographically dense, dancing through the stories of women bloggers, net idols, 'girly' photographers, amateur traders, and cell phone novelists. A rich tour de force!” -- Anne Allison, author of * Precarious Japan *“This book is valuable for what it tells us about how some women, by moving into digital careers, have tried to resist the discrimination and restrictions of Japan’s gendered labor market.... It is also a welcome contribution to our understanding of how capitalism operates in the digital age.” -- Kaye Broadbent * Journal of Japanese Studies *“Gabriella Lukács’s stunning new book, Invisibility by Design, examines online spaces that promise opportunities for women in particular.... Although the dynamics described within it focus on Japan, this book will be of interest to scholars working in many fields, including gender studies, labor, and communications.” -- Allison Alexy * Journal of Asian Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Labor and Gender in Japan's Digital Economy 1 1. Disidentifications: Women, Photography, and Everyday Patriarchy 30 2. The Labor of Cute: Net Idols in the Digital Economy 57 3. Career Porn: Blogging and the Good Life 81 4. Working without Sweating: Amateur Traders and the Financialization of Daily Life 106 5. Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Affective Labor, and Precarity Politics 132 Epilogue. Digital Labor, Labor Precarity, and Basic Income 155 Notes 167 References 207 Index 225

    £90.10

  • A Revolution in Fragments

    Duke University Press A Revolution in Fragments

    Book SynopsisMark Goodale's ethnographic study of Bolivian politics and society between 2006 and 2015 reveals the fragmentary and contested nature of the country's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning.Trade Review“This major piece of scholarship on contemporary Bolivia offers profound theoretical insights and contributions. I have no doubt that this fabulous book will become an authoritative text.” -- Andrew Canessa, author of * Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life *“Revolutionary change has proven profoundly difficult for anthropologists to handle, both in theoretical and descriptive terms. Against this background, A Revolution in Fragments is a triumph. Both a compelling theoretical account of the nature of ‘revolution by constitution’ and a gripping ethnography of the revolutionary process as it unfolded over more than a decade in Bolivia, this is a book no one interested in the nature and potential of radical social transformation should miss.” -- Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge“The rich ethnographic and historical detail that Goodale provides makes A Revolution in Fragments a thoroughly engaging and illuminating read…. Goodale captures the complexity and political multiplicity that comes to the fore during times of revolution and produces an original and thoughtful account of the Morales years, a welcome addition to the growing literature on Bolivia in general.” -- Angus McNelly * Bulletin of Latin American Research *"Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." -- S. L. Rozman * Choice *“A Revolution in Fragments ... is distinctive in its breadth.... This book should be one of the first to turn to for anyone wishing to better understand ... the nature of Bolivian politics during the era of Evo Morales.” -- Jonathan Alderman * Journal of Latin American Studies *“Covering the period 2006-2015, [A Revolution in Fragments] aims to portray and comprehend the Bolivian ‘process of change’ as it unfolds before Goodale’s eyes.... [The book] lays bare the absurdity of reductionist approaches as well as the insatiable political craving for heroes and antiheroes. And yet Goodale’s book makes the point compellingly, almost effortlessly, as if it were merely the channel through which we hear the voices of the revolution.” -- Soledad Valdivia Rivera * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *“Goodale’s analysis spans geographic as well as ideological distances, challenging scholars to think through the various texts and subtexts brought forth in the MAS’s state- and nation-building process.... Goodale’s theoretical scaffolding and his broad evidentiary base make A Revolution in Fragments required reading for scholars of race, class, and gender across the Global South." -- Luis M. Sierra * Journal of Global South Studies *“Goodale’s thoughtful work reveals several tensions that defined Bolivia’s revolutionary project.... This book’s empirical and analytical richness makes transparent an important moment in global history and provides the necessary insight so we can begin to understand that moment’s end.” -- Marygold Walsh-Dilley * Journal of Anthropological Research *“A Revolution in Fragments offers a rich and detailed political and legal history of revolution by constitution, and the juridification of a pro-indigenous reform agenda through creative practices of legal reasoning and bureaucratic refashioning.... Beyond this institutional history, however, the book also offers a touching portrait of the ethical uncertainties of juridification as a technology for political change.” -- Mareike Winchell * Anthropological Quarterly *“Goodale illustrates his dense and enriching theoretical contributions with a delicate combination of a contemplation of the historical, political, economic and ideological context of the South American country, and the ethnographic immediacy with which he observes and interprets his interlocutors.” (Translated from Spanish) -- Maximilian Görgens * Iberoamericana *“A Revolution in Fragments will be of interest to readers interested in recent and longer histories of left governments, left and indigenous social movements, and right-wing organizing in Latin America. It is a beautifully written and moving account of a tumultuous period essential for understanding the achievements, limits, and contradictions of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio.” -- Sarah Hines * The Latin Americanist *Table of ContentsPreface ix Introduction. Meaning and Crisis in Cosmic Time 1 1. Hearing Revolution in a Minor Key 33 2. Legal Cosmovisions 64 3. Opposition as a Cultural System: Myth, Embodiment, Violence 95 4. A Revolution without Revolutionaries: El proceso de cambio in a Trotskyized Country 134 5. The Unstable Assemblage of Law 166 6. And the Pututu Shall Sound 200 Conclusion. The Politics of Forever 234 Notes 249 References 265 Index 283

    £98.60

  • Divided Bodies

    Duke University Press Divided Bodies

    Book SynopsisAbigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy to shed light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States.Trade Review“This exceptional book takes readers into the heart of an important medical controversy about the very nature of Lyme disease. Sensitively portraying the struggles of Lyme sufferers, as well as the divided opinions of the clinicians who care for them, this book demonstrates how evidence-based medicine may not reflect the social complexities of a deeply contested illness. A must-read for scholars of American health and medicine and for anyone interested in the growing Lyme disease epidemic.” -- Marcia C. Inhorn, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University“The controversy over the existence and meaning of chronic Lyme disease is one of the most fascinating stories in contemporary medicine. In Divided Bodies, Abigail A. Dumes explores with penetration and subtlety this epistemic border on which patients and physicians wage an intense battle to impose their truth.” -- Didier Fassin, Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France"This book is valuable for its illustration of how some medical paradigms become mainstream, while others disappear. Chronic Lyme, whatever it is, holds up a mirror to evidence-based medicine. Dumes's ethnographic approach provides voluminous details, new insights, and a refreshing alternative to much of the existing literature on the Lyme controversy. Highly recommended. All readers." -- M. Gochfeld * Choice *“Divided Bodies will be of interest to medical anthropologists and sociologists, and health professionals curious about how illnesses come to be contested.... It is an impressive example of how ethnography can shed light on the relationship between illness, disease and evidence-based medicine.” -- Caragh Brosnan * Sociology of Health & Illness *“Divided Bodies is a thorough, anthropo­logical study of the controversies present in Lyme disease and inherent in EBM.... Interest­ed physicians are encouraged to check it out.” -- William Murdoch * Family Medicine *“Being the first of its kind, Abigail A. Dumes’ ethnographic study of Lyme disease in the United States introduces its readers to a world largely unknown.... Thanks to her continuous, careful attention, readers get a thorough idea of what is at stake.” -- Josephine Rudbech * Ethnos *"I come away from this book with a clearer understanding of how evidence-based medicine makes multiple kinds of truth claims accessible, and how the idea of evidence becomes an agent in all approaches to chronic Lyme/post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. This degree of balance, reflected down to Dumes’s word choice, is masterful. . . . Pre-COVID, most abled people’s lives were cordoned off from those who suffer chronically. Dumes’s text offers insight into what it might mean to distinguish, in our research and writing practices as much as in the subjects of our research, what we mean by evidence, what we mean by knowledge, and how we hold multiple competing worldviews in the same frame, as we pay attention to the suffering of others." -- Charis Boke * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *“Throughout [Divided Bodies], Dumes achieves a balancing act as an ethnographer of an onto-epistemological debate, wherein questions about what Lyme is frequently crowd out the social-scientific questions of what Lyme means and how it is actedupon.” -- Emma Broder * H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews *“Divided Bodies is an excellent example of the scholarship possible for those who take seriously the prospect of contested truths in contemporary medicine. It is well worth a read for those interested in the hegemony of evidence-based medicine and the persistence of the medically unexplained, as well as others invested in the specificities of Lyme disease as it is experienced and treated.” -- Paula Martin * Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry *"Abigail Dumes effectively presents a transdisciplinary approach for articulating the rhizomatic representations of illness that yields the phenomenon of Lyme Disease. It was a joy to read." -- Frans Jackop Lourens Robberts * Sociology of Health & Illness *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Lyme Disease Outside In 1 1. Mapping the Lyme Disease Controversy 27 2. Preventing Lyme 65 3. Living Lyme 99 4. Diagnosing and Treating Lyme 158 5. Lyme Disease, Evidence-Based Medicine, and the Biopolitics of Truthmaking 187 Conclusion: Through Lyme's Looking Glass 222 Notes 235 Glossary 271 References 273 Index 327

    £112.20

  • Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation

    Duke University Press Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisDeborah A. Thomas uses the 2010 military and police incursion into the Kingston, Jamaica, Tivoli Gardens neighborhood as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and other post-plantation societies.Trade Review“In this ambitious, methodologically innovative, remarkable book, Deborah A. Thomas offers a startlingly original engagement with the affective circuits supporting life in Jamaican neighborhoods that are ongoing sites of state-based violence, covert geopolitical intrigue, and narcopolitics. Through all this, Thomas argues for the power of a redemptive politics and offers a guide to how life after the plantation informs the present.” -- Joseph Masco, author of * The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror *“With an exemplary humanity and grace interwoven with a critical and reparative hopefulness, Deborah A. Thomas's Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation meditates on the fateful violences of postcolonial sovereignty. Across the arc of the book's specific preoccupations, Thomas pursues a receptive sensibility to dimensions of cultural, political, and moral life very often obscured by the conventions of disciplinary investigation, and in so doing she offers us not only a revisionary story of the Jamaican past in the present but a model of restorative thinking.” -- David Scott, Columbia University“This is a powerful and persuasive remapping of the contours of black lifeworlds and sovereignty under colonial and national rule and in the face of brutal state violence. Deborah A. Thomas is innovative and creative in her insistence that only alternative archives will reveal the importance of black refusal and significance of affect, and she is passionate in her arguments for ethical practices of witnessing. A remarkable book that should be read by everyone who thinks black life matters.” -- Hazel V. Carby, Yale University"Witnessing Jamaica with an affective register provides an essential standpoint from which to recognize African diasporic people’s lived reality, and compels us to reimagine—affectively—the possibilities for social repair. Recommended. Researchers and faculty." -- R. Chopra * Choice *"Political Life’s imaginatively choreographed structure . . . complicates understanding of the Jamaican state and state violence. It deepens appreciation of the coformation of citizenship and the state, and the state’s imbrication in both transnational and local sociocultural and political processes." -- Charles V. Carnegie * New West Indian Guide *"As an illuminating genealogy of the Jamaican present, it is a must-read for students of Anglophone Caribbean societies, and a model for dealing with both the old and the new as they shape the early twenty-first century. But Political Life is much more than a Caribbeanist’s trove of treasures. As a sharp engagement with recent and classic scholarship, woven through with a thoughtful meditation on ethnographic method, it will form a lasting resource and a generative touchstone for any anthropologist interested in affect, modern citizenship, political theory, postcolonialism, race, or state violence." -- Edward Sammons * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface xi Introduction. Humanness in the Wake of the Plantation 1 1. Doubt 22 Interlude I. Interrogating Imperialism 67 2. Expectancy 88 Interlude II. Naming Names 133 3. Paranoia 151 Coda. The End of the World as We Know It 207 Acknowledgments 223 Notes 229 References 269 Index 293

    3 in stock

    £75.65

  • The Ocean in the School

    Duke University Press The Ocean in the School

    Book SynopsisRick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence into a space based on meaningfulness, respect, and multiple notions of student success.Trade Review"Rick Bonus has provided us with important insights into what it might take to transform colleges and universities so that those who have been historically underserved can thrive in higher education. By placing the experiences of Pacific Islanders at the center of his analysis, Bonus brings incisive critique and profound authenticity to a subject that has bedeviled the efforts of educators for many years. For educators and others who seek to ensure that access to academia is available to marginalized and disadvantaged students, this book will be an eye-opener." -- Pedro A. Noguera, coeditor of * Race, Equity, and Education: Sixty Years from Brown *“In The Ocean in the School, Rick Bonus eloquently shows how indigenous and minority students mobilized against the colonialisms and racisms of higher education. With his focus on the Pacific Islander students of the University of Washington, he demonstrates how they forged a collective identity, protested administrative negligence, developed study groups, and conducted outreach programs. Clearly, Bonus brings much compassion, insight, and rigor to the interplay between Pacific Islander students, multiethnic coalitions, and public education. This book is thus essential reading for anybody who studies the decolonization of modern institutions.” -- Keith L. Camacho, author of * Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam *"A well-written depiction of a particular group of students within a particular institution, … the book is a worthwhile read for higher education administrators who are considering how to enact policies and programs that support marginalized students from a diverse range of backgrounds, as well as for educators and scholars who are considering questions of how to act in solidarity with students seeking to create meaningful learning experiences." -- Paulina Haduong * Harvard Educational Review *"A must-read for all aspiring and current university faculty, leaders, and staff who genuinely wish to decolonize their practices and model inclusive excellence at various levels for Pacific Islander students and others who are underrepresented at PWIs." -- Rachel Endo * Journal of Asian American Studies *"The Ocean in the School is a valuable resource for scholars working and researching in higher education and related fields. It champions Pacific Island students' success and initiatives in the face of rigid educational systems, and challenges universities and their faculty to do the hard work of true transformation to cultural responsiveness for them, and other minority students." -- Michelle Ladwig Williams * Pacific Affairs *“[The Ocean in the School] makes a much-needed intervention in the fields of multicultural education and American ethnic studies. It points to the need for institutions to go beyond the current rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to tackle instead the hegemony of white supremacy. . . . This book [is] captivating and accessible.” -- Bader Alfarhan * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction. What Does It Mean to Transform Schooling? 1 1. The Students, The School, The Ocean: Tracking Students' Lives on Campus 23 2. Pipe: Collective Mentorship as a Politics of Partnership 65 3. Those Who Left 107 4. Schooling Outside and Inside 149 Conclusion. Transformative Schooling Against Boundaries 191 Notes 203 Bibliography 277 Index 245

    £72.25

  • Fencing in Democracy

    Duke University Press Fencing in Democracy

    Book SynopsisBorder walls permeate our world, with more than thirty nation-states constructing them. Anthropologists Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also at enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion. For a decade, the authors studied the U.S.-Mexico border wall constructed by the Department of Homeland Security and observed the political protests and legal challenges that residents mounted in opposition to the wall. In Fencing in Democracy Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga take us to those border communities most affected by the wall and often ignored in national discussions about border security to highlight how the state diminishes citizens'' rights. That dynamic speaks to the citizenship experiences of border residents that is indicative of how walls imprison the populations they are built to protect. Dorsey and Díaz-BTrade Review“Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey's argument that the role of the state in fomenting violence remains unrecognized and depoliticized is powerful and utterly convincing. With its superior scholarship and compelling ethnographic material, Fencing in Democracy will garner interest from scholars and the public alike.” -- Patricia Zavella, author of * I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty *“Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey deliver a groundbreaking exposé of the distorted logics, policies, and politics that underpin the construction of border walls. Focusing on the US-Mexico border wall, Fencing in Democracy is a deeply thoughtful and thoroughly researched investigation that reveals the backstories behind ever-expanding processes of securitization and militarization, and the death and destruction that result. Not for the fainthearted, this book is for concerned citizens of the world looking to comprehend what the popular media and powerful politicians distort and a wake-up call about what gets destroyed in the name of safety.” -- Alisse Waterston, author of * My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century *“This work is provocative.... Given the global rise of authoritarian rule coupled with the imposition of walls of exclusion, Fencing in Democracy will be of interest globally to general publics and students across the social sciences.” -- Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez * Journal of Anthropological Research *“[Fencing in Democracy] is an extremely valuable study of the local dynamics and resistance to the federal and state multilayered border enforcement machine and propaganda.” -- Timothy Dunn * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. The Politics of Bisection: A Visual Ethnography of Rebordering and Rajando 15 2. Not Walls, Bridges: Rituals of Necrocitizenship 49 3. Necrocitizenship Enacted: Raping White Women and Consolidating the State of Exception 79 4. Bleeding like the State: The Open Veins of Latin America 108 5. Necrocitizenship Kills 118 Conclusion 135 Epilogue 141 Notes 145 References 159 Index 171

    £70.55

  • An Ecology of Knowledges

    Duke University Press An Ecology of Knowledges

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisGuatemala''s Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the largest protected area in Central America, is characterized by rampant violence, social and ethnic inequality, and rapid deforestation. Faced with these threats, local residents, conservationists, scientists, and NGOs in the region work within what Micha Rahder calls “an ecology of knowledges,” in which interventions on the MBR landscape are tied to differing and sometimes competing forms of knowing. In this book, Rahder examines how technoscience, endemic violence, and an embodied love of wild species and places shape conservation practices in Guatemala. Rahder highlights how different forms of environmental knowledge emerge from encounters and relations between humans and nonhumans, institutions and local actors, and how situated ways of knowing impact conservation practices and natural places, often in unexpected and unintended ways. In so doing, she opens up new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental knowlTrade Review“An Ecology of Knowledges is replete with intriguing ethnographic material located at the crossroads of histories of violence and practices of conservation. Its themes and depictions of the problematic relation between state, ecology, globalization, and violence—along with its siting in a globally recognized ecological zone—are all extremely compelling features that will appeal to scholars and students, NGO workers, conservation officials, and even governmental organizations.” -- Marisol de la Cadena, author of * Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds *“This exceptionally well-written book details the complex interactions between people, nonhuman animals, organizations, and interests as they converge in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere. Micha Rahder's strongly grounded and fine-grained research reveals how conservation organizations work and how knowledge and uncertainty about nature, population, wildness, and frontiers operate. Although it charts a conservation failure, An Ecology of Knowledges is really about success: how people learn from process, create conservation consciousness and enact deep care.” -- Diane M. Nelson, author of * Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide *"A powerful complement to more standard critical analyses of conservation and development that focus on impacts on local people…. The book is perhaps most appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and Latin American Studies. It is also an essential read for scholars of knowledge, conservation, and development working around the world." -- Maron Greenleaf * American Anthropologist *"With An Ecology of Knowledges, Micha Rahder contributes a thought-provoking, interdisciplinary volume on epistemological inconsistencies that define conservation practice in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR)." -- Daillen Culver * Journal of Latin American Studies *"An Ecology of Knowledges is an important addition to interdisciplinary conservation scholarship. Rahder expertly illustrates the influences that the shifting winds of international development, electoral politics, and NGO funding have on conservation knowledge and action. As well, the work gives insight into the ways that technologies, from GIS to community surveys, interact with individuals, institutions, and histories to produce expert knowledge(s). Lastly, and most importantly, the book moves us away from the simplistic, monolithic depictions of conservation with its unique view into conservationists’ minds, actions, and outcomes." -- David M. Hoffman * Environment and Society *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgements xii Introduction. What on Earth Is a Nooscape? 1 Learning How to See 10 1. The Many Worlds of the Maya Biosphere Reserve 13 Silences of Memory 32 I. Double Visions: Technoscience and Paranoia 2. Eye of the Storm 37 Corrupted Data 57 3. Mapping Gobernabilidad 59 Gender and Violence 92 4. But Is It a Basin? 94 Peteneros and Other Endemic Species 116 II. Patchiness and Fragmentation 5. A Reserve Full of Rooftops 121 Parks, Poverty, People 152 6. Fire at the Edge of the Forest 155 Death of a Dog 185 III. Composing and Composting Knowledges 7. A Known Place 189 Certainty Emerges 216 Apocalypse Soon! 245 9. Nine / Redd+Queen Futures 247 Modest Interventions 265 Afterword 268 Notes 273 References 287 Index 303

    1 in stock

    £80.10

  • Avian Reservoirs

    Duke University Press Avian Reservoirs

    Book SynopsisAfter experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs Frédéric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics—stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong—reflect Trade Review“In this ethnography of the prevention of bird flu pandemics in Asia, Frédéric Keck dazzlingly interweaves perspectives from the anthropology of sciences and institutions, an account of the modernization of methods of biopower, and a fine-grained analysis of relations between endangered humans and nonhumans in order to show how common values evolve out of their mutual vulnerabilities. A crucial contribution to the reformulation of political rules for the coexistence between different forms of life.” -- Philippe Descola, Collège de France“This is a delicious book, fun to read and full of bright sparks of insight. Frédéric Keck compares microbiologists to hunters; he mixes and matches his ontologies in relation to particular scientific practices. The exuberance of comparison makes the experiment work. I find it stimulating and good to think with.” -- Anna Tsing, coeditor of * Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene *"This thought-provoking and brilliant book is no doubt timely. Avian Reservoirs inspires us to re-examine our relations with animals and techniques of dealing with zoonotic disease." -- Justin Lau * LSE Review of Books *"The message of [Avian Reservoirs] is both timely and time-honored. The birds and their microbes, like the omens of classical literature, bear witness to a realm of higher truths. We would do well to heed our augurs." -- Priscilla Wald * Public Books *“Ultimately Keck’s work offers a global view of China and the region, and if it re­mains less invested in the concerns of area studies specialists, it fits nicely with much of contemporary medical anthropology, especially recent work on biology, biosciences, and even environmental history…. Theoretically sophisticated, and holding ethnographical ambitions, Avian Reservoirs offers much to consider with the questions it poses, actively seeking to ‘decenter humans by showing their dependence on other species.’” -- John P. DiMoia * Asian Ethnology *“Avian Reservoirs is a fascinating and timely ethnography on bird flu prevention in East Asia. Frédéric Keck has taken a unique approach to the field of global health that is rich with theoretical insights and fresh methods.” -- Eric I. Karchmer * Journal of Asian Studies *“Avian Reservoirs offers a well-historicized ethnography of key systems of global infectious disease research, surveillance, and prevention.... Keck’s book is essential for scholars interested in pandemic preparedness.” -- Stephen Molldrem * New Genetics and Society *“Frédéric Keck’s illuminating study . . . could not be more timely at a time when the world is in the throes of Covid-19. . . . [Avian Reservoirs] forces us to reflect on the disequilibrium that has created our present crisis.” -- Thomas Abraham * Journal of Anthropological Research *"Avian Reservoirs is a highly creative and unorthodox work, richly informed by interdisciplinary concepts that are folded into the text with care and intellectual fidelity. . . . Avian Reservoirs is a thought-provoking read—imposing order and orientation over disparate, highly charged, and locally varying projects to manage the entanglements between humans, animals, and emerging pathogens." -- Martha Lincoln * China Perspectives *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Animal Diseases 1. Culling, Vaccinating, and Monitoring Contagious Animals 11 2. Biosecurity Concerns and the Surveillance of Zoonoses 29 3. Global Health and the Ecologies of Conservation 44 Part II. Techniques of Preparedness 4. Sentinels and Early Warning Signals 69 5. Simulations and Reverse Scenarios 108 6. Stockpiling and Storage 139 Conclusion 173 Notes 179 Bibliography 211 Index 237

    £98.60

  • Affective Trajectories

    Duke University Press Affective Trajectories

    Book SynopsisThe contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in aTrade Review“This amazing collection of highly evocative and sophisticated essays makes a cutting-edge intervention into current debates on the role of emotions and affect in religious practice as well as the study of urbanity in African studies and beyond. There is no doubt that Affective Trajectories will be of keen interest to those researching African urbanities and religion and urban studies more broadly.” -- Birgit Meyer, author of * Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana *“Providing a diverse range of case studies of how religious experience plays out and is expressed affectively, this unique and timely volume pushes forward the study of affect and emotion in religious contexts. An innovative and original contribution.” -- Kai Kresse, author of * Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience *"Linking affect, emotion, and religion in urban African settings, this volume contributes to studying how new modes of existence may emerge in Africa. Published before the emergence of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Affective Trajectories is particularly useful for considering its consequences on the continent." -- E. P. Renne * Choice *“Affective Trajectories is a clarion call for more systematic engagement by scholars of religion with affect and the importance and vitality of such efforts in the African context.... Affective Trajectories and its many unique contributions provide an impressive point of departure for such work.” -- Nathanael J. Homewood * Journal of Africana Religions *“This collective work offers very rich and original reflections and case studies embracing diverse theoretical and conceptual challenges.... This book leaves a very inspiring mark for further research in other big or small African cities and beyond—revealing the potentialities of the intertwinement of emotion, (im)materiality and spirituality to see and navigate cities.” -- Édith Nabos * Connections *“... [A]n intriguing image emerges out of the diversity of the case studies and contributions, leaving the reader with original insights but also exciting new questions about the changing nature of, and relationship between, religious practices, personhood, and urban life. This makes Affective Trajectories a valuable contribution to the study of religion in Africa.” -- Yotam Gidron * Reading Religion *“Clearly written, with a feast of new concepts and insights of broader relevance to anthropological theory, Affective Trajectories does scholars in religion, affect and urban studies an invaluable service by richly mediating these three terrains.” -- Ray Qu * Social Anthropology *“The strength of [Affective Trajectories] resides in the rich ethnographic descriptions, and these have led to a number of novel concepts, which are likely to generate new analytical discussions.... This volume will speak to anyone interested in religious subjectivities or in urban African mobilities.” -- Katrien Pype * Journal of Southern African Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Affective Trajectories in Religious African Cityscapes / Hansjörg Dilger, Marian Burchardt, Mathew Wilhelm-Solomon, and Astrid Bochow 1 Part I. Affective Infrastructures 1. Affective Regenerations: Intimacy, Cleansing, and Mourning in and around Johannesburg's Dark Buildings / Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon 29 2. Emotions as Affective Trajectories of Belief in Mwari (God) among Masowe Apostles in Urban Zimbabwe / Isabel Mukonyora 52 3. The Sites of Divine Encounter: Affective Religious Spaces and Sensational Practices in Christ Embassy and NASFAT in the City of Abuja / Murtala Ibrahim 77 4. Religious Sophistication in African Pentecostalism: An Urban Spirit? Rijk Van Dijk 98 Part II. Emotions on the Move 5. Affective Routes of Healing: Navigating Paths of Recovery in Urban and Rural West Africa / Isabelle L. Lange 119 6. The Cleansing Touch: Spirits, Atmospheres, and Attouchment in a "Japanese" Spiritual Movement in Kinshasa / Peter Lambertz 138 7. Learning How to Feel: Emotional Repertoires of Nigerian and Congolese Pentecostal Pastors in the Diaspora / Rafael Cazarin and Marian Burchardt 160 Part III. Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Belonging 8. "Those Who Pray Together": Religious Practice, Affect, and Dissent among Muslims in Asante (Ghana) / Benedikt Pontzen 185 9. Longing for Connection: Christian Education and Emerging Urban Lifestyles in Botswana / Astrid Bochow 202 10. "Here, Here Is a Place Where I Can Cry": Religion in a Context of Displacement: Congolese Churches in Kampala / Alessandro Gusman 222 11. Men of Love? Affective Conversions on Township Streets / Hans Reihling 243 Bibliography 263 Contributors 299 Index 303

    £25.19

  • Concrete Dreams

    Duke University Press Concrete Dreams

    Book SynopsisNicholas D'Avella offers an ethnographic reflection on the value of buildings in post-crisis Buenos Aires, showing how everyday practices transform buildings into politically, economically, and socially consequential objects, and arguing that such local forms of value and practice suggest possibilities for building better futures.Trade Review“Concrete Dreams is a beautifully written ethnography that focuses on how the specific everyday practices of lay investors, real estate analysts, and architects produce divergent forms of value in the volatile political and economic landscape of recent Argentine history. The ethnographic narratives show exactly how ‘buildings’ emerge as partially connected conceptual and concrete entities that hold value as investments, as objects of design, and as homes. The power of the analysis lies in the combination of a deep understanding of dominant economic modes of valuation with a sensitivity to the fragile relational spaces where alternative possibilities are kept alive.” -- Penny Harvey, University of Manchester“Nicholas D’Avella has managed to take a topic central to the historical sweep of Argentine political economy and written an intimate, engaging portrait of quotidian life amid economic uncertainty. He makes real estate markets and municipal zoning understandable at the macro-scale with which they crash economies and at the micro-scale that causes people to strap money to their bodies. Ambitious and weighty, subtle and intimate, Concrete Dreams is an exceptional urban ethnography.” -- Kregg Hetherington, editor of * Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene *“...Concrete Dreams is a welcome contribution to the study of contemporary urban transformation in Latin America.... At a time when Buenos Aires is confronting the growth of high-rise luxury developments and mega real estate projects, D’Avella offers a glimmer of hope amid the threats to green spaces, heritage and barrio life.” -- Cecilia Dinardi * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *“The book develops an innovative approach to comprehending broad historical shifts in political economy from an ethnographic perspective. D’Avella’s writing is eloquent and engaging.... [Concrete Dreams] is definitely a rewarding read for a broad interdisciplinary social science audience.” -- Virág Molnár * American Journal of Sociology *“Concrete Dreams is an engaging and rigorous ethnographic exploration of built environments within post-crisis Buenos Aires.... Any reader ... who wishes to know more about the built environments of Buenos Aires, the people in them, and the history of them, would do well to pick it up.” -- Jeremy R. Grossman * Journal of Cultural Economy *“Taking an anthropological approach to everyday life in post-crisis Buenos Aires, Concrete Dreams does not reduce practices to a market-centered matrix.... D’Avella’s book allows us to avoid oversimplifying ways of living in the city.” -- Gonzalo Saavedra * American Anthropologist *“[Concrete Dreams] one of the best and most nuanced studies on Buenos Aires, Argentina, and urban Latin America.... [D’Avella’s] examination of the prelude and aftermath of the 2001 crisis is dexterous, insightful, and relevant in cultural, political economy, and affective terms.” -- Juan M. del Nido * Bulletin of Latin American Research *“D’Avella brings to life the everyday experiences of residents of single-floor homes as high-rise buildings blocked the sun, casting shadows over urban gardens.” -- Denisa Jashari * Latin American Research Review *

    £25.19

  • Invisibility by Design

    Duke University Press Invisibility by Design

    Book SynopsisGabriella Lukács traces how young Japanese women's unpaid labor as bloggers, net idols, “girly” photographers, online traders, and cell phone novelists was central to the development of Japan's digital economy in the 1990s and 2000s.Trade Review“Addressing crucial issues for our time, Gabriella Lukács brings an ethnographic perspective to young Japanese women who aspire to lucrative careers in day trading and beyond. Through a writing style filled with warmth and empathy, she portrays how these women often face disappointment in their entrepreneurial endeavors, and analyzes how these women's desires for better careers can sometimes be self-defeating. A deeply insightful and thought-provoking book.” -- Ian Condry, author of * The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story *“Stunningly powerful, Invisibility by Design tracks the movement of young Japanese women into the digital economy where, ‘seduced’ into imagining its possibilities for meaningful work, most found instead that they labored too hard for little pay-off or gendered advancement. Indicting the capitalism that drove digital economy's rapid expansion in 2000s Japan by exploiting and invisibilizing women's affective labor, Gabriella Lukács has given us a book that is at once theoretically profound and ethnographically dense, dancing through the stories of women bloggers, net idols, 'girly' photographers, amateur traders, and cell phone novelists. A rich tour de force!” -- Anne Allison, author of * Precarious Japan *“This book is valuable for what it tells us about how some women, by moving into digital careers, have tried to resist the discrimination and restrictions of Japan’s gendered labor market.... It is also a welcome contribution to our understanding of how capitalism operates in the digital age.” -- Kaye Broadbent * Journal of Japanese Studies *“Gabriella Lukács’s stunning new book, Invisibility by Design, examines online spaces that promise opportunities for women in particular.... Although the dynamics described within it focus on Japan, this book will be of interest to scholars working in many fields, including gender studies, labor, and communications.” -- Allison Alexy * Journal of Asian Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Labor and Gender in Japan's Digital Economy 1 1. Disidentifications: Women, Photography, and Everyday Patriarchy 30 2. The Labor of Cute: Net Idols in the Digital Economy 57 3. Career Porn: Blogging and the Good Life 81 4. Working without Sweating: Amateur Traders and the Financialization of Daily Life 106 5. Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Affective Labor, and Precarity Politics 132 Epilogue. Digital Labor, Labor Precarity, and Basic Income 155 Notes 167 References 207 Index 225

    £22.49

  • A Revolution in Fragments

    Duke University Press A Revolution in Fragments

    Book SynopsisMark Goodale's ethnographic study of Bolivian politics and society between 2006 and 2015 reveals the fragmentary and contested nature of the country's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning.Trade Review“This major piece of scholarship on contemporary Bolivia offers profound theoretical insights and contributions. I have no doubt that this fabulous book will become an authoritative text.” -- Andrew Canessa, author of * Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life *“Revolutionary change has proven profoundly difficult for anthropologists to handle, both in theoretical and descriptive terms. Against this background, A Revolution in Fragments is a triumph. Both a compelling theoretical account of the nature of ‘revolution by constitution’ and a gripping ethnography of the revolutionary process as it unfolded over more than a decade in Bolivia, this is a book no one interested in the nature and potential of radical social transformation should miss.” -- Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge“The rich ethnographic and historical detail that Goodale provides makes A Revolution in Fragments a thoroughly engaging and illuminating read…. Goodale captures the complexity and political multiplicity that comes to the fore during times of revolution and produces an original and thoughtful account of the Morales years, a welcome addition to the growing literature on Bolivia in general.” -- Angus McNelly * Bulletin of Latin American Research *"Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." -- S. L. Rozman * Choice *“A Revolution in Fragments ... is distinctive in its breadth.... This book should be one of the first to turn to for anyone wishing to better understand ... the nature of Bolivian politics during the era of Evo Morales.” -- Jonathan Alderman * Journal of Latin American Studies *“Covering the period 2006-2015, [A Revolution in Fragments] aims to portray and comprehend the Bolivian ‘process of change’ as it unfolds before Goodale’s eyes.... [The book] lays bare the absurdity of reductionist approaches as well as the insatiable political craving for heroes and antiheroes. And yet Goodale’s book makes the point compellingly, almost effortlessly, as if it were merely the channel through which we hear the voices of the revolution.” -- Soledad Valdivia Rivera * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *“Goodale’s analysis spans geographic as well as ideological distances, challenging scholars to think through the various texts and subtexts brought forth in the MAS’s state- and nation-building process.... Goodale’s theoretical scaffolding and his broad evidentiary base make A Revolution in Fragments required reading for scholars of race, class, and gender across the Global South." -- Luis M. Sierra * Journal of Global South Studies *“Goodale’s thoughtful work reveals several tensions that defined Bolivia’s revolutionary project.... This book’s empirical and analytical richness makes transparent an important moment in global history and provides the necessary insight so we can begin to understand that moment’s end.” -- Marygold Walsh-Dilley * Journal of Anthropological Research *“A Revolution in Fragments offers a rich and detailed political and legal history of revolution by constitution, and the juridification of a pro-indigenous reform agenda through creative practices of legal reasoning and bureaucratic refashioning.... Beyond this institutional history, however, the book also offers a touching portrait of the ethical uncertainties of juridification as a technology for political change.” -- Mareike Winchell * Anthropological Quarterly *“Goodale illustrates his dense and enriching theoretical contributions with a delicate combination of a contemplation of the historical, political, economic and ideological context of the South American country, and the ethnographic immediacy with which he observes and interprets his interlocutors.” (Translated from Spanish) -- Maximilian Görgens * Iberoamericana *“A Revolution in Fragments will be of interest to readers interested in recent and longer histories of left governments, left and indigenous social movements, and right-wing organizing in Latin America. It is a beautifully written and moving account of a tumultuous period essential for understanding the achievements, limits, and contradictions of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio.” -- Sarah Hines * The Latin Americanist *Table of ContentsPreface ix Introduction. Meaning and Crisis in Cosmic Time 1 1. Hearing Revolution in a Minor Key 33 2. Legal Cosmovisions 64 3. Opposition as a Cultural System: Myth, Embodiment, Violence 95 4. A Revolution without Revolutionaries: El proceso de cambio in a Trotskyized Country 134 5. The Unstable Assemblage of Law 166 6. And the Pututu Shall Sound 200 Conclusion. The Politics of Forever 234 Notes 249 References 265 Index 283

    £25.19

  • The Complete Lives of Camp People

    Duke University Press The Complete Lives of Camp People

    Book SynopsisIn The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrázek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi “ghetto” for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch “isolation camp” Boven Digoel—which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrázek shows how modern life''s most mundane tasks—buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports—continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity''s tenets. In this way, MráTrade Review“The Complete Lives of Camp People is quite simply an extraordinary, provocative, challenging, and brilliant work. Offering an audacious theorization of modernity via modernity's twin forms of violence—colonialism and the camp—Rudolf Mrázek has written perhaps the finest book I have read this decade.” -- Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University“The Complete Lives of Camp People is a stunning collage assembled from witness testimonies, administrative instructions, philosophical reflections, and poetic illuminations. By juxtaposing the stories of two ‘model camps’—Boven Digoel and Theresienstadt—Rudolf Mrázek explores the sensory, material, experiential, and spatial dimensions of twentieth-century internment camps. This is the ‘thickest description’ of camp life yet to appear in print, providing valuable insights into a ubiquitous feature of modernity.” -- Iris Rachamimov, Tel Aviv University"A strength of this work is its emphasis on portraying the lives of camp people as they lived them. Mrázek leads his reader through the quotidian activities of the camps, touching on theatre, music, study—even the geography of the camps in their block arrangements. . . . Mrázek has provided the means of developing entirely new analyses of the history of concentration camps." -- Brenda Melendy * International Social Science Review *"This book offers an urgent reminder, and its remarkable range of engagement with thinkers—from Levinas to Isaac Bashevis Singer—gives it the energy of a living conversation. A useful intervention into holocaust and genocide studies, this work should be included in courses on empire and colonization more generally . . . plus chapters could serve as productive additions to a range of classroom conversations." -- Spencer Dew * Religion and Law *"With this book, Mrázek offers readers a rich, complex picture that greatly enhances existing knowledge of concentration camps in the previous century. . . . Supported by rigorous research and the author's lucid writing style, this volume is an interesting read. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- Q. E. Wang * Choice *"This book offers a well-rounded perspective on camp lives that are often overlooked and unimagined. . . . [Mrázek's] portrayal of the internees is also humanizing and compassionate. All in all, this book is recommended for those interested in exploring more on the everyday life in the camps." -- Amrina Rosyada * Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia *"Brilliant, moving and deeply disturbing . . ." -- Danilyn Rutherford * Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia *"This book offers an urgent reminder, and its remarkable range of engagement with thinkers—from Levinas to Isaac Bashevis Singer—gives it the energy of a living conversation. A useful intervention into holocaust and genocide studies, this work should be included in courses on empire and colonization more generally." -- Spencer Dew * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Part I. Fashion 1. Clothes 11 2. Beauty Spots 27 3. Pink Bodies 43 4. Sport 72 Part II. Sound 5. Noise 83 6. Voice 91 7. Music 104 8. Radio 119 Part III. Light 9. Clearing 143 10. Enlightenment 169 11. Limelight 189 Part IV. City 12. Blocks 211 13. Streets 239 14. Suburbs 265 Part V. Scattering 15. Nausea 297 16. Escape 319 17. Dust, or Memory 349 Notes 379 Bibliography 451 Index

    £27.90

  • The Ocean in the School

    Duke University Press The Ocean in the School

    Book SynopsisRick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence into a space based on meaningfulness, respect, and multiple notions of student success.Trade Review"Rick Bonus has provided us with important insights into what it might take to transform colleges and universities so that those who have been historically underserved can thrive in higher education. By placing the experiences of Pacific Islanders at the center of his analysis, Bonus brings incisive critique and profound authenticity to a subject that has bedeviled the efforts of educators for many years. For educators and others who seek to ensure that access to academia is available to marginalized and disadvantaged students, this book will be an eye-opener." -- Pedro A. Noguera, coeditor of * Race, Equity, and Education: Sixty Years from Brown *“In The Ocean in the School, Rick Bonus eloquently shows how indigenous and minority students mobilized against the colonialisms and racisms of higher education. With his focus on the Pacific Islander students of the University of Washington, he demonstrates how they forged a collective identity, protested administrative negligence, developed study groups, and conducted outreach programs. Clearly, Bonus brings much compassion, insight, and rigor to the interplay between Pacific Islander students, multiethnic coalitions, and public education. This book is thus essential reading for anybody who studies the decolonization of modern institutions.” -- Keith L. Camacho, author of * Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam *"A well-written depiction of a particular group of students within a particular institution, … the book is a worthwhile read for higher education administrators who are considering how to enact policies and programs that support marginalized students from a diverse range of backgrounds, as well as for educators and scholars who are considering questions of how to act in solidarity with students seeking to create meaningful learning experiences." -- Paulina Haduong * Harvard Educational Review *"A must-read for all aspiring and current university faculty, leaders, and staff who genuinely wish to decolonize their practices and model inclusive excellence at various levels for Pacific Islander students and others who are underrepresented at PWIs." -- Rachel Endo * Journal of Asian American Studies *"The Ocean in the School is a valuable resource for scholars working and researching in higher education and related fields. It champions Pacific Island students' success and initiatives in the face of rigid educational systems, and challenges universities and their faculty to do the hard work of true transformation to cultural responsiveness for them, and other minority students." -- Michelle Ladwig Williams * Pacific Affairs *“[The Ocean in the School] makes a much-needed intervention in the fields of multicultural education and American ethnic studies. It points to the need for institutions to go beyond the current rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to tackle instead the hegemony of white supremacy. . . . This book [is] captivating and accessible.” -- Bader Alfarhan * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction. What Does It Mean to Transform Schooling? 1 1. The Students, The School, The Ocean: Tracking Students' Lives on Campus 23 2. Pipe: Collective Mentorship as a Politics of Partnership 65 3. Those Who Left 107 4. Schooling Outside and Inside 149 Conclusion. Transformative Schooling Against Boundaries 191 Notes 203 Bibliography 277 Index 245

    £19.79

  • Writing Anthropology

    Duke University Press Writing Anthropology

    Book SynopsisIn Writing Anthropology, fifty-two anthropologists reflect on scholarly writing as both craft and commitment, offering insights into the myriad roles of anthropological writing, the beauty and the function of language, the joys and pains of writing, and encouragement to stay at it.Trade Review“Writing Anthropology is the long-awaited handbook that our discipline desperately needs to move us away from the lingering idea that our texts should be indecipherable to mortals. Carole McGranahan and company have given anthropologists a beautifully wrinkled and coffee-stained road map to help us all get to a writing place that is thoughtful, self-aware, compassionate, and (gasp!) accessible.” -- Jason De León, author of * The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail *“In this powerful volume, a multitude of ruminations, thoughts, prompts, and provocations flow together like a vibrant stream until we see the lifeblood of contemporary anthropology as a committed way of writing about people that is beholden to a sense of accountability. The accomplished anthropologists featured in this book pursue a shared commitment to writing well. But this is not merely for the sake of more effective explication or theoretical nuance. They aim to better convey the hardships and dignity of humanity itself. This is ethnography at its best: beautifully written, surprising, deeply instructive, and grounded in an ethical practice that never ceases to care about and attend to everything and everyone with whom anthropologists engage.” -- Laurence Ralph, author of * The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence *"In these 53 short, blog-style essays, students now have a new, pithy guide to help them think through a wealth of writing issues. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals." * Choice *"A rich wordhoard of ideas that focus on 'craft and commitment' in anthropological writing…" -- David Syring * Anthropology and Humanism *"Although Writing Anthropology is not ostensibly a how-to book, readers seeking strategies to apply to their writing practices should not be disappointed. . . . The essays in this collection resonate, as McGranahan depicts, that ‘anthropology is a writing discipline’ (7). As writers, anthropologists make ideal commentators on their practices of presentation and representation, on their visions for process and product." -- Steven E. Gump * Journal of Scholarly Publishing *"... Writing Anthropology makes a compelling case for clear, truthful, heartfelt, and engaged anthropological writing. It will certainly be one of those books I will turn to for inspiration and solace when I find myself struggling in front of a white screen." -- Nastja Slavec * Anthropology Notebooks *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. On Writing and Writing Well: Ethics, Practice, Story / Carole McGranahan 1 Section I. Ruminations 1. Writing in and from the Field / Ieva Jusionyte 23 2. List as Form: Literary, Ethnographic, Long, Short, Heavy, Light / Sasha Su-Ling Welland 28 3. Finding Your Way / Paul Stoller 34 4. The Ecology of What We Write / Anand Pandian 37 5. When Do Words Count? / Kirin Narayan 41 Section II. Writing Ideas 6. Read More, Write Less / Ruth Behar 47 7. Pro Tips for Academic Writing / C. Anne Claus 54 8. My Ten Steps for Writing a Book / Kristen R. Ghodsee 58 9. Slow Reading / Michael Lambek 62 10. Digging with the Pen: Writing Archaeology / Zoë Crossland 66 Section III. Telling Stories 11. Anthropology as Theoretical Storytelling / Carole McGranahan 73 12. Beyond Thin Description: Biography, Theory, Ethnographic Writing / Donna M. Goldstein 78 13. Can't Get There from Here? Writing Place and Moving Narratives / Sarah Besky 83 14. Ethnographic Writing with Kirin Narayan: An Interview / Carole McGranahan 87 15. On Unreliable Narrators / Sienna R. Craig 93 Section IV. On Responsibility 16. In Dialogue: Ethnographic Writing and Listening / Marnie Jane Thomson 101 17. Writing with Community / Sara L. Gonzalez 104 18. To Fieldwork, to Write / Kim Fortun 110 19. Quick, Quick, Slow: Ethnography in the Digital Age / Yarimar Bonilla 118 20. That Generative Space between Ethnography and Journalism / Maria D. Vesperi 121 Section V. The Urgency of Now 21. Writing about Violence / K. Drybread 127 22. Writing about Bad, Sad, Hard Things / Carole McGranahan 131 23. Writing to Live: On Finding Strength While Watching Ferguson / Whitney Battle-Baptiste 134 24. Finding My Muse While Mourning / Chelsi West Ohueri 137 25. Mourning, Survival, and Time: Writing Through Crisis / Adia Benton 140 Section VI. Writing With, Writing Against 26. A Case for Agitation: On Affect and Writing / Carla Jones 145 27. Antiracist Writing / Ghassan Hage 149 28. Writing with Love and Hate / Bhrigupati Singh 153 29. Peer Review: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger / Alan Kaiser 158 30. When They Don't Like What We Write: Criticism of Anthropology as a Diagnostic of Power / Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar 163 Section VII. Academic Authors 31. Writing Archaeology "Alone," or a Eulogy for a Codirector / Jane Eva Baxter 169 32. Collaboration: From Different Throats Intone One Language? / Matt Sponheimer 173 33. What Is and (Academic) Author? / Mary Murrell 178 34. The Writing behind the Written / Noel B. Salazar 182 35. It's All "Real" Writing / Daniel M. Goldstein 185 36. Dr. Funding or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Grant Writing / Robin M. Bernstein 188 Section VIII. Ethnographic Genres 37. Poetry and Anthropology / Nomi Stone 195 38. "SEA" Stories: Anthropologies and Poetries beyond the Human / Stuart McLean 201 39. Dilations / Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant 206 40. Genre Bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction / Jessica Marie Falcone 212 41. Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between / Roxanne Varzi 220 42. From Real Life to the Magic of Fiction / Ruth Behar 223 Section IX. Becoming and Belonging 43. On Writing from Elsewhere / Uzma Z. Rizvi 229 44. Writing to Become . . . / Sita Venkateswar 234 45. Unscholarly Confessions on Reading / Katerina Teaiwa 239 46. Guard Your Heart and Your Purpose: Faithfully Writing Anthropology / Bianca C. Williams 246 47. Writing Anthropology and Such, or "Once More, with Feeling" / Gina Athena Ulysse 251 48. The Anthropology of Being (Me) / Paul Tapsell 256 Section X. Writing and Knowing 49. Writing as Cognition / Barak Kalir 263 50. Thinking Through the Untranslatable / Kevin Carrico 266 51. Freeze-Dried Memory Crumbs: Field Notes from North Korea / Lisa Sang Mi Min 270 52. Writing the Disquiets of a Colonial Field / Ann Laura Stoler 274 53. On Ethnographic Unknowability / Catherine Besteman 280 Bibliography 283 Contributors 293 Index 305

    £75.65

  • Futureproof

    Duke University Press Futureproof

    Book SynopsisSecurity is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Futureproof redirect this focus, showing how security is a sensory domain shaped by affect and image as much as rules and rationalities. They examine security as it is lived and felt in domains as varied as real estate listings, active-shooter drills, border crossings, landslide maps, gang graffiti, and museum exhibits to theorize how security regimes are expressed through aesthetic forms. Taking a global perspective with studies ranging from Jamaica to Jakarta and Colombia to the U.S.-Mexico border, Futureproof expands our understanding of the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that pervade everyday life. Contributors. Victoria Bernal, Jon Horne Carter, Alexandra Demshock, Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, Didier Fassin, D. Asher Ghertner, Daniel M. Goldstein, Rachel Hall, Rivke Jaffe, Ieva Jusionyte, Catherine Lutz, Alejandra Leal Martinez, Hudson McFann, Limor Samimian-Darash, AbdouMaliq Simone, Austin ZeidermanTrade Review“This provocative book reframes the issue of security, considering it at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. It opens new possibilities of critique and of understanding, using ethnographies to expose several dimensions of our everydayness that normalize fear, risk, violence, and the invisibilization of growing inequalities. It will become mandatory reading for all interested in criticizing contemporary formations of power and the ways in which violence and security are lived and felt in the everyday.” -- Teresa P. R. Caldeira, author of * City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo *“This volume offers a critical analysis of ‘security’ as a mode of power and form of governance by examining its aesthetic dimensions. The authors explore the institutions and discourses that sell protection from almost every aspect of everyday life. By focusing on the political and social aesthetics of how security claims and threats control human lives, they argue that it is these aesthetic manipulations that provide an affective infrastructure and set of practices that manage human life. An important addition to the anthropology of security, Futureproof provides a provocative glimpse into the future.” -- Setha Low, coeditor of * Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control *"The development of the concept of security as an aesthetic and sensory experience is an interesting line of research, and the broad sample of cases evaluated in Futureproof was well chosen. This is a reference text I would recommend for security practitioners as well as advanced students and scholars of security and strategic theories. Far from the typical security text, there are philosophical elements and advanced concepts that lend more to a scholar’s eye, but this text will prove educational for anyone with an interest in the staging and portrayal of security." -- Courteney J. O’Connor * LSE Review of Books *"This is a worthy and relevant contribution to security studies, a field which will likely become even more prominent in the post–COVID-19 world." -- R. P. Lorenzo * Choice *Table of ContentsForeword / Catherine Lutz vii Introduction. Security Aesthetics of and beyond the Biopolitical / D. Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein 1 1. The Aesthetics of Cyber Insecurity: Displaying the Digital in Three American Museum Exhibits / Victoria Bernal 33 2. Danger Signs: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Bogotá / Austin Zeiderman 63 3. "We All Have the Same Red Blood": Security Aesthetics and Rescue Ethics on the Arizona-Sonora Border / Ieva Jusionyte 87 4. Fugitive Horizons and the Arts of Security in Honduras / Jon Horne Carter 114 5. Security Aesthetics and Political Community Formation in Kingston, Jamaica / Rivke Jaffe 134 6. Staging Safety in Brooklyn's Real Estate / Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores and Alexandra Demshock 156 7. Expecting the Worst: Active-Shooter Scenario Play in American Schools / Rachel Hall 175 8. H5N1 and the Aesthetics of Biosecurity: From Danger to Risk / Limor Samimian-Darash 200 9. Securing "Standby" and Urban Space Making in Jakarta: Intensities in Search of Forms / AbdouMaliq Simone 225 10. Securing the Street: Urban Renewal and the Fight against "Informality" in Mexico City / Alejandra Leal Martínez 245 Afterword. The Age of Security / Didier Fassin 271 Acknowledgments 277 Contributors 279 Index 285

    £25.19

  • Fencing in Democracy

    Duke University Press Fencing in Democracy

    Book SynopsisBorder walls permeate our world, with more than thirty nation-states constructing them. Anthropologists Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also at enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion. For a decade, the authors studied the U.S.-Mexico border wall constructed by the Department of Homeland Security and observed the political protests and legal challenges that residents mounted in opposition to the wall. In Fencing in Democracy Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga take us to those border communities most affected by the wall and often ignored in national discussions about border security to highlight how the state diminishes citizens'' rights. That dynamic speaks to the citizenship experiences of border residents that is indicative of how walls imprison the populations they are built to protect. Dorsey and Díaz-BTrade Review“Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey's argument that the role of the state in fomenting violence remains unrecognized and depoliticized is powerful and utterly convincing. With its superior scholarship and compelling ethnographic material, Fencing in Democracy will garner interest from scholars and the public alike.” -- Patricia Zavella, author of * I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty *“Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey deliver a groundbreaking exposé of the distorted logics, policies, and politics that underpin the construction of border walls. Focusing on the US-Mexico border wall, Fencing in Democracy is a deeply thoughtful and thoroughly researched investigation that reveals the backstories behind ever-expanding processes of securitization and militarization, and the death and destruction that result. Not for the fainthearted, this book is for concerned citizens of the world looking to comprehend what the popular media and powerful politicians distort and a wake-up call about what gets destroyed in the name of safety.” -- Alisse Waterston, author of * My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century *“This work is provocative.... Given the global rise of authoritarian rule coupled with the imposition of walls of exclusion, Fencing in Democracy will be of interest globally to general publics and students across the social sciences.” -- Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez * Journal of Anthropological Research *“[Fencing in Democracy] is an extremely valuable study of the local dynamics and resistance to the federal and state multilayered border enforcement machine and propaganda.” -- Timothy Dunn * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. The Politics of Bisection: A Visual Ethnography of Rebordering and Rajando 15 2. Not Walls, Bridges: Rituals of Necrocitizenship 49 3. Necrocitizenship Enacted: Raping White Women and Consolidating the State of Exception 79 4. Bleeding like the State: The Open Veins of Latin America 108 5. Necrocitizenship Kills 118 Conclusion 135 Epilogue 141 Notes 145 References 159 Index 171

    £18.99

  • Avian Reservoirs

    Duke University Press Avian Reservoirs

    Book SynopsisAfter experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs Frédéric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics—stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong—reflect Trade Review“In this ethnography of the prevention of bird flu pandemics in Asia, Frédéric Keck dazzlingly interweaves perspectives from the anthropology of sciences and institutions, an account of the modernization of methods of biopower, and a fine-grained analysis of relations between endangered humans and nonhumans in order to show how common values evolve out of their mutual vulnerabilities. A crucial contribution to the reformulation of political rules for the coexistence between different forms of life.” -- Philippe Descola, Collège de France“This is a delicious book, fun to read and full of bright sparks of insight. Frédéric Keck compares microbiologists to hunters; he mixes and matches his ontologies in relation to particular scientific practices. The exuberance of comparison makes the experiment work. I find it stimulating and good to think with.” -- Anna Tsing, coeditor of * Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene *"This thought-provoking and brilliant book is no doubt timely. Avian Reservoirs inspires us to re-examine our relations with animals and techniques of dealing with zoonotic disease." -- Justin Lau * LSE Review of Books *"The message of [Avian Reservoirs] is both timely and time-honored. The birds and their microbes, like the omens of classical literature, bear witness to a realm of higher truths. We would do well to heed our augurs." -- Priscilla Wald * Public Books *“Ultimately Keck’s work offers a global view of China and the region, and if it re­mains less invested in the concerns of area studies specialists, it fits nicely with much of contemporary medical anthropology, especially recent work on biology, biosciences, and even environmental history…. Theoretically sophisticated, and holding ethnographical ambitions, Avian Reservoirs offers much to consider with the questions it poses, actively seeking to ‘decenter humans by showing their dependence on other species.’” -- John P. DiMoia * Asian Ethnology *“Avian Reservoirs is a fascinating and timely ethnography on bird flu prevention in East Asia. Frédéric Keck has taken a unique approach to the field of global health that is rich with theoretical insights and fresh methods.” -- Eric I. Karchmer * Journal of Asian Studies *“Avian Reservoirs offers a well-historicized ethnography of key systems of global infectious disease research, surveillance, and prevention.... Keck’s book is essential for scholars interested in pandemic preparedness.” -- Stephen Molldrem * New Genetics and Society *“Frédéric Keck’s illuminating study . . . could not be more timely at a time when the world is in the throes of Covid-19. . . . [Avian Reservoirs] forces us to reflect on the disequilibrium that has created our present crisis.” -- Thomas Abraham * Journal of Anthropological Research *"Avian Reservoirs is a highly creative and unorthodox work, richly informed by interdisciplinary concepts that are folded into the text with care and intellectual fidelity. . . . Avian Reservoirs is a thought-provoking read—imposing order and orientation over disparate, highly charged, and locally varying projects to manage the entanglements between humans, animals, and emerging pathogens." -- Martha Lincoln * China Perspectives *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Animal Diseases 1. Culling, Vaccinating, and Monitoring Contagious Animals 11 2. Biosecurity Concerns and the Surveillance of Zoonoses 29 3. Global Health and the Ecologies of Conservation 44 Part II. Techniques of Preparedness 4. Sentinels and Early Warning Signals 69 5. Simulations and Reverse Scenarios 108 6. Stockpiling and Storage 139 Conclusion 173 Notes 179 Bibliography 211 Index 237

    £25.19

  • Vital Decomposition

    Duke University Press Vital Decomposition

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisKristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations in which she follows state soil scientists and peasant farmers in Colombia's Putumayo region, showing how their relationship with soil is key to caring for the forest and growing non-illicit crops in the face of violence, militarism, and environmental destruction.Trade Review“Vital Decomposition weaves enthralling ecopoetic writing with the finest ethnographic storytelling. Kristina M. Lyons tells us a compelling story of human-soil relations nurturing insurgent life from the very grounds of eco-social devastation. An indispensable and inspiring read for hopeful decolonial naturecultures.” -- María Puig de la Bellacasa, author of * Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds *“Making several important interventions in biopolitics, multispecies ethnography, and feminist science studies, Vital Decomposition is a riveting, engaging, timely, and intimate book. It is the best kind of ethnography; it takes us to the small, marginal, and forgotten and examines the world through them, making us feel as though we've been looking at everything the wrong way for a while.” -- Kregg Hetherington, author of * The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops *“Vital Decomposition is a beautifully written book that takes readers deep inside the worlds of Amazonian farmers, soil scientists, and the Amazonian ecosystem itself…. Readers interested in rural Colombia, alternative agricultural practices, and the connections between knowledge, practice, power, and resistance, will appreciate her work.” -- Alex Diamond * NACLA *“Through her research, Lyons weaves poetry and storytelling into a novel analysis of soils. From the perspective of the rural farmers she came to know, Lyons vividly describes the urgent need to ‘think with Amazonian soils’ rather than external systems....” -- Kathleen M. Smits and Jessica M. Smith * Vadose Zone Journal *“Through sensorially powerful ethnographic writing about relations between humans and soil in Colombia, Lyons tells us a story about soil farmers in the Amazon and soil scientists in Bogotá.... Lyons insists on foregrounding the resilience of people and, crucially, of Amazonian soil.” -- María Elena García * Public Books *“This exciting and innovative ethnography centers the often invisible, yet ubiquitous, materiality of soil. [Vital Decomposition] will, I hope, generate a renewed interest in the political ecology of soils and encourage future studies around human-soil relations within the social sciences.” -- Meghan Sullivan * Antipode *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Life in the Midst of Poison 1 1. From Aerial Spaces to Litter Layers 10 2. The Theater of Life Is Also a Stage of Death: Beyond Surface Chauvinism 41 3. Partial Alliances among Minor Practices: The "Ellusive" Nature of Colombia's Amazonian Plains 70 4. Decomposition as Life Politics: On Reclaiming and Relaying 105 5. Resonating Farms and Vital Spaces: A Person and His Concepts 137 6. Which Soils? Where Soils? Why Soils? 169 Notes 183 References 197 Index 213

    3 in stock

    £72.25

  • Relations

    Duke University Press Relations

    Book SynopsisMarilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology's key concept of relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking about knowledge-making and kin-making.Trade Review“Drawing on a wonderfully diverse array of sources, and in a dazzling display of analytic brilliance, Marilyn Strathern traces the parallel trajectories of ‘relation’—as comparison and as kinship—from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. Relations of both kinds, and the connections and knowledge that bind them, will be apprehended differently after reading this extraordinary work.” -- Janet Carsten, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Edinburgh“An extraordinary work by one of today's preeminent scholars in the field of anthropology, Relations radically transforms our understanding of both kin-making and knowledge-making as well as the depths and productivity of their entwinement. It does so not only in the epistemic and relational cosmology of the English-speaking world but also, by the light of comparison, in those of other cultural worlds. A profoundly illuminating book.” -- Susan McKinnon, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Virginia“Relations unfolds as a tour-de-force in the history, philosophy, and anthropology of social descriptors, bedazzling its readers as it charts how relations have sneaked between the limits of every account of (more-than-)human affairs, at every turn rekindling the magic and the challenge of anthropological analysis.” -- Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Reader in Social Anthropology, Spanish National Research Council"Relations is an event in Strathern's own sense: fresh evidence of the capacity to relate, which gains and adds dimensions in time.… Please read Relations…: it holds the promise that you and I—we—will never be the same." -- Ashley Lebner * American Ethnologist *"Relations is a conceptual page-turner narrated through an arc of mystery. . . . Relations synthesizes its author’s ferocious curiosity about who puts worlds together and how they do so through concepts. The consequences are, she argues, all around us. By arranging precisely selected descriptions, Strathern offers us a glimpse of what is normally occluded, her deployment of analytical subtlety and narrative wit making the force in and to exposition demonstrable." -- Rachel Douglas-Jones * American Anthropologist *"The breadth and depth of sources Strathern employs in her inquiry is exacting, particular, yet formidable still. She draws from fields as disparate as the philosophy of science, biology, art, and literary criticism, and the work of other anthropologists. . . . There is much food for thought on offer in thinking about relations from Strathern’s relatively short yet dense inquiry." -- Arthur Ivan Bravo * Anthropology Book Forum *Table of ContentsPreface ix Introductions: The Compulsion of Relations 1 Part I 1. Experimentation, English and Otherwise 25 2. Registers of Comparison 45 Coda to Part I: Comparing Persons Again 69 Part II 3. Expansion and Contradiction 73 4. The Dissimilar and the Different 97 Coda to Part II: Preparation 117 Part III. 5. Enlightenment Dramas 121 6. Kinship Unbound 143 Coda to Part III: Visibility 165 Conclusions: The Reinvention of Relations at Moments of Knowledge-Making 167 Notes 191 References 229 Index of Names 251 Index of Subjects 259

    £76.50

  • The Moral Triangle

    Duke University Press The Moral Triangle

    Book SynopsisSa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to explore the asymmetric relationships between Germans and Israeli and Palestinian immigrants in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the impact of coming to terms with the past.Trade Review“Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor are engaged in rich and rare dialogues—with each other and their informants—that redefine the ‘moral triangle’ between Palestinians, Jews, and Germans as they act, react, interact, resist, and reconcile in Berlin. In a spirit of affective affiliation they draw on psychic compulsions and political circumstances that haunt the histories of cohabitation. Survival, trauma, grace, forgiveness, desperation, and hospitality are issues that stir the conscience and consciousness of this remarkable book. The Moral Triangle exceeds its geometry to provide a many-sided, plural perspective on living together in difference with dignity.” -- Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University“The Moral Triangle takes up one of the most complex topics in the contemporary world: the ethically fraught relationships between Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians. But Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor's book is also much more than an original and urgently needed study; it is itself an ethical document that exemplifies how scholarship can confront thorny moral and political problems with generosity, nuance, and a strong sense of restorative justice. This uniquely powerful book will make a significant and salutary intervention for both academic and general readerships.” -- Michael Rothberg, author of * The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators *“[The Moral Triangle] shines in its impressionistic and fast-paced reportage style. Galor and Atshan tap into narratives of perpetrators and victims, trauma and its afterlives, responsibility and reconciliation, morality, and memory.” -- Anna-E. Younes * Journal of Palestine Studies *“Guilt and a sense of culpability for their country’s past crimes against the Jewish people have led many Germans—particularly the country’s government—to adopt highly supportive positions vis-a-vis Israel. In The Moral Triangle, scholars Saed Atshan and Katharina Galor dare to explore the sensitive intricacies of this issue. . . . The results of their work are fascinating and groundbreaking.” -- Dale Sprusansky * Washington Report on Middle East Affairs *

    £72.25

  • Porkopolis

    Duke University Press Porkopolis

    Book SynopsisAlex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism.Trade Review“Porkopolis is a rigorous and insightful ethnography of food production that connects the politics of labor to ambitious theorizations of political economy and biopolitical governance. Beautifully written and highly accessible, Porkopolis is a field-defining work in animal studies, the anthropology of labor, and food studies. An outstanding book.” -- Gabriel N. Rosenberg, author of * The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America *“In Porkopolis, the industrial pig is not just vertically integrated; it is pervasive, conditioning hog and human bodies and saturating workers' social lives and living spaces. Exquisitely researched and indelibly written, Alex Blanchette's arresting ethnography challenges us to see industrial meat as a new biopolitical regime, the next chapter in capitalism's quest to dominate nature by standardizing life.” -- Heather Paxson, author of * The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America *“As a human-animal researcher, I found this book exciting in its examination of how labor and class shapes human nonhuman entanglement in the industrial setting, and the novel employment of multispecies sensibilities to offer an alternative perspective on the factory farm. Porkopolis might also be read as a twenty-first century world-making process of domestication, radically co-shaping environments, pigs, humans, and other species in the process.” -- Paul G. Keil * Anthropology Book Forum *"What is remarkable about Porkopolis is that Blanchette never makes the predictable point but instead uses his thorough ethnography to question many of the taken-for-granted assumptions both popular media and the scholarly literature have made about factory farms. In the process, he has generated the beginning steps toward a new approach toward understanding the relations between industrial forms of capitalism and nature." -- Ilana Gershon * Current Anthropology *"The clarity and analytical power of Porkopolis are impressive achievements. . . . It is not surprising to learn that Blanchette’s peers consider him one of the finest ethnographers of his generation. The book is crafted with a perspicacity and empathy reminiscent of Munro’s short stories." -- Troy Vettese * Boston Review *"An even-handed exploration of an issue usually dominated by extremes. . . . That said, even Blanchette’s moral generosity and even-handed treatment of the pork industry cannot powder and perfume the everyday horrors contained within. . . . Blanchette may not have set out to write an argument for de-industrializing pigs, but he achieved it." -- Jennifer Graham * The Hippo *"The book obliges the thoughtful reader to ponder how this remarkable departure from normal biological life could ever have come about—all for the sake of cheap meat and profit—and what we might need to do (if ever we could) about changing it. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." -- J. A. Mather * Choice *“Porkopolis is very well written, powerful, and provocative and is an exceptionally insightful look at industrial capitalism through the lens of human–animal relations. It offers a truly unique perspective into the world that industrial farming has made and remade.” -- Steve Striffler * American Anthropologist *“Porkopolis is a triumph. It is exceptionally readable and engaging in spite of the gravity of its subject matter. It is also creative and challenging in the most haunting and curious ways.” -- Claire Bunschoten * Social Text *“Blanchette’s ethnography ... demonstrates the ways in which the modern pork industry has reshaped the rural American workforce as well as economic and social relationships.... Porkopolis is a masterful piece of multi-sited research.” -- Jon Wolseth * American Ethnologist *“Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis is an incredible ethnographic achievement.... The book’s commitment to an ambitious theoretical project, its inviting prose that balances precision and readability, and its sharply described ethnographic insights all work flawlessly.” -- Andrea Rissing and Nicholas C. Kawa * Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment *“There are many angles from which to approach Alex Blanchette’s sweeping, paradigm defining and redefining, and prescient ethnography.... Porkopolis will assuredly become essential reading in many areas of anthropology.” -- Carolyn Barnes and Peter Benson * Anthropological Quarterly *"The pig’s body is shaped by the market and the prices of its various parts. But more shockingly, as Blanchette argues, much the same is true of the bodies of the workers sucked into the maw of this gigantic meat machine. It would be hard to find a more compelling critique of contemporary capitalist exploitation of what was once part of the natural world." -- John Dupré * Los Angeles Review of Books *“Porkopolis provides a substantial and nuanced explanation of industrialized pork production that calls into question the collective societal energy invested into life-forms best suited for capitalist extraction. . . . Blanchette makes numerous contributions to sociology, anthropology, and more-than-human geographies.” -- Michaela Hoffelmeyer * Agriculture and Human Values *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Preface. Watching Hogs Watch Workers xiii A Note on Photography xvii Introduction. The "Factory" Farm 1 Part I. Boar 1. The Dover Flies 33 2. The Herd: Intimate Biosecurity and Posthuman Labor 45 Part II. Sow 3. Somos Puercos 73 4. Stimulation: Instincts in Production 89 Part III. Hog 5. Lutalyse 121 6. Stockperson: Love, Muscles, and the Industrial Runt 137 Part IV. Carcass 7. Miss Wicked 167 8. Biological System: Breaking in at the End of Industrial Time 177 Part V. Viscera 9. Maybe Some Blood, but Mostly Grease 203 10. Lifecycle: On Using All of the Porcine Species 211 Epilogue. The (De-)Industrialization of the World 239 Notes 247 References 265 Index 287

    £75.65

  • Voluminous States

    Duke University Press Voluminous States

    Book SynopsisConceiving of sovereign space as volume rather than area, the contributors to Voluminous States explore how such a conception reveals and underscores the three-dimensional nature of modern territorial governance.Trade Review“Responding to the changing ways in which states are colonizing previously inconceivable dimensions of life and livelihood in the ever-reinvented interests of territorial sovereignty, Voluminous States tackles real-life issues of state control. With its specific focus on three-dimensional space as itself a materiality as well as a force in political conceptions and social analysis, it will be welcomed by scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, sovereignty, territoriality, and beyond. This volume sparks the imagination.” -- Marilyn Strathern, author of * Relations: An Anthropological Account *“Taking materiality and dimensionality seriously in thinking about geopolitics, Voluminous States is likely to become a standard reference in developing debates in human geography, political theory, international relations, and anthropology. Global in reach, this is a great project that is executed extremely well.” -- Stuart Elden, author of * Shakespearean Territories *“[Voluminous States] provides a highly nuanced and textured examination of the tensions between the state’s intrusive attempts to flatten, homogenize, and control space.... Wide ranging studies lend this volume conceptual richness, social and cultural texture, and geographical diversity.... The book never fails to sustain the readers’ interest.” -- Martin T. Fromm * Environment, Space, Place *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Voluminous: An Introduction / Franck Billé 1 Sovereignty 1. Warren: Subterranean Structures at a Sea Border of Ukraine / Caroline Humphrey 39 2. Tunnel: Striating and Militarizing Subterranean Space in the Republic of Georgia / Elizabeth Cullen Dunn 52 3. Spoofing: The Geophysics of Not Being Governed / Wayne Chambliss 64 4. Lag: Four-Dimensional Bordering in the Himalayas / Tina Harris 78 5. Traffic: Authorizing Airspace, Applying Governance / Marcel LaFlamme 91 Materiality 6. Fissure: Cracking, Forcing, and Covering Up / Klaus Dodds 105 7. Downwind: Three Phases of a Aerosol Form / Jerry Zee 119 8. Necrotone: Death-Dealing Volumetrics at the US-Mexico Border / Hilary Cunningham 131 9. Surface: Seeing, Solidifying, and Scaling Urban Space in Hong Kong / Clancy Wilmott 146 10. Gravity: On the Primacy of Terrain / Gastón Gordillo Territorial Imagination 11. Geometries: From Analogy to Performativity / Sarah Green 175 12. Buoyancy: Blue Territorialization of Asian Power / Aihwa Ong 191 13. Seepage: That which Oozes / Jason Cons 204 14. Jigsaw: Micropartitioning in the Enclaves of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassu / Franck Billé 217 15. Echolocation: Within the Sonic Fold of the Korean Demilitarized Zone / Lisa Sang-Mi Min 230 Beyond: An Afterword / Debbora Battaglia 243 Bibliography 253 Index 279

    £98.60

  • Paper Trails

    Duke University Press Paper Trails

    Book SynopsisThe contributors to Paper Trails examine migrants' relationship to the state through requirements to obtain identification documents in order to get legal status.Trade Review“The rich collection of case studies in Paper Trails reminds us that states have increasingly refined their surveillance techniques. A must-read for anyone interested in how the issuing of the identifications and documents that pervade our everyday lives give states power over the populations—both citizens and immigrants—they govern.” -- Leo R. Chavez, author of * The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation *“Offering a unique way to think about the materiality of immigrant life and the ways that papers shape migrants' identities, experiences, rights, and sense of belonging, this volume tells a compelling story about the need to center documents in the study of international migration.” -- Leisy J. Abrego, coeditor of * We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States *“Documents, or ‘papers,’ both reflect and help construct a global reality of heightened border policing and profound socioeconomic inequality. By powerfully illuminating the work that documents do in producing the state and people of unequal status, and the tactics people employ to contest citizenship-related forms of exclusion, Paper Trails provides valuable tools for those engaged in the struggle to realize a more just world.” -- Joseph Nevins, author of * Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid *“Paper Trails is a substantial and well-edited collection of research. It is an interesting, theoretically engaging and empirically rich book. It is undoubtedly an important contribution to migration studies and social sciences in general.” -- Shahram Khosravi * Ethnic and Racial Studies *“A group of preeminent scholars of immigration have produced a stellar collection of essays. . . . [Paper Trails] is an invaluable addition to our understanding of how the everyday processes of documentation operate in systems of state governance. . . . It deserves a wide readership.” -- Susan J. Terrio * Journal of Anthropological Research *“Paper Trails is an important contribution for students and researchers in migration studies, as well as practitioners in the field.” -- Sandra King-Savic * Refuge *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Paper Trails: Migrants, Bureaucratic Inscription, and Legal Recognition / Sarah B. Horton 1 Part I. Foundations: Controlling Space and Time 27 1. The "People Out of Place": State Limits on Free Mobility and the Making of Im(migrants) / Nandita Sharma 31 2. And About Time Too . . .: Migration, Documentation, and Temporalities / Bridget Anderson 53 3. Documenting Membership: The Divergent Politics of Migrant Driver's Licenses in New Mexico and Arizona / Doris Marie Provine and Monica W. Varsanyi 74 Part II. Documents as Security, Documents as Visibility 103 4. Documented as Unauthorized / Deborah A. Boehm 109 5. Opportunities and Double Binds: Legal Craft in an Era of Uncertainty / Susan Bibler Coutin 130 6. Document Overseers, Enhanced Enforcement, and Racialized Local Contexts: Experiences of Latino Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona / Cecilia Menjívar 153 Part III. Resistance and Refusals 179 7. Knowing Your Rights in Trump's America: Paper Trails of Community Empowerment / Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz 185 8. Strategies of Documentation among Kichwa Transnational Migrants / Juan Thomas Ordóñez 208 Conclusion: Documents as Power / Josiah Heyman 229 Contributors 249 Index 253

    £98.60

  • Parenting Empires

    Duke University Press Parenting Empires

    Book SynopsisIn Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as parenting empires, she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.Trade Review“In this brilliant ethnography, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas invites us into the intimate worlds of parents and children in two affluent enclaves to listen carefully to conversations about ordinary things: nature, yoga, Eastern spirituality, mindfulness, government corruption, austerity, and sovereignty. She astutely and sensitively shows us how to read the mundane worlds of childrearing as imperial formations that are recasting hierarchies of race and class in very unequal societies under the shadow of U.S. empire.” -- Laura Briggs, author of * Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico *“This ambitious and fascinating book connects the interior lives, affects, and childrearing practices of urban elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico to their spatial environments, interpersonal relationships, and national and international political and discursive contexts. Based on rich ethnography in an understudied field, Parenting Empires makes a strong contribution to research on elites and will be of interest to people working on a broad range of issues from class, race, and identity to parenting, urban studies, and development.” -- Rachel Sherman, author of * Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence *"Social scientists and political philosophers – as well as professional politicians and all those who are concerned with racial and class injustices – should take careful note of this contribution by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, especially on how Latin American elites come to morally justify wealth and inequalities in the name of parenting and austerity subjectivities." -- Jaime Fierro * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Parenting Empires reveals that a strategy for governability in subject populations is to cultivate the imperial core's likeness in them, or at least in the key elite. I recommend this high-end science for students and scholars of social/racial stratification, political economy, and Latin Americanists of all stripes." -- Stanley Bailey * American Journal of Sociology *“Agile, informed, and engaging prose.... Where Parenting Empires reveals itself as a trail-blazing text within critical race studies in Latin America is in the author’s knack for picking up, and keenly reflecting, on the anxiety and uncertainty that sit at the root of white identities.” -- Guillermo Rebollo Gil * CENTRO *"Brimming over with insightful analyses, memorable fieldwork, and instigating arguments, Parenting Empires is a pathbreaking monograph on the workings of race and class privilege among Latin American upper classes." -- Maureen E. O'Dougherty * Anthropos *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Parenting Empires and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Brazil and Puerto Rico 1 2. The Feel of Ipanema: Social History and Structure of Feeling in Rio de Janeiro 37 3. Parenting El Condado: Social History and Immaterial Materiality in San Juan 65 4. Whiteness from Within: Elite Interiority, Personhood, and Parenthood 95 5. Schooling Whiteness: Adult Friendships, Social Ease, and the Privilege of Choosing Race 127 6. The Extended Family: Intimate Hierarchies and Ancestral Imaginaries 157 7. Affective Inequalities: Childcare Workers and Elite Consumptions of Blackness 185 Epilogue 215 Notes 231 References 261 Index 277

    £25.19

  • Afterlives of Affect

    Duke University Press Afterlives of Affect

    Book SynopsisIn Afterlives of Affect Matthew C. Watson considers the life and work of artist and Mayanist scholar Linda Schele (194298) as a point of departure for what he calls an excitable anthropology. As part of a small collective of scholars who devised the first compelling arguments that Maya hieroglyphs were a fully grammatical writing system, Schele popularized the decipherment of hieroglyphs by developing narratives of Maya politics and religion in popular books and public workshops. In this experimental, person-centered ethnography, Watson shows how Schele's sense of joyous discovery and affective engagement with research led her to traverse and disrupt borders between religion, science, art, life, death, and history. While acknowledging critiques of Schele's work and the idea of discovery more generally, Watson contends that affect and wonder should lie at the heart of any reflexive anthropology. With this singular examination of Schele and the community she built around herself and her work, Watson furthers debates on more-than-human worlds, spiritualism, modernity, science studies, affect theory, and the social conditions of knowledge production.Trade Review“Afterlives of Affect is a remarkable and highly original work that pushes the boundaries of scholarly writing in creative and challenging ways. It speaks to science studies, the history of anthropology and anthropological theorizations of meaning, new materialist scholarship, the posthumanities, and the renewed interest in experimental anthropological writing. A work of outstanding importance, this book is an eminently accessible and hugely enjoyable read.” -- Stuart J. McLean, author of * Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human *“In this riveting and meticulously researched hybrid work of scholarship and shamanism, Matthew C. Watson raises the dead and conjures the spirits who animated a world upon whose edge I was raised, but never really knew or understood. With mind-bending intelligence, exuberance, and heart, Afterlives of Affect brings back to life the ancient power of Palenque and the passionate intellectual energy of the scholars and amateurs who fell under its spell. I have never read, or even imagined, anything quite like it.” -- Ruth Ozeki, author of * A Tale for the Time Being *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Edgewalking Affect 1 1. Sacrilege 24 2. Animals 43 3. Cosmos 63 4. Bones 96 5. Genius 115 6. Love 145 Notes 175 Bibliography 223 Index 253

    £25.19

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