Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisIn the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, sustainable hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory.Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontologicaTrade ReviewWhitington's book analyses a period of unprecedented hydropower development during which the country effectively doubled its major dams. The book is daunting in its complexity, but it essentially con- ceptualises the administration of water from its practices * Australian Book Review *Bursting with insights about dams as an ecological response in the contemporary moment, Anthropogenic Rivers will be required reading for environmental anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and science and technology studies scholars with an interest in enviro-technical landscapes. This book also adds to the burgeoning literature on rivers and waters in Asia tackling what it means to do environmental scholarship in late industrial and post-socialist landscapes in the global South. Finally, this book breaks fresh ground in ethnography of the statist development by rethinking how we define expertise and uncertainty. Every reader will come away from the book to look at rivers and dammed waterscapes with a new lens. * H-Net *Through the ethnographic study of an unusual, experimental collaboration between a hydropower company constructing dams in Laos and a transnational activist group, Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers examines the purposeful production of uncertainty as a strategic political ontology and as a form of knowledge. Anthropogenic Rivers is an exciting contribution to the study of uncertainty and a slightly rebel addition to the by now well established subgenre of analyses of the Anthropocene. * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Production of Uncertainty Interlude. On the Postcolony (Engineering) Hydropower's Circle of Influence Interlude. What Is a Dam? Vulnerable at Every Joint Interlude. Intimacy (Vetting) 3. Performance-Based Management Interlude. The Method of Uncertainty 4. The Ethics of Document Engineering Interlude. Interview Notes (Lightly Edited) 5. Anthropogenic Rivers Conclusion: Figuring the Anthropogenic Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNicholas Copeland sheds new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings in The Democracy Development Machine. This historical ethnography examines how governmentalized spaces of democracy and development fell short, enabling and disfiguring an ethnic Mayan resurgence.In a passionate and politically engaged book, Copeland argues that the transition to democracy in Guatemalan Mayan communities has led to a troubling paradox. He finds that while liberal democracy is celebrated in most of the world as the ideal, it can subvert political desires and channel them into illiberal spaces. As a result, Copeland explores alternative ways of imagining liberal democracy and economic and social amelioration in a traumatized and highly unequal society as it strives to transition from war and authoritarian rule to open elections and free-market democracy.The Democracy Development Machine follows Guatemala''s transition, reflects on MayaTrade Review"The Democracy Development Machine is a fantastic book. It’s exactly what political ethnography should be—insightful, analytically rigorous, ethnographically rich, and provocative." -- Jennifer Burrell, Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, SUNY-Albany, and author of Maya After War"Nicholas Copeland has written a powerful critique of grassroots democracy. Copeland captures the complicated ways local allegiances work in practice; shattering romantic notions of community cooperation. This reveals much about Guatemala's troubled politics and enriches our understanding of the multifaceted, often unintended, effects of social action." -- Edward Fischer, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Transition to Misery 1. "They Committed No Crime": Developing Democratic Memories 2. Nos Falta Capacidad: Training Enterprising Selves 3. The Capacity for Democracy: Transforming Democratic Imaginaries 4. Radical Pessimism: Neoliberal Democratic Atmosphere 5. Parties and Projects: Democratizing Sovereign Violence 6. Cruel Populism: Mutilating the People Conclusion: Reorienting Democracy Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisNicholas Copeland sheds new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings in The Democracy Development Machine. This historical ethnography examines how governmentalized spaces of democracy and development fell short, enabling and disfiguring an ethnic Mayan resurgence.In a passionate and politically engaged book, Copeland argues that the transition to democracy in Guatemalan Mayan communities has led to a troubling paradox. He finds that while liberal democracy is celebrated in most of the world as the ideal, it can subvert political desires and channel them into illiberal spaces. As a result, Copeland explores alternative ways of imagining liberal democracy and economic and social amelioration in a traumatized and highly unequal society as it strives to transition from war and authoritarian rule to open elections and free-market democracy.The Democracy Development Machine follows Guatemala''s transition, reflects on MayaTrade Review"The Democracy Development Machine is a fantastic book. It’s exactly what political ethnography should be—insightful, analytically rigorous, ethnographically rich, and provocative." -- Jennifer Burrell, Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, SUNY-Albany, and author of Maya After War"Nicholas Copeland has written a powerful critique of grassroots democracy. Copeland captures the complicated ways local allegiances work in practice; shattering romantic notions of community cooperation. This reveals much about Guatemala's troubled politics and enriches our understanding of the multifaceted, often unintended, effects of social action." -- Edward Fischer, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Transition to Misery 1. "They Committed No Crime": Developing Democratic Memories 2. Nos Falta Capacidad: Training Enterprising Selves 3. The Capacity for Democracy: Transforming Democratic Imaginaries 4. Radical Pessimism: Neoliberal Democratic Atmosphere 5. Parties and Projects: Democratizing Sovereign Violence 6. Cruel Populism: Mutilating the People Conclusion: Reorienting Democracy Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIn Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and...Trade ReviewAn erudite work of original and seminal scholarship, Rethinking Diabetes is an extraordinary study that is especially and unreservedly recommended. * Midwest Book Review *Rethinking Diabetes is an astonishing achievement for both its breadth and depth in mapping lived experiences around diabetes and other conditions. The breadth is provided by data collection over four locations, while teasing out the differences between those. The depths are in providing understanding of how diabetes is both a contributor to and effect of trauma, poverty, and other health conditions. The use of narratives within each chapter makes for compelling reading of a text that is accessible and relatable. * Sociology in Health & Illness *Rethinking Diabetes is an outstanding example of current medical anthropological theory, and one with important messages for other many fields—including global health and human biology. It is also highly readable, bringing the reader into the world it explores. * American Journal of Human Biology *

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Book SynopsisIn Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation''s wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China''s great transformation.Trade ReviewJun Zhang's Driving Toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China presents an exceptional and fascinating ethnographic study that examines the relationship between the rise of the 'automotive regime' and the (re-)emergence of the middle class. * China Information *This rich ethnography will be a benchmark for any forthcoming scholarly work on car consumption in China. Zhang's ethnographic account of the car-owning mobility of middle-class consumers in southern China represents a major contribution to an important topic in the understanding of contemporary Chinese society. * Pacific Affairs *Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Note on Translation Introduction: A Mobile Lifestyle, A Middle Way of Living Prologue: From Official Privileges to Consumer Goods 1. Driving Alone Together: Sociality, Solidarity, and Status 2. Family Cars, Filial Consumer-Citizens: Becoming Properly Middle Class 3. The Emerging Middle Class and the Car Market: Mobilities and Trajectories 4. Car Crash, Class Encounter: Anxiety of Mobility 5. Bidding for a License Plate: The Importance of Being a Free and Proper Consumer 6. Parking: Contesting Space in Middle-Class Complexes Epilogue: Politics of Transformation Glossary Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisWhat is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us...Trade ReviewThere is a good deal that we can recognise—and take comfort from—in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book. -- Piers Taylor * Architecture Today *

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Book SynopsisAulino''s work is a strong contribution to the study of aging in the field of medical anthropology specifically because of the focus on the embodied performativity of care evident in her research practice and analysis. Rituals of Care is an excellent book, which offers a thoughtful approach to everyday care in Thailand. ? Anthropology & AgingEnd-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Felicity Aulino''s Rituals of Care speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased attention to care for the elderly, both personal and professional, Aulino challenges common presumptions about the universal nature of caring. The way she examines particular sets of emotional and practical ways of being with people, and their sTrade ReviewThis book should be read by all students of Thai culture who have an interest in the everyday life, religious practices and socio-political conditions surrounding people's everyday lives. It also makes a remarkable contribution to the understanding of care, as well as to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality. * South East Asia Research *Rituals of Care is a complex, compelling empirical and conceptual work that engages deeply with questions of caregiving and volunteerism in the Theravada Buddhist context of Thai society. The book is highly recommended for researchers on Theravada Buddhism, caregiving, volunteerism, medical and political anthropology, as well as scholars of Thai society and culture more generally. * Pacific Affairs *Aulino's work is a strong contribution to the study of aging in the field of medical anthropology specifically because of the focus on the embodied performativity of care evident in her research practice and analysis. Rituals of Care is an excellent book, which offers a thoughtful approach to everyday care in Thailand. * Anthropology & Aging *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Karma of Care: Ordinary Actions and Their Consequences 2. The Conditioning of Care: Intention, Emotion, and Restraint 3. The Subjects of Care: Perceiving the Social Body 4. The Civic Landscape of Care: Merit and the Spirit of Volunteering for Elders 5. The Violence of Care: Pity and Compassion, Patronage and Repression Conclusion: On Unending Care: Rituals for Making Things So

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Book SynopsisWhat if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case.The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (19491987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order.As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the policeTrade ReviewJeff Martin's book is a very welcome volume in Cornell's ground-breaking Police/ Worlds series on security, crime and governance, and this book offers the kind of sustained intellectual analysis of police that I wish I had been able to read as a neophyte comparative criminological researcher prior to visiting Taiwan nearly twenty years ago. Sentiment, Reason, and Law does precisely that, and invites us to consider what concepts, contexts and forms are most pertinent for building a reflective relation to the present. Martin spent almost a decade living in Taiwan, and this book is a fittingly rich intellectual legacy of his sojourn on that enchanted island. * The China Quarterly *Jeffrey T. Martin's book is a masterful addition to the ethnographic literature both on the anthropology of the state and for the anthropology of police and policing. The strength of the book lies in the in-depth fieldwork that, combined with a refusal of presentism, enables Martin to distance himself from culturalism and present Taiwanese police and its work as part of a historical process. Thus, this book can be highly recommended as a contribution to the anthropology of policing and of the state. * Polar *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Backstage Passage 2. The Paichusuo and the Jurisdiction of Qing 3. Policing and the Politics of Care 4. Administrative Repair 5. Holding Things Together 6. Strong Democracy, Weak Police Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHow do people improvise political communities in the face of state collapseand at what cost? Street Sovereigns explores the risks and rewards taken by young men on the margins of urban Haiti who broker relations with politicians, state agents, and NGO workers in order to secure representation, resources, and jobs for themselves and neighbors. Moving beyond mainstream analyses that understand these groupsknown as baz (base)as apolitical, criminal gangs, Chelsey Kivland argues that they more accurately express a novel mode of street politics that has resulted from the nexus of liberalizing orders of governance and development with longstanding practices of militant organizing in Haiti.Kivland demonstrates how the baz exemplifies an innovative and effective platform for intervening in the contemporary political order, while at the same time reproducing gendered and generational hierarchies and precipitating contests of leadership that exacerbate neighborhood insecuTrade ReviewKivland's fine-grained portraits of her interlocutors are poignant and compelling. * American Anthropologist *In Street Sovereigns, Chelsey Kivland draws on years of ethnographic research to reframe the way we think about political agency, sovereignty, and statemaking in Haiti. Kivland masterfully weaves an analysis that is rich in ethnographic detail and sophisticated in theoretical insight. There is a remarkable humility to her analysis; the result is a work of deep and profound respect. * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Baz 1. Defense 2. History 3. Respect 4. Identity 5. Development 6. Gender Conclusion: The Spiral

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Book SynopsisHow do people improvise political communities in the face of state collapseand at what cost? Street Sovereigns explores the risks and rewards taken by young men on the margins of urban Haiti who broker relations with politicians, state agents, and NGO workers in order to secure representation, resources, and jobs for themselves and neighbors. Moving beyond mainstream analyses that understand these groupsknown as baz (base)as apolitical, criminal gangs, Chelsey Kivland argues that they more accurately express a novel mode of street politics that has resulted from the nexus of liberalizing orders of governance and development with longstanding practices of militant organizing in Haiti.Kivland demonstrates how the baz exemplifies an innovative and effective platform for intervening in the contemporary political order, while at the same time reproducing gendered and generational hierarchies and precipitating contests of leadership that exacerbate neighborhood insecuTrade ReviewKivland's fine-grained portraits of her interlocutors are poignant and compelling. * American Anthropologist *In Street Sovereigns, Chelsey Kivland draws on years of ethnographic research to reframe the way we think about political agency, sovereignty, and statemaking in Haiti. Kivland masterfully weaves an analysis that is rich in ethnographic detail and sophisticated in theoretical insight. There is a remarkable humility to her analysis; the result is a work of deep and profound respect. * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Baz 1. Defense 2. History 3. Respect 4. Identity 5. Development 6. Gender Conclusion: The Spiral

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: Beginnings 1. From Manchukuo to Marriage 2. The Making and Unmaking of "Unmarriageable Persons" in Japan 3. Creating "Similar" Others at Transnational Matchmaking Agencies in Japan 4. Marrying Up, Down, or Off in Dongyang 5. Gendered Investments in Marriage Migration 6. Crafting Legitimate Marital Relations Conclusion: Yen or En?

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Book SynopsisOver the nearly two decades that they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for this book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a field that is marked by such representations. The three focus on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. They analyze what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies they study. They propose ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. They ask: What would not only Middle East studies, but stuTrade ReviewThis thought-provoking book is a clear invitation and reminder for every reader interested in Gulf studies and involved in their production to always interrogate and revisit her/his own work, reflect and act upon her/his own research practice, thereby contributing to the "new venues for interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula" called for by the authors. * Anthropos *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ethnography from the Exceptional to the Everyday 1. Space, Mobility, and Shifting Identities in the Constitution of the "Field" 2. How Western Residents in Riyadh and Dubai Produce and Challenge Exceptionalism 3. Anthropology and the Educational Encounter: Archival Logics and Gendered "Backlash" in Qatar's Education City 4. Class Struggle and De-exceptionalizing the Gulf Conclusion: Centering the Arabian Peninsula, Decolonizing the Academy

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Book SynopsisTales from Albarado revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, Smoki Musaraj looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. She argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capiTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Tale of Albarado and the Anthropology of Financial Speculation 1. Fajde, Pyramid Firms, or Ponzi Schemes: Gendered Discourses of Finance 2. "Money Flowed Like a River": Materialities of Speculation 3. "Working the Money": Migrants, Remittances, and Social Ties 4. "All We Wanted Was a Beautiful Home": Housing and Temporalities of Speculation 5. The Pyramid Way: Speculation in Construction Epilogue: Ponzi Logics in Postsocialist Albania

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewRios has written a compelling, theoretically sophisticated analysis of predatory policing and the Ferguson protest movement that erupted in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown... Rios concludes with a brilliant assessment of the queer and trans women who led the Ferguson movement and their relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement. * Choice *This text is well suited for introductory and graduate-level work in cultural and urban anthropology and would well serve scholars and thinkers with grounding in studies of the carceral state, critical race studies, and human geograpy. * American Anthropologist *Overall, in Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Rios has crafted a significant contribution to urban and suburban studies, geography, and broader literatures on Blackness, race, and space. [O]ne of Rios's most meaningful scholarly contributions is to show how intimate knowledge of urban planning and policy are key to unpacking everyday oppression as well as the roots of radical resistance. * Urban Geography *Black Lives and Spatial Matters performs with grace and exacting rigor the skills of audience that planners and civic leaders must develop more fully if we are to participate directly in urgent social challenges of our day. Black Lives and Spatial Matters thus lands on our doorsteps at an opportune moment. It offers a troubling review of epistemic violence and a hopeful performance of freedom and audience skills and introduces us to the Black Lives Matters leaders of North St. Louis County. * Journal of American Planning Association *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dancing with Death 1. Race and Space 2. Confluence and Contestation 3. Racial States and Local Governance 4. Discursive Regimes and Everyday Practices 5. Politics and Policing in Pagedale Interlude: A Day in August 6. Queering Protest 7. Ontologies of Resistance Coda: Archipelagoes of Life

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Book SynopsisBlack Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blacknessliving fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erasecan create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk.Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and Trade ReviewRios has written a compelling, theoretically sophisticated analysis of predatory policing and the Ferguson protest movement that erupted in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown... Rios concludes with a brilliant assessment of the queer and trans women who led the Ferguson movement and their relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement. * Choice *This text is well suited for introductory and graduate-level work in cultural and urban anthropology and would well serve scholars and thinkers with grounding in studies of the carceral state, critical race studies, and human geograpy. * American Anthropologist *Overall, in Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Rios has crafted a significant contribution to urban and suburban studies, geography, and broader literatures on Blackness, race, and space. [O]ne of Rios's most meaningful scholarly contributions is to show how intimate knowledge of urban planning and policy are key to unpacking everyday oppression as well as the roots of radical resistance. * Urban Geography *Black Lives and Spatial Matters performs with grace and exacting rigor the skills of audience that planners and civic leaders must develop more fully if we are to participate directly in urgent social challenges of our day. Black Lives and Spatial Matters thus lands on our doorsteps at an opportune moment. It offers a troubling review of epistemic violence and a hopeful performance of freedom and audience skills and introduces us to the Black Lives Matters leaders of North St. Louis County. * Journal of American Planning Association *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dancing with Death 1. Race and Space 2. Confluence and Contestation 3. Racial States and Local Governance 4. Discursive Regimes and Everyday Practices 5. Politics and Policing in Pagedale Interlude: A Day in August 6. Queering Protest 7. Ontologies of Resistance Coda: Archipelagoes of Life

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Book SynopsisFocusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, Mixed Messages engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. Kathryn E. Graber demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? Mixed Messages addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation''s Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia.MixedTrade ReviewGrounded in a rich set of ethnographic evidence, the author skillfully combines ethnographic, digital ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and archival data on Buryat-Russian language and on the production and consumption of local media such as print, radio, TV, and digital media. Considering the amount of information and evidence on which this study is based, Graber offers an impressive account of detailed analysis of ethnographic and archival data, cleverly tied up to the central concerns of the book, minority publics, and notions of belonging. * JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY *This book is essential for linguistic anthropologists and anyone studying the languages, cultures, and histories of Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia. It is also a valuable read for anyone interested in the discourses, ideologies, and practices we find connected to minoritized and indigenous language maintenance and revitalization anywhere in the world. Graber's writing is engaging and precise, whether she is discussing the nuances of linguistic anthropological theory or presenting an ethnographic vignette; she is a skilled storteller and reading the book was a pleasure. * Sibrica *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Native Autonomy in a Multinational State 2. Media and the Making of a Buryat Public 3. Rupture and Reclamation 4. A Literary Standard and Its Discontents 5. Anchors of Authority 6. Performance Anxiety 7. Emergent Minority Publics Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFocusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, Mixed Messages engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. Kathryn E. Graber demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? Mixed Messages addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation''s Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia.MixedTrade ReviewGrounded in a rich set of ethnographic evidence, the author skillfully combines ethnographic, digital ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and archival data on Buryat-Russian language and on the production and consumption of local media such as print, radio, TV, and digital media. Considering the amount of information and evidence on which this study is based, Graber offers an impressive account of detailed analysis of ethnographic and archival data, cleverly tied up to the central concerns of the book, minority publics, and notions of belonging. * JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY *This book is essential for linguistic anthropologists and anyone studying the languages, cultures, and histories of Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia. It is also a valuable read for anyone interested in the discourses, ideologies, and practices we find connected to minoritized and indigenous language maintenance and revitalization anywhere in the world. Graber's writing is engaging and precise, whether she is discussing the nuances of linguistic anthropological theory or presenting an ethnographic vignette; she is a skilled storteller and reading the book was a pleasure. * Sibrica *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Native Autonomy in a Multinational State 2. Media and the Making of a Buryat Public 3. Rupture and Reclamation 4. A Literary Standard and Its Discontents 5. Anchors of Authority 6. Performance Anxiety 7. Emergent Minority Publics Conclusion

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Book SynopsisTracing the history of refugee settlement in Fargo, North Dakota, from the 1980s to the present day, Race-ing Fargo focuses on the role that gender, religion, and sociality play in everyday interactions between refugees from South Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the dominant white Euro-American population of the city. Jennifer Erickson outlines the ways in which refugees have impacted this small city over the last thirty years, showing how culture, political economy, and institutional transformations collectively contribute to the racialization of white cities like Fargo in ways that complicate their demographics. Race-ing Fargo shows that race, religion, and decorum prove to be powerful forces determining worthiness and belonging in the city and draws attention to the different roles that state and private sectors played in shaping ideas about race and citizenship on a local level. Through the comparative study of white secular Muslim Bosnians and Black ChristTrade ReviewA grounded study of the everyday practices of refugee-serving state and nonprofit agencies and the interpersonal relationships between refugees and the city's dominant white population, this volume offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of how refugees have reshaped local ideas about race, citizenship practices, and belonging. * Choice *Race-ing Fargo contributes to the literature on refugee resettlement, new immigrant destinations, and urban studies and would be of interest to scholars and students in these fields. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Race-ing Fargo is a meticulously researched study about citizenship and diversity practices among residents and newcomers resulting from refugee resettlement and how those played out in, and transformed, the small global city of Fargo, North Dakota—making important contributions to race, immigration, belonging, welfare, and globalization scholarship. * Social Forces *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Valley to the World 1. Histories, Assemblages, and the City 2. The NGOization of Refugee Resettlement 3. ibling Rivalry: Welfare and Refugee Resettlement 4. Diversity and Inclusion in Fargo 5. Resettled Orientalisms: Bosnian Muslims and Roma in Fargo 6. Beyond Bare Life: Southern Sudanese in Fargo Conclusion: Prairie for the People

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewStreicher's [Uneasy Military Encounters] provides a significant contribution to our knowledge of the military's counterinsurgency operations in southern Thailand. * Journal of Contemporary Asia *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Policing the Imperial Formation 1. Policing History: A Military Handbook on the Southern Provinces 2. Checkpoints: Racialized Practices of Suspicion 3. The New Path to Peace: Disciplining Religious Subjects 4. Guarding the Daughter: Patriarchal Compromise and Military Sisterhood Conclusion: Happiness and Military Rule

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Book SynopsisCan a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? Studying closely the oral narrations and writings of four Indian authors in colonial India, The Audacious Raconteur argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress audacious raconteurs: skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. By drawing attention to the vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism in the narratives of these raconteurs, Leela Prasad shows how the ideological bulwark of colonialismformed by concepts of colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledgeis dismantled. Audacious raconteurs wrest back meanings of religion, culture, and history that are closer to their lived understandings. The figure of the audacious raconteur does not only hover in an archive but suffuses everyday life. Underlying these ideas, Prasad''Trade Review[A] charming retelling of Hanuman's visit to Lanka[...] her insightful studies of her four subjects at times suggest to me a more complex and equivocal relationship with colonial ideology and its hegemonic language. * Journal of the American Oriental Society *Table of ContentsIntroduction: "That Acre of Ground" 1. The Ruse of Colonial Modernity: Anna Liberata de Souza 2. The History of the English Empire as a Fall: P. V. Ramaswami Raju 3. The Subjective Scientific Method: M. N. Venkataswami 4. The Irony of the "Native Scholar": S. M. Natesa Sastri Conclusion: The Sovereign Self

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Book SynopsisThe Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people''s gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regimeTrade ReviewGolubev (Univ. of Houston) has produced a provocative work on materiality in the late Soviet period. The study analyzes the role of material objects and spaces in the development of gender roles, social structures, and the socialist ideal in the last decades of the Soviet Union. * Choice *The Things of Life is an important book and a substantial contribution to the social and cultural history of the USSR, the history of Soviet materiality, and material culture in general. Although it is rather short, the book covers a lot of ground and offers important theoretical insights. It should stimulate scholars to continue the exploration of socialist material culture and other interstices of the Soviet individual and collective experience. * Ab Imperio *Golubev's book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of late-Soviet everyday life. [T]his analytical intervention makes Golubev's book a valuable resource for anthropologists working with materialities and their interfaces with selves and bodies. * Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford *The Things of Life is provocative, tantalizing and stimulating, and it fully achieves its aim of showing the importance and creative potential of centring the material at the heart of human experience. * Slavonic and East European Review *[A] highly readable text and an ideal integration of theory, empiricism, and narrative. This book lends itself well to teaching and is a welcome addition to our knowledge of late Soviet society, thoroughly researched and theorized, yet accessibly written in a lively tone. * The Russian Review *Golubev's book stands in a rich tradition of investigating the social agency of things and the entanglements between humans and objects in Soviet Russia and other European socialist countries. Golubev's book is certainly a welcome addition to the academic literature on (post)soviet materiality. * Technology and Culture *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Elemental Materialism in Soviet Culture and Society 1. Techno-Utopian Visions of Soviet Intellectuals after Stalin 2. Time in 1:72 Scale: The Plastic Historicity of Soviet Models 3. History in Wood: The Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 4. When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers: Social Antagonisms of Soviet Stairwells and Streets 5. The Men of Steel: Repairing and Empowering Soviet Bodies with Iron 6. Ordinary and Paranormal: The Soviet Television Set Conclusions: Soviet Objects and Socialist Modernity

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Book SynopsisReworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan''s corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan''s remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of salarymen came to embody the New Middle Class family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes.Gagné explores Japan''s fraught and problematic transition from the posTrade ReviewThe book's main value lies in its detailed accounts of men's careers and life courses, which provide some instructive illustrations of typical (successful) white-collar career arcs. * ILR Review *The combination of sites enabled the author to construct multidimensional portraits which would have been difficult with a single-site method. Indeed, these portraits are very vibrant. The second part offers a fascinating account of the informants outside work. The strengths of the book lie in the genuineness of the men's accounts, which undoubtedly reflect a rapport the author was able to create with them. * The Journal of Japanese Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1. LOCATING SALARYMEN, CAPITALISM, AND NEOLIBERALISM IN JAPAN 1. Historicizing Japanese Workers and Japanese Capitalism 2. Working in and Working on Neoliberalism Part 2. AFTER WORK, BEYOND LEISURE, AND INDIVIDUAL DESIRES 3. The Business of Leisure, the Leisure of Business 4. Working Hard at Having Fun through Hobbies and Community Part 3. MULTIPLICITIES OF MEN 5. Escaping the Corporate Shackles 6. Navigating the Waves of Work and Life 7. Weathering the Storms of Corporate Restructuring Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn 2012, Cambodiaan epicenter of violent land grabbingannounced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban''s Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world''s longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce modern farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people mTrade ReviewBeban's book provides a valuable and detailed account of Hun Sen's Order 01 land-titling initiative. Each chapter begins with a thought-provoking vignette and references to relevant theoretical literature. Unwritten Rule will be required reading for anyone interested in the politics of land in Cambodia. * The Developing Economies *This new book by Beban presents a granular, almost journalistic, account of how land reform and other government policies have affected Cambodia's rural population in recent years.[T]here is much to learn here about how the particular policies of Cambodia's authoritarian government impact the country's rural inhabitants[.] * Choice *Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. Donor-State Partnerships in the Cambodian Land Sector 3. Encountering the Leopard Skin Land Reform 4. Reconfiguring Local Authority through Land Reform 5. Youth Volunteers to the Frontier 6. Life in the Leopard Skin 7. Communal Land Struggles in the Wake of the Land Reform 8. An Ontology of Land Beyond State-Capital Formations 9. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn 2012, Cambodiaan epicenter of violent land grabbingannounced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban''s Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world''s longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce modern farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people mTrade ReviewBeban's book provides a valuable and detailed account of Hun Sen's Order 01 land-titling initiative. Each chapter begins with a thought-provoking vignette and references to relevant theoretical literature. Unwritten Rule will be required reading for anyone interested in the politics of land in Cambodia. * The Developing Economies *This new book by Beban presents a granular, almost journalistic, account of how land reform and other government policies have affected Cambodia's rural population in recent years.[T]here is much to learn here about how the particular policies of Cambodia's authoritarian government impact the country's rural inhabitants[.] * Choice *Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. Donor-State Partnerships in the Cambodian Land Sector 3. Encountering the Leopard Skin Land Reform 4. Reconfiguring Local Authority through Land Reform 5. Youth Volunteers to the Frontier 6. Life in the Leopard Skin 7. Communal Land Struggles in the Wake of the Land Reform 8. An Ontology of Land Beyond State-Capital Formations 9. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn The Future Conditional, Eric S. Henry brings twelve-years of expertise and research to offer a nuanced discussion of the globalization of the English language and the widespread effects it has had on Shenyang, the capital and largest city of China''s northeast Liaoning Province. Adopting an ethnographic and linguistic perspective, Henry considers the personal connotations that English, has for Chinese people, beyond its role in the education system. Through research on how English is spoken, taught, and studied in China, Henry considers what the language itself means to Chinese speakers. How and why, he asks, has English become so deeply fascinating in contemporary China, simultaneously existing as a source of desire and anxiety? The answer, he suggests, is that English-speaking Chinese consider themselves distinctly separate from those who do not speak the language, the result of a cultural assumption that speaking English makes a person modern. <Trade ReviewA solid ethnography, useful to anyone teaching languages. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The English Modern 1. Dirty Talk: Hybrid Registers of Chinese and English 2. The Moral Economy of Walls: Recursive Enclosure and Linguistic Space 3. Better to Die Abroad Than to Live in China: Narratives of Life and Learning 4. Commodifying Language: The Business of English in Shenyang 5. On "Chinglish": Stigmatization, Laughter, and Nostalgia 6. Raciolinguistic Identities: The White Foreign Body of the Native English Speaker Conclusion: Reflections on a Global Language

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Book SynopsisAround the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to take back sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace DzenovskTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward an Anthropology of Sovereign Agency, by Rebecca Bryant and Madeleine Reeves 1. Sovereignty in the Skies: An Anthropology of Everyday Aeropolitics, by Rebecca Bryant 2. Sovereignty as Generator of Inconsistent State Desire in Northeastern Central African Republic, by Louisa Lombard 3. "Because I Have a Hookup": Cheating Citizens and the Unbearable State in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina, by Azra Hromadžić 4. Aspirational Sovereignty and Human Rights Advocacy: Audience, Recognition, and the Reach of the Taiwan State, by Sara Friedman 5. Gender, Violence, and Competing Sovereign Claims in Afghanistan, by Torunn Wimpelmann 6. Everyday Sovereignty in Exile: People, Territory, and Resources among Sahrawi Refugees, by Alice Wilson 7. Existential Sovereignty: Latvian People,Their State, and the Problem of Mobility, by Dace Dzenovska 8. Sovereign Days: Imagining and Making the Catalan Republic from Below, by Panos Achniotis 9. The False Promises of Sovereignty: Enclaves, Exclaves, and Impossible Politics in the Jewish State, by Joyce Dalsheim 10. Signs of Sovereignty: Mapping and Countermapping at an "Unwritten" Border, by Madeleine Reeves Epilogue: The Ironies of Misrecognition, by Jens Bartelson

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Book SynopsisSubstantial Relations examines global reproductive medicine in India, focusing on in vitro fertilization. Since the 1970s, India has played a central but shifting role in shaping global reproductive medicinefrom a provider of raw material, to a producer of knowledge and technology, to a creator of a thriving medical market that attracts patients from all over the world. Relying on archival material and oral history, Substantial Relations traces the path of this transnational historical trajectory. This book also examines the contemporary making of IVF in Delhi. Drawing on ethnographic research in homes, hospitals, and laboratories, Sandra Bärnreuther provides deep insights into the intricacies of clinical life and everyday experience by depicting IVF users'' quest for offspring and their fears of establishing unwanted ties, as well as the minute engagements of clinicians and laboratory staff with reproductive substances.Thinking through substancesmTrade ReviewBärnreuther (Univ. of Lucerne, Switzerland) skillfully uses anthropological fieldwork (conducted from 2010 to 2017) and archival research to describe and analyze this growing IVF medical system. * Choice *The book is a recommended read for all scholars working in the area of infertility/fertility and kinship studies. * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. From Urine to Ampoule: The Commodity Chain of a Hormone 2. From Dismissal to Recognition: A Contested Claim 3. From Hobby to Industry: How IVF Diversified 4. The Clinic and Beyond: Reproductive Temporalities 5. When Cells Circulate: Unwanted Ties 6. Inside the Laboratory: Embryo Ethics Epilogue

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewDeftly depicting the linguistic choices made by these print entrepreneurs, Tom G. Hoogervorst paints a rich portrait of the social life of this community as well as the articulation of their aspirations, anxieties and concerns that were expressed in creative use of multiple languages. * New Books Network *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Prism into the Past 1. Connected Language Histories 2. On Good, Bad, and Ugly Malay 3. Printing, Pulp, and Popularity 4. Competing Expressions of Modernity 5. The Humoristic and the Invective Epilogue: An Important Historical Monument

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Book SynopsisIn To Save Heaven and Earth, Jennie E. Burnet considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, Burnet highlights the ways that complex decisions and behaviors emerge in the social, political, and economic processes that constitute a genocide.To Save Heaven and Earth explores external factors, such as geography, local power dynamics, and genocide timelines, as well as the internal states of mind and motivations of those who effected rescues. Framed within the interdisciplinary scholarship of genocide studies and rooted in cultural anthropology methodologies, this book presents stories of heroism and of the good done amid theTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Dynamics of Violence in the Gray Zone 2. Agency and Morality in the Gray Zone 3. Muslim Exceptionalism and Genocide 4. Resistance, Rescue, and Religion 5. The Border as Salvation and Snare 6. At the Margins of the State 7. Altruism, Agency, and Martyrdom in the Gray Zone Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn To Save Heaven and Earth, Jennie E. Burnet considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, Burnet highlights the ways that complex decisions and behaviors emerge in the social, political, and economic processes that constitute a genocide.To Save Heaven and Earth explores external factors, such as geography, local power dynamics, and genocide timelines, as well as the internal states of mind and motivations of those who effected rescues. Framed within the interdisciplinary scholarship of genocide studies and rooted in cultural anthropology methodologies, this book presents stories of heroism and of the good done amid theTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Dynamics of Violence in the Gray Zone 2. Agency and Morality in the Gray Zone 3. Muslim Exceptionalism and Genocide 4. Resistance, Rescue, and Religion 5. The Border as Salvation and Snare 6. At the Margins of the State 7. Altruism, Agency, and Martyrdom in the Gray Zone Conclusion

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Book SynopsisGleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers'' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev''s major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev''s perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself. A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the Table of ContentsIntroduction: Households and Historiographies 1. The "Soviet" Things of Postsocialism 2. Gleaning for the Common Good 3. Songs of Stalin and Khrushchev 4. Chuvstvo khoziaina: The Feeling of Being an Owner Conclusion: Russian Socialism

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Book SynopsisA Global Idea outlines how youthas shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responsesbecame a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a global youth development complex, a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel

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Book SynopsisA Global Idea outlines how youthas shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responsesbecame a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a global youth development complex, a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel

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Book SynopsisBeyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is an explanation? What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political

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Book SynopsisBeyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.

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Book SynopsisScience Interrupted examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. Timothy G. McLellan offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracywork that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated. Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the author takes the experiences of the organization''s staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. He asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice? Extending a mode of anthropological research i

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Book SynopsisIn The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of da

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Book SynopsisThe lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo''s old day-laborer district, San''ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San''ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering''s book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values

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Book SynopsisSince the initial publication of Cultures@SiliconValley fourteen years ago, much has changed in Silicon Valley. The corporate landscape of the Valley has shifted, with tech giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter vying for space with a halo of applications that connect people for work, play, romance, and education. Contingent labor has been catalyzed by ubiquitous access to the Internet on smartphones, enabling ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft and space-sharing apps like Airbnb. Entrepreneurs compete for people's attention and screen time. Alongside these changes, daily life for all but the highest echelon has been altered by new perceptions of scarcity, risk, and shortage. Established workers and those new to the workforce try to adjust. The second edition of Cultures@SiliconValley brings the story of technological saturation and global cultural diversity in this renowned hub of digital innovation up to the present. In this fully updated edition, J. A. English-Lueck provides readers with a host of new ethnographic stories, documenting the latest expansions of Silicon Valley to San Francisco and beyond. The book explores how changes in technology, especially as mobile phones make the Internet accessible everywhere, impact work, family, and community life. The inhabitants of Silicon Valley illustrate in microcosm the social and cultural identity of the future. Trade Review"Many imagine Silicon Valley as a kind high-tech Oz, watched over by wizards of code. But thanks to more than twenty years of on-the-ground exploration, Jan English-Lueck can show us the Valley as it really is: risky, diverse, cosmopolitan and complex. This is simply the best study of Silicon Valley's many cultures that I know." -- Fred Turner * Stanford University *"In her newly updated book, Jan English-Lueck takes a deep dive into Silicon Valley, where hackers, engineers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, educators, janitors, and many more drive the creation of technologies that pervade our lives. Her sharp and lively account is simply indispensable for anyone who wants to understand how technology shapes those living in Silicon Valley and the broader consequences." -- Gabriella Coleman * author of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Culture Version 2.x: An Amplified Community chapter abstractThis chapter gives an overview of the development and impact of Silicon Valley. Work and workplaces, long a factor in regional civic life, have solidified their position. Large iconic organizations, such as Apple and Google, set the stage for worker expectations, even in small start-ups. Industries such as clean technology and the Internet of Things go beyond the realm of communication revealing the role of information technologies in the world around us. These new industries are part of the story of Silicon Valley's expansion. The region itself has outgrown its original boundaries, extending beyond Santa Clara County into the rest of the Bay Area. This chapter provides a guide to the rest of the book, and sets up the twin stories of technological saturation and complex global diversity. 2Compressing: Using Digital Devices to Reshape Space and Time chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how ubiquitous computing has remolded work patterns and family connections. As technologies emerged and economic landscape changed, workers faced new opportunities for augmentation, and new obligations to produce. Mobile access to the Internet, cloud computing, and social networking intensified the domination of work in life. Designers, increasingly important players in the workscape, think through ways to hook devices and services to amplified users. High visibility companies such as Google and Facebook actively rethink worker productivity and worker roles. Organized labor has a muted impact, while microwork, the "gig economy," and contract work continue to redefine the relationship of workers to companies, and the relative status of workers. These changes have an impact on the lives of the workers, their families, and their communities. The use of mobile computing changed everyday life and, above all, the compression of time and space. Ethnographic stories illustrate these concepts. 3Networking: Building Community in Silicon Valley chapter abstractThis chapter includes discussions of how commercial and non-profit social networking platforms have changed social interactions. Facebook links weak ties, and amplifies distinctions between experienced communities. Services, augmented by technology, change how we build and think about our social institutions. Clean technology and financial technology illustrate this linkage of social and engineering endeavors. Human-centered design often augments the impact of such services. Design itself has become a metaphor for intentional change that influences civic discourse. Socially-infused industries, such as clean technology, meld together social aspirations and opportunities for venture capitalism. Civic engineering, intentionally redesigning Silicon Valley public life as a demonstration of social innovation, has given rise to enduring public-private partnerships that have reshaped Silicon Valley's public culture. 4Input/Output: Catalyzing Global Cultures chapter abstractNo longer is Silicon Valley an emergent globalizing phenomenon, it is a premiere planetary hub whose global economic ties have become iconic. Large companies can harness a global workforce, and small startups reach across international boundaries. More than a third of the population is foreign-born, and everyday experiences are necessarily multicultural. This chapter deepens the discussion of deep diversity, of living in a complex plural society. The stories in the chapter go beyond a focus on the immigrant experience to explore what is celebrated, accepted, tolerated and excluded as cultures meet and intermingle. The region, however, is not a multicultural utopia. Class remains a dominant divisive element in this experiment in multicultural living. Inequality reaches into civic and work life revealing potential vulnerabilities in the body politic. 5Channeling: Culture at Work and Home chapter abstractThe deep diversity experienced across the range of the lower to upper middle classes does not mask the deep exclusion of the marginalized. Examples of how deep diversity enters daily life through care, food, and home life humanize this complex concept. Stories of care giving highlight what matters to people, teasing out the challenge of juggling omnipresent work and intimate home life. Similarly, stories of cultural instrumentality underscore the rules of Silicon Valley culture, which are so deeply pragmatic. Silicon Valley residents and workers struggle with "cultural agility" as a tool for navigating the diverse demands of culture, work, time and family. 6Bandwidth Control: Creating Useful Culture chapter abstractSilicon Valley balances social experimentation with the old familiar story of inequality driven by capitalism. The etiquette of pragmatism, discussed in this chapter, is a tool for sifting out social behaviors that do not lead to a desirable future. Design, gamification, and venture philanthropy offer a novel way of approaching the region's social issues, but can they change the fundamental dynamics of inequality and lead to a more sustainable region? The experiment in the pragmatic merger of civic life and entrepreneurial endeavor continues. Some consequences of this merger are perilous, and others enticing. Silicon Valley remains a test case for 21st century life, and the effects of the various experimental cultural attitudes and actions of this region bear examination and reflection.

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Book SynopsisDecades after the first multicultural reforms were introduced in Latin America, Afrodescendant people from the region are still disproportionately impoverished, underserved, policed, and incarcerated. In Nicaragua, Afrodescendants have mobilized to confront this state of siege through the politics of black autonomy. For women and men grappling with postwar violence, black autonomy has its own cultural meanings as a political aspiration and a way of crafting selfhood and solidarity. Jennifer Goett's ethnography examines the race and gender politics of activism for autonomous rights in an Afrodescendant. Creole community in Nicaragua. Weaving together fifteen years of research, Black Autonomy follows this community-based movement from its inception in the late 1990s to its realization as an autonomous territory in 2009 and beyond. Goett argues that despite significant gains in multicultural recognition, Afro-Nicaraguan Creoles continue to grapple with the day-to-day violence of capitalist intensification, racialized policing, and drug war militarization in their territories. Activists have responded by adopting a politics of autonomy based on race pride, territoriality, self-determination, and self-defense. Black Autonomy shows how this political radicalism is rooted in African diasporic identification and gendered cultural practices that women and men use to assert control over their bodies, labor, and spaces in an atmosphere of violence.Trade Review"Jennifer Goett's fine book shows, with vivid ethnography, how Afro-Nicaraguan political mobilization is inspired by the vernacular cultural practices of women and men. Her book provides penetrating insight into the way multiculturalist reforms that give rights to racialized minorities coexist with rapacious and punitive forms of 'development,' by state and private sector interests, operating in transnational and gendered circuits of geopolitics and capital." -- Peter Wade * University of Manchester *"Black Autonomy powerfully interrogates the regionally and racially disparate effects of neoliberalism, drug war capitalism, state securitization, and state-sanctioned sexual violence in post-Cold War Nicaragua. Jennifer Goett presents a compelling analysis of the gendered struggle of Afrodescendants, particularly Creoles, for full rights of multicultural citizenship, including territorial autonomy. Goett's feminist activist ethnography is an important contribution to studies of post-conflict Central America and the African diaspora." -- Faye V. Harrison * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *"Black Autonomy is a powerfully argued and beautifully written entrée to the intimate social worlds of people struggling for livelihood and autonomy on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. Taking readers into the inner lives of local residents, Jennifer Goett explores how gender-based solidarity is produced and mobilized to challenge military occupation, counternarcotics policing, and sexual violence. Through feminist activist ethnography, Goett effectively conveys the voices and experiences of local actors while significantly advancing our understanding of what it takes to commit anthropology's resources to local projects of liberation." -- Daniel M. Goldstein * Rutgers University *"In a valuable contribution to scholarship on Nicaragua's east coast and the "official multiculturalism" now prevalent throughout Latin America, Jennifer Goett interrogates the meaning of autonomy for the Afro-descendant Creole residents of the community of Monkey Point....Her work demonstrates how critical feminist scholarship on racial violence can root itself in community understandings." -- David Johnson Lee * Hispanic American Historical Review *"Goett's knowledge of local history and politics from the perspectives of Creole actors is fabulously rich and denotes the seriousness of her activist-ethnographic dedication. Her reflexive discussion of her relation to the field and of her ethnographic strategies and experiences provide an excellent entry point into the complex sociocultural, economic, and political situations she elucidates. This is certainly one of the best ethnographies I have had the opportunity to read in a long time." -- Jean Muteba Rahier * Latin American Research Review *"Black Autonomy, written by feminist anthropologist Jennifer Goett, makes an important contribution to the field of Afro-Latin American studies....Very well written, her narrative at various points thrilled me with the vitality and political commitment expressed both in the description of the experiences of the Monkey Point people and in their analyses of inequalities in the global economy." -- Amilcar Araujo Pereira * Latin American Politics and Society *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter provides an introduction to Monkey Point, including a discussion of the feminist activist research methodologies used. It contextualizes community activism within debates about ethnic autonomy regimes in Latin America and develops new theoretical insights on the relationship between security and capitalist intensification in postwar Nicaragua. Specifically, the chapter locates the emergence of a politics of black autonomy within wider processes of postwar governance. It analyzes the transition from the neoliberal right to the socialist left in 2007, arguing that there has been a shift in political discourse, but clear continuities in capitalist development and security policy. The chapter ends with an overview of the book, which is broadly chronological, beginning with women's mobilization in the late 1990s and ending with resistance to military occupation in the early 2010s. 1Women's Origin Stories chapter abstractThis chapter examines the community's past via the oral histories of three women elders who led the first wave of land rights activism in the late 1990s. It shows how diasporic subjectivities rooted in social memories of slavery, migration, and race, class, and gender oppression drive community activism for autonomous rights.Accounts of racialized domestic servitude and labor run throughout the stories, providing a narrative thread that links six generations of community women. Each woman tells these histories in ways that are both politically strategic and pedagogic in the present. For instance, they represent female ancestors as forceful political agents and, in doing so, shore up their own leadership positions, which are often contested by community men.They make race, class, and gender subordination visible as past sites of struggle, and thus urge younger generations to embrace these expressions of diasporic historical consciousness as grounds for contemporary autonomous rights. 2"Bad Boys" and Direct Resistance chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on young men's cultural practices and their armed resistance to the speculation of community lands by outside venture capitalists in the early 2000s. Many of the men involved in these acts of direct resistance are known as "bad boys," a countercultural identity that the men embrace and reproduce in their oppositional politics, personal style, and diasporic investments in popular culture. For these men, Monkey Point is an autonomous rural space where they can go to recover from drug abuse and escape the degradation of being poor and heavily policed in Bluefields. They are perhaps unlikely protagonists in the making of a social movement, but their direct resistance to land speculation signaled a deepening radicalism in community politics and an emergent political strategy for dealing with some of the worst abuses of the postwar state. 3Life on the Edge of the Global Economy chapter abstractThis chapter examines women's sociality as an autonomous sphere of self-valorization that is resistant to capitalist and patriarchal social relations and values. For women, livelihood politics are enmeshed in dense networks of gendered sociality and intimacy, where reciprocity and shared affective labor between women are central to survival under conditions of capitalist intensification. Women's sociality makes it possible to live independently of men and undermines a racial and gender division of labor that promotes wageless Creole women's subordination to male wage earners. The chapter argues that women's sociality is not a mere adaption to oppressive systems because it produces pleasure, self-respect, and solidarity and thus has autonomous social logics. As an affirmative practice rooted in working class Creole culture, it drives women's activism and their demands for collective rights. 4From Cold Wars to Drug Wars chapter abstractThis chapter tracks shifting security paradigms by drawing on narratives from community men who fought as contra during the 1980s and are now the targets of counternarcotics policing. Their accounts give intimate insight into how drug war violence and policing are historical outgrowths of cold war conflict and US intervention in Central America. Wartime stories show that coercion and physical violence were unavoidable for most Monkey Point men, as their age, gender, race, and class overdetermined their roles as Sandinista soldiers, contra fighters, draft evaders, deserters, and refugees. But rather than bringing peace and security, refuge in Costa Rica and repatriation to Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s signaled the demise of one securitized masculine subject (enemy combatant) and the rise of another (drug trafficker), producing new forms of securitized social control. 5Sexual Violence and Autonomous Politics chapter abstractThis chapter shows how ordinary life in Monkey Point was saturated and interrupted by military occupation and state sexual violence in the late 2000s. Drawing on racialized and sexualized fantasy, the occupation targeted local women and girls as objects of sexual domination, cast local men as masculine subordinates and racialized security threats, and promoted heteropatriarchal forms of mestizo territorial sovereignty. The soldier's abuse of girls initially followed preexisting patterns of gendered and sexual violence in the community before erupting into exceptional violence that provoked a public politics of opposition to the state. Diverse advocates for the girls struggled to fully decipher and politicize the racial, gendered, and sexual articulation of violence under military occupation, and state institutional power promoted impunity for mestizo state actors. Epilogue chapter abstractThe epilogue reflects on the impact of more than a decade of community mobilization. It assesses the political opportunities and potential entrapments that recognition offers as community people continue to confront violence and systemic inequality in their territory. It further points to a reservoir of political knowledge and agency embedded in vernacular practice, gendered subjectivity, and black diasporic identification that challenges oppressive systems and suggests that territorial recognition can serve as a strategic asset that emboldens and radicalizes black autonomy and as a governance strategy that may facilitate the expansion of state and capitalist power. The tension between these two outcomes is likely to shape the contours of future struggle in the region.

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Book SynopsisMourning Remains examines the attempts to find, recover, and identify the bodies of Peruvians who were disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru's central southern Andes. Isaias Rojas-Perez explores the lives and political engagement of elderly Quechua mothers as they attempt to mourn and seek recognition for their kin. Of the estimated 16,000 Peruvians disappeared during the conflict, only the bodies of 3,202 victims have been located, and only 1,833 identified. The rest remain unknown or unfound, scattered across the country and often shattered beyond recognition. Rojas-Perez examines how, in the face of the state's failure to account for their missing dead, the mothers rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human to bring the disappeared back into being through everyday practices of mourning and memorialization. Mourning Remains reveals how collective mourning becomes a political escape from the state's project of governing past death and how the dead can help secure the future of the body politic.Trade Review"Giving close attention to the work women do in the aftermath of unspeakable violence to knit life together, Isaias Rojas-Perez reveals the amazing potential of ethnography to engage suffering and show how the living learn to become apprentices to death itself. Mourning Remains is an outstanding contribution to the anthropology of genocide, violence, and the ability to reclaim life to the extent possible." -- Veena Das * Johns Hopkins University *"In this stunning ethnography, Rojas-Perez reveals how the materiality and affective force of victims' remains persist in the aftermath of war—revealing unexpected possibilities for reimagining political community. Theoretically nuanced and empirically rich, Mourning Remains reassesses the broad claims of transitional justice in Peru through a vivid, painstaking look at the attempt to craft legal evidence from disinterred traces of wartime atrocities." -- Richard Kernaghan * University of Florida *"Profound—and profoundly moving—Mourning Remains opens up another history of Peru in the aftermath of the bloody war between the Shining Path, the military, and the rest of the country. Rojas-Perez's narrative boldly offers presence to those who died un-nameable deaths and the practices through which their relatives memorialize their lives. This book tells us that acknowledging their presence may be a requirement for an unusual and necessary reconciliation." -- Marisol de la Cadena * University of California, Davis, *"In its careful consideration of state power in its various modes and its examination of the possibilities for rearrangements of this power, Mourning Remains adds fresh insight to analyses of sovereignty, necropolitics, and governance of the dead....Clearly argued and deeply researched, [this book] is an important theoretical and ethnograhic contribution to studies of post-conflict Peru, forensic exhumation, human rights, and transitional justice." -- Alexa Hagerty * Anthropological Quarterly *"Rojas-Perez complicates our understanding of power itself, highlighting the ways in which alongside the disciplinary operation of sovereign power there are elements that exceed these limits thanks to the resistance and agency of even the most marginalized actors (in this case Peruvian indigenous peasant women). This also points to the importance of [transitional justice] not just engaging with sites and discourses beyond elite, formal institutions...but also revisiting the very conception of the political." -- Kiran Grewal * International Journal of Transitional Justice *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: chapter abstractThis introduction offers an overview of the book's themes. It starts by situating the discursive context in which the Peruvian post-conflict of reckoning with past violence came into being. The chapter then introduces the concept of necro-governmentality—a form of power that by means of governing dead bodies seeks to structure the field of action and speech of survivors and society at large to prevent the repetition of violence. The book describes how this form of power emerges in response to Necropower, or power's capacity to create "death worlds" (Mbembe). This framework is central to understand the ways the survivors' response to atrocity stands in its own right at the intersection of these two forms of power. This framework shows that the unique contribution of the book is its focus on how death is actually managed, experienced, negotiated and mourned in post-conflict settings—a theme barely treated in the literature on transitional justice. 1Death in Transition: Reclaiming the Unknown Dead in Post-conflict Peru chapter abstractThis chapter offers a partial history of how the question of recovering the remains of victims of the internal war for proper burial came to occupy center stage in Peru's post-conflict project of nation making. It traces how a legal project that started with the with the specific goal of shedding light on the whereabouts of the disappeared by the state ended up in a humanitarian project of exhumation and reburial of forgotten victims of both the Shining Path and the army. It situates this shift within the unfolding of a broad project of reckoning with past violence, including a truth commission, exhumations and prosecutions, under of the human rights notion of "right to truth." The chapter conceptualizes this development as "necro-governmentality of post-conflict" and shows how it was initially implemented and how Quechua-speaking survivors received, accommodated, and contested this project to put forward their own projects of reckoning. 2Malamuerte: Governing Tragic Death in the Andes chapter abstractThis chapter examines the question of why Quechua-speaking survivors and relatives buried hastily the bodies of their slaughtered relatives in the places where they had fallen and did not attempt to move those bodies to consecrated ground. It focuses on a case of suicide in the rural community of Accomarca to offer an ethnographic account of how Andean villagers cope with tragic death (or "bad death") in ordinary contexts. It traces the relations of specificity and continuity between state and cultural practices to properly dispose of the dead body and address suffering in cases of transgressive death. The chapter explores the gendered division of labor in mourning and highlight the central role of women in ordinary mortuary rituals. Finally, it shows how, by contrast, the 1985 massacre at the hands of the state cannot be absorbed through these ordinary practices until such killing is first legally, politically, and historically prosecuted. 3Excavating State Atrocity chapter abstractThis chapter explores the question of what kind of forensic object state atrocity is. In doing so, it follows the work of forensic archaeologists during the exhumation of clandestine mass graves at Los Cabitos—the former regional headquarters of the counterinsurgency in Peru's central southern Andes. It shows how archaeologists working as legal experts in contexts of mass killing and atrocity are trapped in power relations, while their practice is not independent of power and politics. It offers an ethnographic account of how the forensic findings that proved practices of state atrocity at Los Cabitos were first made possible by the unexpected intrusion at the site of a drunken man who was not part of the legal procedures. Following Latour, the chapter shows that through laymen who have witnessed the past, or through its material remains, the past objects to how it is produced and spoken of by the experts. 4The Cry: Memories of the Present chapter abstractThis chapter begins an account of the ways the Quechua mothers of the disappeared engage the forensic exhumation at Los Cabitos. In particular, it focuses on the stories of suffering they retell at the former site of mass killing to reflect on the nature of the disappearance as an ongoing event. These stories speak of the disappearance in terms of both the specific act of abduction of the body as well as the different languages, performance of authority and practices of denial through which state authorities sanctioned the disappearance in the past and continue to subtly sanction it in the present. In this sense, the chapter shows the inadequacy of trauma theories that typically tend to situate the event of violence in the past. Instead, the chapter suggests that any rendering of this kind of violence should look at the double political temporality of past/present in which it unfolds as an ongoing event. 5Caprichakuspa: Witnessing Before Terror chapter abstractThis chapter explores the gendered dimensions of the response to state atrocity. In particular, it interrogates the age-old wisdom that women engage politics in contexts of violence motivated only by their desire to protect the sacred rights of their families as opposed to the rights of the sovereign. This view confines women's agency to the realm of the "pre-political" as opposed to the "political sphere." This chapter shows how, by contrast, the mothers started their search out of their love for their missing relatives, but in this search they end up engaging questions concerning the possibility of political community itself in the face of sate atrocity. It shows how the mothers relate to the sovereign's power to kill in terms of escape and movement, and how this gesture of disobedience as a form of political action evokes the figure of the people walking away from the sovereign's binding and shepherding powers. 6Talking Soul: Reclaiming Death as Human Experience chapter abstractThis chapter offers an ethnographic account of the ways the mothers reinvent death as human experience in response to practices of state atrocity akin to what Arendt called "fabrication of corpses." Because the forensic technologies are unable to produce the individual missing bodies, the mothers mobilize ordinary practices of mourning to both imagine the presence of those bodies at the site of mass killing and mourn them in the subjunctive mood of the "might be." It is a gesture that envisions the figure of the mother moving between two deaths—death as biological termination of life and death as human experience—attempting to bring the disappeared back into some form of social being. Central to this gesture are the agency Andean people assign to dead bodies and how they see the relationship between body, soul, and the Earth. The chapter conceptualizes this imperfect form of mourning as "subjunctive mourning." 7The Magic of Justice: Or How to Ensoul the Work of Law chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the assemblage of everyday practices of the self and technologies of truth (dreams, apparitions, and rites of propitiation) that the mothers bring to the site of mass killing, to animate the work of justice in response to atrocity. Modern politics see these practices and technologies as premodern relics and vestiges of "magical" practices. The chapter examines the ways these "magical" practices enter into a relationship of adjacency with the rational practices of the law and forensic science, to together confront, in their own distinct terms, the longstanding legacies of state terror. While the work of the former depend for their efficacy on the work of the latter, the former go beyond the rational limits of the latter to create conditions of possibility for truth and justice in the face of forms of violence that have gone beyond the thresholds within which Andean peoples test what a human form of life is. 8"The Glory of the Disappeared": Or the Figure of the People chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the ceremony of inauguration of "La Cruz de la Hoyada" at the former site of mass killing of Los Cabitos. It examines the historical and political saliency of this symbol and the ways it embodies a claim on political community in the aftermath of state atrocity. The chapter shows how, in reclaiming the site as a space for justice and mourning, the mothers at once level a radical critique of the sovereign power to kill and respond to the inability of the law and forensic sciences to reconstitute the weave of life torn by state terror. The chapter argues that insofar as it stands in its own right at the intersection between the trajectories of necropower and necro-governmentality, the makes a claim on political community. It thus evokes the figure of the people emerging as a necessary response to keep at bay the state's ever-present capacity for "fabrication of corpses."

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Book SynopsisChina's patrilineal and patriarchal tradition has encouraged a long-standing preference for male heirs within families. Coupled with China's birth-planning policy, this has led to a severe gender imbalance. But a counterpattern is emerging in rural China where a noticeable proportion of young couples have willingly accepted having a single daughter. They are doing so even as birth-planning policies are being relaxed and having a second child, and the opportunity of having a son, is a new possibility. Choosing Daughters explores this critical, yet largely overlooked, reproductive pattern emerging in China's demographic landscape. Lihong Shi delves into the social, economic, and cultural forces behind the complex decision-making process of these couples to unravel their life goals and childrearing aspirations, the changing family dynamics and gender relations, and the intimate parent–daughter ties that have engendered this drastic transformation of reproductive choice. She reveals a leading-edge social force that fosters China's recent fertility decline, namely pursuit of a modern family and successful childrearing achieved through having a small family. Through this discussion, Shi refutes the conventional understanding of a universal preference for sons and discrimination against daughters in China and counters claims of continuing resistance against China's population control program. Trade Review"With rich ethnographic detail, beautiful writing, and rigorous marshalling of evidence, Choosing Daughters presents a nuanced portrait of how and why gender roles and family life have changed in a Chinese village. Lihong Shi offers a bold challenge to widespread assumptions about bias against daughters in rural China." -- Vanessa Fong * Amherst College *"Choosing Daughters gives us key insights into the complexity of reproductive choices in rural China. Through meticulous ethnographic research and a firm grasp of big issues, Lihong Shi shows us not only why some Chinese families choose—in fact, desire—to have only one daughter, but also how ideas about son preference, elder care, familial intimacy, and filial piety are being redefined." -- Rubie Watson * Harvard University *"Choosing Daughters is a persuasive, eloquent study of the changing gender roles. Full of surprises and new vistas for investigation, it is ethnography at its best." -- William Jankowiak * University of Nevada, Las Vegas *"[T]his book is a delight to read....[It] is a persuasive and eloquent study of the changing gender roles in Chinese society. It is a ground-breaking account of the cultural transformation of northern Chinese society whose people have come to re-evaluate kinship bonds and to value a daughter over a son. This is the kind of book that opens up new vistas. Full of surprises, it is ethnography as it should be." -- William Jankowiak * China Information *"Choosing Daughters is an interesting and innovative book that examines the transformations of patrilineal and patriarchal traditions in rural China through the lens of reproductive preferences and child-bearing decisions...This book enriches our understanding of rural Chinese families in general and their new reproductive patterns in the post-reform period in particular."––Yinni Peng, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Birth-Planning Campaign: Local Experience of Population Control chapter abstractChapter 1 delves into the formulation and implementation of and the reactions to the birth-planning policy in Lijia Village, focusing on the birth-planning campaign from the 1970s to 2010, to present a local account of the practice and the experience of China's population control campaign. While unfolding the ways in which such a pervasive birth-planning policy was implemented and received on the local level for more than three decades, this chapter reveals that as the policy was adjusted and relaxed and the implementation measures modified, the reactions of the villagers toward the policy were drastically transformed. More strikingly, with an increasing number of peasant couples accepting the policy since the 1990s, a new reproductive pattern of couples willingly embracing a singleton daughter rather than taking advantage of the relaxed policy that allowed them to have a second child emerged. 2"Life Is to Enjoy": The Pursuit of the New Ideal of Happiness chapter abstractChapter 2 explores the impact of the pursuit of a new ideal of happiness on the childbearing preference of young parents. China's burgeoning market economy and the retreat of the state in governing the social life of villagers has facilitated the formation of a new ideal of happiness, defined by material consumption and the enjoyment of leisure. Young villagers believed that childrearing jeopardized the pursuit of their new life ideal, which discouraged them from making the decision to have a second child. In particular, many young women desired to have only one child to relieve themselves from the burden of childrearing. They were able to exercise their agency to carry out their reproductive choice for only one child when their desire did not coincide with the desires of their husbands. 3One Tiger versus Ten Mice: Raising One Successful Child chapter abstractThis chapter explores a new childrearing practice and its impact on childbearing preferences. Young couples had high expectations for their children's success in adult life and believed that raising one successful child was more rewarding than raising multiple unsuccessful children. The increasing cost of a child's daily consumption, driven by rising consumerism and children's agency in demanding consumption products, exacerbated the financial burden of childrearing. Moreover, raising a successful child also required parental support for a child's education, another major cost of childrearing. Consequently, an increasing number of young couples decided to concentrate limited family resources on only one child to secure the best possible upbringing for that child. This new childrearing belief and practice were not gender specific. Gender-neutral parental support and close parent-daughter ties further encouraged parents to stay with a singleton daughter and to support her in an unprecedented manner. 4"Little Quilted Vest to Warm Parents' Hearts": Gendered Transformation of Filial Piety chapter abstractChapter 4 examines the gendered transformation of filial piety and its impact on reproductive choice. It discusses the arrangements of elderly care and demonstrates that the practice of filial support provided by sons and daughters-in-law declined. Meanwhile, a married daughter started to maintain close ties with her parents and proved to be reliable for filial support. Such a transformation was the result of a reinterpreted intergenerational exchange, women's emerging practice to their parents, and the shift of postmarital residence patterns and women's socially constructed role as being more considerate than men. The decline of sons' filial support had weakened the desire for a son among young parents. They had started to make multiple preparations for their old age, including cultivating a close bond with a daughter. 5"Here Comes My Big Debt": Wedding Costs and Sons as Financial Burdens chapter abstractChapter 5 delves into the escalating burden of financing a son's wedding and its impact on reproductive choice. While marriage was significant for a man's having a lifelong companionship and establishing his status in his community, the patrilineal practice of a groom's family financing a wedding persisted. In the sex-ratio imbalanced marriage market, young women had gained leverage in negotiating marriage proposals, exacerbating the burden of wedding financing. Not only were parents expected to fulfill this critical parental obligation, they had to continue their support for their sons and daughters-in-law after their wedding to help maintain their sons' marriage. Consequently, a son had become a financial burden for his parents instead of a source of financial support in old age. This drastic shift of the role of sons further encouraged couples to willingly accept a singleton daughter. 6Emerging from the Ancestors' Shadow: Weakened Belief in Family Continuity chapter abstractChapter 6 explores the eroding effect that the belief in family continuity has had on the preference for sons. Without the presence of a lineage culture, there is no institutional support for the belief and practice of having a son to pass on the family line. Furthermore, skepticism concerning the belief in an afterlife and a reciprocal relationship between the ancestors and the living descendants had shaken the religious and cultural significance of having a son to perform ancestral rituals. Finally, while families without a son used to be stigmatized by their communities, such stigma had been removed as financial capability had become the most significant marker for social status. In the process of emerging from ancestors' shadows, young couples who had a singleton daughter no longer considered family continuity a necessity for their nuclear family and had willingly embraced a singleton daughter. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion discusses the implications of this emerging reproductive pattern of parents' embracing singleton daughters on the understandings of family transformations in rural China in general and son preference in particular. It also discusses the ways in which this reproductive choice sheds light on the studies on state-society relations in reproductive choice and control in China. Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction first situates this research in the literature on state-society relations in reproductive choice and control in China, the reproductive preference for a son among Chinese families, and the media and scholarly attention on China's "missing girls." It then introduces the emergence of a new reproductive pattern of rural couples' embracing a singleton daughter in China's demographic landscape. It discusses the community (Lijia Village) in which the research was conducted, in particular, the location, history, demographic makeup, economic activities, and the practices of marriage and ancestral rituals of the residents. The chapter also discusses the development of the research project and the research methodology and concludes with an outline of the remaining chapters of this book.

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Book SynopsisRadical changes in our understanding of health and healthcare are reshaping twenty-first-century personhood. In the last few years, there has been a great influx of public policy and biometric technologies targeted at engaging individuals in their own health, increasing personal responsibility, and encouraging people to "self-manage" their own care. One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.Trade Review"Surprising, subtle, and sophisticated, One Blue Child exemplifies ethnographic and comparative inquiry at its best. Susanna Trnka's focus on situated and strategic social action – ranging from children and parents to clinicians and activists and across sites as diverse as spas, clinics, and private homes – provides a convincing case for policy as ongoing, often contested practice." -- Don Brenneis * University of California, Santa Cruz *"One Blue Child is a fascinating ethnographic study of how physicians, patients, and families negotiate multiple meanings of and experiences with asthma. Trnka demonstrates that asthma is not a disease, but a process that is enacted across intersecting constituencies, bodies, medicines, and decisions. The book illuminates how individualized responsibility is socially and collectively contested and refashioned through science and policy, and in health care and family settings." -- Erin Koch * University of Kentucky *"In her new book, One Blue Child, anthropologist Susanna Trnka offers a portrait of asthma in the Czech Republic and New Zealand that shows how much we have been missing. To create it, she pursued the disease and the problems that accompany it through the daily lives of patients and families, their physicians, and others in these communities. Accessibly written, her story takes us back and forth between the countries, drawing out the impact of differing policies and political contexts on the management and experience of asthma....With her book, Trnka shows that until we understand more about its origins and its optimal care and treatment, we should be cautious about the flight from failing institutions to individual behavior and selfmanagement." -- David Van Sickle * American Anthropologist *"One Blue Child is straight down the line, good, solid medical anthropology. The fieldwork is well documented, discussion is empirically grounded, and analysis is informed by the best current social theories. Trnka is to be commended for writing a book that not only contributes to theory and methods in anthropology, but will also be an enlightening resource for people who have been affected by asthma and their families. Respiratory healthcare workers, clinical researchers and policy makers will also benefit greatly from reading this book. My hope is that this book will go some distance to convincing policy makers, clinical researchers, and health advocates concerned with asthma to orient their efforts towards holistic, multi-stranded approaches that will improve lung health globally." -- Paul H. Mason * Somatosphere *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Taking Responsibility for Asthma: New Kinds of People, New Kinds of Health chapter abstractThis chapter outlines what happens when health reforms designed to inculcate self-responsibility come up against older forms of relationality, obligation, and care. Drawing on the concept of "competing responsibilities," the chapter argues for the need to recognize the inherent interrelationality of care, outlining how even patients who embrace the ideals of acting like self-reliant, autonomous subjects are frequently forced to balance these alongside their obligations to others and others' efforts on their behalf. Moreover, in some instances, patients and their caregivers reject self-responsibility in an effort to recast obligation back onto the state or their physicians, demanding that the sick be taken care of, instead of being forced to become the facilitators of their own care. The result is a series of tensions as reformist agendas open up new opportunities and foreclose others, demanding a reframing of health and illness beyond the scope of neoliberal agendas. 1Democratizing Knowledge: Patients Caught between Compliance and Self-Management chapter abstractThis chapter examines how the adoption of self-managed care in New Zealand results in new forms of patienthood and medical authority. First, it outlines how revolutionizing the health-care system to promote policies of self-management has radically empowered some patients while severely disadvantaging those already marginalized. It then discusses a tension central in neoliberal discourses of self-responsibility: Although medical professionals encourage patients to take responsibility for their own care, they also feel a professional obligation to use their expertise to steer patients toward the behaviors they view as efficacious, resulting in frustration within the clinical encounter. Finally, it demonstrates how, in the drive to increase patient compliance, many of the same health professionals who embrace "patient choice" end up blaming patients for using medication "irresponsibly," thus creating the illusion that self-management is a foolproof system that fails only when individual patients lack the discipline to conform. 2Domestic Experiments: When Parents Become "Half a Doctor" chapter abstractThis chapter examines New Zealand parents' and children's perspectives of self-management, arguing that being forced to take on the role of the "patient expert" cuts both ways, overwhelming families unable or unwilling to manage their own care and granting greater control to families able to craft their own familial-based health-care routines. Aiming to achieve "normal childhoods" for their children, many New Zealand parents experiment with medication, revising dosages and guidelines based on their own experiential knowledge and, in the words of one mother, becoming "half a doctor" to cope with their child's condition. Although some of these parents view asthma as a chronic condition and encourage their children to adopt ongoing preventative regimes, others are strongly critical of the pharmaceutical industry and refute chronicity and, in some cases, reinterpret diagnoses in ways that radically recast "self-management" beyond what health authorities and policy makers have in mind. 3Patient Agency, Personal Responsibility, and the Upholding of Medical Expertise chapter abstractTwenty-five years after the end of state socialism, the Czech health-care system is characterized by a constant weighing of market-based approaches against widespread public support for ensuring solidarity in health-care provision. This chapter looks at the place of personal responsibility in both new policies governing health care and associated ideologies of democratic citizenship. Focusing on clinical encounters and medical discourses about asthma, the chapter documents the tensions that emerge out of a health-care system that requires greater patient agency while denying patients a role in overtly shaping their own care to preserve the power of the medical elite. It concludes by demonstrating that, despite claims to the contrary, many Czech patients are agentive in medical encounters, using the tactics of gift exchange and personal networking to compel physicians to take responsibility for their care. 4Knowledge, Discipline, and Domesticity: The Work of Raising Healthy Children chapter abstractThis chapter is about how Czech women navigate the tricky terrain of adhering to doctors' directives while crafting their own responsibility and authority over their children. Most mothers wish to carry out medical professionals' instructions but are also eager to exercise their own agency in determining home-based care. Many are also wary of overmedicalizing their children. Domestic space thus becomes a site where multiple kinds of knowledge come to a head: the expert knowledge of medical specialists, the experiential knowledge of mothers dealing with sick children, and widespread social understandings of medicines as both efficacious and dangerous. Out of the intimate tangle of interpersonal ties and obligations, modes of knowledge, and daily practicalities, there emerges a strikingly different sense of self, care, knowledge, and expertise than that of the neoliberal, autonomous, self-responsible subject. 5Body, Breath, and Mind: Subjugated Knowledge and Alternative Therapeutics chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the phenomenological aspects of breathlessness, examining the physical and mental aspects of living with asthma as well as the efforts of some New Zealanders to diminish or cure their asthma through the use of alternative therapeutic practices, most notably sports and Buteyko breathing retraining. Once lauded by family physicians as a route to coping with asthma, sports have largely fallen out of the register of the biomedical, acting today as an unsystematic "local" or "naïve" form of knowledge that nonetheless disrupts the hegemonic hold of pharmaceuticals. Buteyko, in contrast, is best described as a systematic "alternative" mode of respiratory therapeutics, invented under the auspices of (Russian) biomedicine and now existing on (Western) biomedicine's fringes. Both therapeutic approaches address the physical as well as the mental or emotional aspects of breathlessness and offer distinct counterpoints to the predominant biomedical focus on pharmaceuticals. 6The Best Holiday Ever: The Pleasures and Pains of Spa Cures and Summer Camps chapter abstractIn a March 2014 court decision, the Czech government asserted every Czech citizen's right to treatment in government-supported sanatorium-style health spas. Collectively administered and often authoritarian in nature, the therapeutic regimes enacted in these "total institutions" raise key questions about the roles of professional responsibility, pleasure, and discipline in promoting respiratory health. This chapter outlines the effects of both spa cures and summer asthma camps, documenting how removing children and their parents from their homes for four to six weeks at a time can set the stage for a comprehensive mind–body therapeutics, encouraging relaxation alongside discipline and compelling patients to reframe their understandings of what their bodies are capable of, despite their asthma. The disciplined pleasure of spa cures and summer camps, it is argued, is central to this experience, acting as a catalyst for new behaviors and new understandings of the body and health. 7Redistributing Responsibility among States, Companies, and Citizens: Struggles in the Steel Heart of the Republic chapter abstractThe city of Ostrava is famous for its residents' respiratory problems, with some scientists contending that it has the world's highest incidence of childhood asthma. Activists blame Ostrava's steelworks, owned by the multinational ArcelorMittal, which in turn suggests residents should do more to personally improve their living conditions. This chapter examines how respiratory illnesses get cast as a citizenship issue, inspiring national debate over whether the state, corporations, or individuals are the ultimate guarantor of citizens' rights. Drawing on prevalent tropes about working-class labor and vulnerable children, popular representations of Ostrava's woes portray a struggle between citizens who are suffering and a state not living up to its obligations. Harkening back to environmental protests that fueled the 1989 Velvet Revolution, such calls on the state suggest a "politics of last resort," positioning the state as the ultimate moral agent and source of responsibility for citizens' health and well-being. Conclusion: Problematizing Asthma chapter abstractThis chapter delineates how health-care policies "problematize" asthma and the range of "solutions" such problems prompt, highlighting how seemingly inevitable facets of a phenomenon such as asthma care can, in fact, be constituted differently across different cultural contexts. The chapter outlines four key steps for improving asthma outcomes, ranging from enabling patients to coauthor their self-management programs to addressing the structural factors that determine respiratory health. It delineates how using open-ended, ethnographically grounded research enables us to move beyond the questions that occupy many public health professionals—how to improve the implementation of self-management—to gain a comprehensive understanding of the broader social dynamics and power structures that determine health. It concludes by suggesting how critiquing neoliberal visions of self-managing subjects necessitates not giving up the ideal of patient autonomy but recognizing how promoting patient autonomy requires taking seriously the inherent interrelationality of health.

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Book SynopsisA central motor of Argentine historical and political development since the early twentieth century, unions have been the site of active citizenship in both political participation and the distribution of social, economic, political, and cultural rights. What brings activists to Argentine unions and what gives these unions their remarkable strength? The Social Life of Politics examines the intimate, personal, and family dimensions of two political activist groups: the Union of National Civil Servants (UPCN) and the Association of State Workers (ATE). These two unions represent distinct political orientations within Argentina's broad, vibrant labor movement: the UPCN identifies as predominantly Peronist, disciplined, and supportive of incumbent government, while the ATE prides itself on its democratic, horizontal approach and relative autonomy from the electoral process. Sian Lazar examines how activists in both unions create themselves as particular kinds of militants and forms of political community. The Social Life of Politics places the lived experience of political activism into historical relief and shows how ethics and family values deeply inform the process by which political actors are formed, understood, and joined together through collectivism. Trade Review"Bringing the new anthropology of ethics to bear on the lives of union activists, Sian Lazar provides fresh insight into the moral foundations of political commitment and collective identity. Her nuanced approach to politics expands our understanding of the ethical. This book opens up fertile new terrain." -- Webb Keane * author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories *"The Social Life of Politics brings a sensitively deployed interdisciplinary approach to the study of Argentine trade unionism in the contemporary era. Lazar's fine blend of ethnographic research, theoretical sophistication and genuine compassion for trade unionists offers fresh insight into activism and political identity in the complex and shifting context of modern Argentina and Peronism. Latin Americanists and all who are interested in the emerging international contours of labor in the era of neoliberalism are in her debt." -- Daniel James * Indiana University Bloomington *"Written primarily for academic and graduate student audiences, The Social Life of Politics makes a number of key contributions to anthropological scholarship....[Lazar's] book is a theoretically compelling work that will no doubt provide a great source of inspiration for anthropologists studying subjectivation, kinship, union organizing, and class-based social movements." -- Marcos Mendoza * American Ethnologist *"[A] rich ethnographic portrait of the internal dynamics of two public sector unions in Argentina....[Offers] key insights into an overlooked element of the anthropology of bureaucracy." -- Brandon Hunter-Pazzara * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction presents the main argument and surveys the relevant literature: of anthropology of social movements, class, ethics and kinship. It then summarizes the structure of the book. 1The State and theUnions in Space and Time chapter abstractThe chapter sets out the context within which the unionists work, describing the organization of public sector unionism and some of the differences between the two unions studied in the book. The unions are called UPCN (Unión del Personal Civil de la Nación, Union of National Civil Servants) and ATE (Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado, Association of State Workers). The chapter then outlines some key moments in contemporary history of state restructuring, which deeply affected public sector workers and their unions and framed nearly all of the discussions about this research with the unions. It introduces the various histories that run throughout the chapters of this book, as they are entwined with personal stories of militancy and shape projects of collective ethical subjectivation and political action: histories of Peronism, of the labor movement in Argentina more broadly, of dictatorship, of state restructuring, and of neoliberalism. 2Militancia: An Ethics and Politics of the Self chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the concept of militancia (activism), a philosophy of political action and self-definition with an associated set of historical resonances and claims about character. Union activists often explained that they became activists because of what they considered to be their essential being: they were that kind of character; they joined because their parents had been unionists; political activity was a biological necessity; an addiction or a virus. The chapter explores these narratives of character as essence, and shows how militancy as subject position is deeply ethical in that it has ethical consequences - for activists' life course and for political action, because it shapes how they strive for the good, how they are perceived from the outside. However, outside of the research interview it is not often reflected upon. Rather, it is a process of self-cultivation that just happens and for which they are naturally pre-disposed. 3Family and Intergenerational Transmission of Militancia chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on one of the dominant ways that people explained their predisposition to activism, as something inherited from their families. The character of political militant can be transmitted through generations by stories, childhood experience, teaching and inherited characteristics. It is not always an easy path, and does not always happen, but family loomed large in many stories that activists told about their militant trajectories. Again, this is an aspect of ethical subjectivation that is considered to be part of one's essence, but it is more mutable than the character essence narrated in the previous chapter, which might be thought only to develop teleologically, by becoming stronger or weaker. In contrast, family transmission of essential ethical characteristics is more open to narration and thus to contingency, change and variation – as siblings take very different attitudes towards politics, for example. 4Pedagogy and Political Community chapter abstractThis chapter turns to explicit pedagogies of construction of individual militants and the collective ethical subject of the union by examining the ways that the two unions train newly elected delegates – by UPCN in the school for unionists, and by ATE in a less formal workshop structure. The chapter shows how the unions cultivate particular virtues among their activists, principally associated with how they orient themselves to and define the collectivity. This is a political community envisaged as vertical (for UPCN) and horizontal (for ATE), a difference which indexes the difference between political community as organism and as political project. This collective subject, and the individual selves that comprise it, is constructed through explicit exhortation, by appealing to characteristics and virtues that are thought to already exist among the delegates, drawing out their predisposition to rage against injustice or to feel a vocation for social action, for example. 5Containment as Care chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the concept of containment (contención), and describes how members of a UPCN delegation in the Health Ministry enact collectivity in their day to day life. Containment names ways that the union delegation encompasses its activists and affiliates. This can be through quasi-therapeutic relationships between activist and affiliate, as the activist seeks to resolve workplace problems and to talk through concerns from their life more broadly. But the main subject of this chapter is encompassment through practices of sociability, care, ritual and problem-solving. The local delegation is a space for processes of kinning, of making people into kin and friends. This takes place as ethical values of vocation, will, or desire for social justice circulate alongside talk, food, and other shared concerns to build a shared collective subjectivity. Kinship also shapes the conditions of possibility for action and care on the part of the union. 6Containment as Political Encompassment chapter abstractThis chapter examines containment as collective political action, which provides activists with spaces for self-fulfilment and political subject-hood. Through assemblies and street protests, unionists in both ATE and UPCN act on themselves and on the world. They construct themselves as a collective ethical subject and seek to transform the world for the better, or prevent or mitigate its transformation for the worse. Both kinds of political ethical action take place from a particular embodied and spatialized subject position. They also involve a particular relation to time, as each assembly or protest is part of a trajectory of action in history that also builds history, as well as being an experience of quotidian work which might only achieve very small but incremental improvements. Finally, they are also events where collective subjectivation takes place through the building of kinship as 'mutuality of being' in moments of effervescence and shared effort. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the book's argument that, for the unionists, activism is an ethical mode of existence that combines life experience and action to transform society. The conclusion shows how the concepts of hexis, praxis, and essence describe different ethical modes for the unionists. Understandings of essential character or biological predisposition interact with hexis – the cultivated state or disposition of political activist – and then transform into praxis, or explicitly theorized political action. The book has introduced these concepts in turn as overlapping modes of subjectivation, and the conclusion ties together this conceptual framework. The unions derive their strength and longevity insofar as they are able to successfully achieve projects of collective ethical-political subjectivation, as people become good activists and contain each other within the group. Politics is grounded in the ethical realms of the everyday, of the intimate, of shared values, and of the family.

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Book SynopsisTeach for Arabia offers an ethnographic account of the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators in Education City, Qatar. Education City, home to the branch campuses of six elite American universities, represents the Qatari government's multibillion dollar investment over the last two decades in growing a local knowledge-based economy. Though leaders have eagerly welcomed these institutions, not all citizens embrace the U.S. universities in their midst. Some critics see them as emblematic of a turn away from traditional values toward Westernization. Qatari students who attend these schools often feel stereotyped and segregated within their spaces. Neha Vora considers how American branch campuses influence notions of identity and citizenship among both citizen and non-citizen residents and contribute to national imaginings of the future and a transnational Qatar. Looking beyond the branch campus, she also confronts mythologies of liberal and illiberal peoples, places, and ideologies that have developed around these universities. Supporters and detractors alike of branch campuses have long ignored the imperial histories of American universities and the exclusions and inequalities that continue to animate daily academic life. From the vantage point of Qatar, Teach for Arabia challenges the assumed mantle of liberalism in Western institutions and illuminates how people can contribute to decolonized university life and knowledge production.Trade Review"Neha Vora has written a compelling, and personal, account of American campuses in Qatar, one that is as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking. Teach for Arabia brings to life the constantly evolving dynamics and debates within these campuses and offers great insight into the global expansion of American higher education institutions." -- Kristian Coates Ulrichsen * Rice University, author of Qatar and the Arab Spring *"Teach for Arabia is a groundbreaking contribution to understanding the goals and consequences of establishing US branch campuses in the Arab Gulf. Neha Vora interrogates the claim that universities export liberal education, arguing that such assertions rely on the reification of an illiberal other and a romanticization of the US academy. Her rich ethnographic detail makes this a unique and engaging read." -- Fida Adely * Georgetown University *"Teach for Arabia boldly challenges academic cosmopolitanism within the United States, demonstrating how notions of the liberal universities of the West versus their supposed illiberal counterparts among Arab states are firmly embedded in liberal ideologies. An attentive ethnography of the lived contradictions within Education City, this book shows how critique has no region and authoritarianism has no territory. Neha Vora's book represents a spectacular and hopefully developing direction in critical university studies." -- Roderick Ferguson * University of Illinois, Chicago, author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference *"If the measure of good anthropology is whether or not one's arguments have resonance with the people being written about, then Vora has produced stellar anthropology. Teach for Arabia should be essential reading for anyone interested in education, modernity and development, citizenship and nationalism, the global university, and most of all, discourses of liberalism and how these discourses travel."––Sami Hermez, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Vora] provides an ethnographic account of college life at six branches of respected American universities in Qatar. By drawing on her experiences working as a professor in the Gulf, attending various conferences and lectures, and interacting with countless students, Vora provides valuable insight on how these branches serve as "postcolonial" institutions established by the West." -- Refael Kubersky * Middle East Journal *"At a time when the Gulf region is undergoing tremendous political transformation, Neha Vora succeeds brilliantly in highlighting an important ongoing pedagogical and cultural transition." -- Morgan C. Packer * Journal of Arabian Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Mythologies of Liberalism chapter abstractThe introduction presents academic understandings of liberalism, illiberalism, and the Middle East, and how these inform the sense of contemporary crisis around the future of American academia, especially as it globalizes. Critiques by US-based scholars of internationalization projects reproduce certain mythologies about liberalism, namely that it is universal, positive, and ahistorical. Nostalgia for a time when the university was less entangled with projects of capitalism and empire pervades many of these narratives, and in the process centers a disembodied, unmarked subject whose belonging within the academy is natural and unquestioned. The introduction also interrogates contemporary academic understandings of illiberal places and the cultures, people, and forms of power that are presumed to map onto them. It highlights how ideas about the Gulf region were produced through British social science and colonial practices of proxy governance, as well as through American oil imperialism and the proliferation of Western expertise. 1Unlearning Knowledge Economy chapter abstractKnowledge economy has become a buzzword in Qatar, used to discuss almost every new development project. This chapter highlights how this concept and the narratives associated with it function as forms of received knowledge about Qatar and the Gulf in much academic knowledge production, institutional rhetoric, and everyday conversation, both inside and outside the region. This terminology, like other exceptionalizing vocabulary about the Gulf, forecloses nuanced research and instead invites knowledge production that reproduces statist interests and the products of previous and ongoing imperial entanglements. The chapter argues that the rhetorics of knowledge economy and the actual effects of national development projects in Qatar are quite divergent, and offers a methodological intervention into the vocabularies of seeing and knowing higher education, national development, and forms of belonging in Qatar and the Gulf. 2Pedagogies of Essentialism chapter abstractThis ethnographic chapter shows how the contradictions between university mission and liberal celebrations of multiculturalism produced essentialized ideas about Qatariness, which led to segregation between Qatari and non-Qatari students. Faculty and administrators at branch campuses implemented nativist policies and privileged Qataris as the intended beneficiaries of liberal education, despite ever-present celebrations of diversity and multiculturalism. The misinterpretation of nation building as being for nationals only, along with reductive understandings of Qatariness, naturalized Qatari privilege within campuses, while Qataris themselves ended up feeling marginalized. Meanwhile, students were encouraged to interact with each other through essentialized understandings of difference, which reproduced existing social hierarchies instead of creating more inclusive campus climates. 3Mixed Meanings chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on how the category of "Qatari woman" and the parameters of proper national femininity were produced within Education City's coeducational spaces. The Qatari state considered women's education and employment within mixed workplaces essential to modernization, to transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and to achieving greater Qatarization. Yet, gender integration was also considered a threat to women's bodily purity, reputation, and to the gender roles and norms attached to Qatar's emergent national identity. The overt and covert ways coeducational anxiety permeated Education City played out on the bodies and actions of Qatari women in particular, both as a group to be protected from criticism, and as the source of gender threat itself. Tasked with playing a critical role in Qatar's modernization, but also expected to represent a timeless national culture, young Qatari women constantly negotiated competing expectations and parameters of what constituted proper femininity. 4Local Expats chapter abstractThis chapter pays particular attention to how local expatriate students—those who were raised in Qatar but had no access to citizenship—navigated what appeared to be a disjunction between Qatarization, a policy that structurally favored citizens, and a university system charged with actively promoting cosmopolitan global citizenship based on beliefs in individualism and meritocracy. Understanding contradictions built into their branch campus experiences actually prompted students to criticize the American academy, which, in their view, failed to live up to its egalitarian promise, rather than Qatar and its legal restrictions on foreign residents. Thus students understood that global citizenship, meritocracy, and egalitarianism, as constituted in the United Statees, were inherently unequal and did not become less equal or more flawed when they moved to a supposedly non-liberal space like Qatar. Branch campuses were increasing their belonging to Qatar and cementing its transnational future. 5Expat/Expert Camps chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the daily lives of faculty and staff in Education City, recruited mostly from North America and predominantly white. Most of these expatriates, like their counterparts in other sectors, spend their days shuttling between various compounds: those of the companies where they work, the shopping malls and hotels where they spend their leisure time, and the gated housing communities and high-rise buildings where they live. Their nationalities in many ways define their mobility and opportunities in the country, as do their Western professional accreditations, their English-language skills and—to a large extent—their whiteness. The concept of the "expert/expat camp" highlights how these subjects are both laborers who are segregated into compounds and a privileged elite who can enjoy the pleasures of raced and classed segregation while disavowing their ability to do anything about structural inequalities within an illiberal, repressive state. Conclusion: Anthropology and the Educational Encounter chapter abstractThe conclusion explores in particular the creation of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU), which encompasses all of the institutions within Education City. Education City's ongoing and uneven transition into HBKU coincided with shifts in Qatar Foundation's rhetoric away from global education toward local heritage and social formations. The author tracks her experiences of moving between spaces that increasingly embodied different epistemologies, gender norms, and social expectations in order to highlight how, rather than producing a more fractured landscape of higher education, these changes were quite ordinary reflections of how institutions incorporate political contestations and calls for greater representation. The conclusion's title also speaks directly to anthropology, and to Talal Asad's important volume urging a decolonization of the discipline—it is perhaps time for anthropologists to also take more ownership over how their concepts and categories of difference are problematically deployed across contemporary iterations of liberal education.

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Book SynopsisNational Matters investigates the role of material culture and materiality in defining and solidifying national identity in everyday practice. Examining a range of "things"—from art objects, clay fragments, and broken stones to clothing, food, and urban green space—the contributors to this volume explore the importance of matter in making the nation appear real, close, and important to its citizens. Symbols and material objects do not just reflect the national visions deployed by elites and consumed by the masses, but are themselves important factors in the production of national ideals. Through a series of theoretically grounded and empirically rich case studies, this volume analyzes three key aspects of materiality and nationalism: the relationship between objects and national institutions, the way commonplace objects can shape a national ethos, and the everyday practices that allow individuals to enact and embody the nation. In giving attention to the agency of things and the capacities they afford or foreclose, these cases also challenge the methodological orthodoxies of cultural sociology. Taken together, these essays highlight how the "material turn" in the social sciences pushes conventional understanding of state and nation-making processes in new directions.Trade Review"Geneviève Zubrzycki has brought together an original collection of essays laden with fresh insights. Attending to the concrete experiences that sustain large-scale political identities, National Matters brings the new materiality to bear on nationalism in order to shed light on a subject of perennial significance." -- Webb Keane * University of Michigan *"National Matters brims with engrossing details, bringing together a lucid introduction and well-crafted essays into coherent conversation. Essential reading for cultural sociologists, scholars of nationalism, and students of material culture." -- Philip Gorski * Yale University *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsMatter and Meaning: A Cultural Sociology of Nationalism Geneviève Zubrzycki chapter abstractThe volume's introduction first discusses theoretical cues and gaps in the literature on nationalism before arguing that the recent material turn in the social sciences and the focus on materiality can help fill those gaps. It then turns to a description of individual chapters, a discussion of overlapping themes, and the articulation of the volume's contributions. 1Artisans and the Construction of the French State: The Political Role of the Louvre's Workshops Chandra Mukerji chapter abstractThe French state, arguably the first modern state, subordinated high nobles at court with a cultural program. Artisans housed at the Louvre, men of low rank working backstage to power, designed the image of Louis XIV as the Sun King, and made Versailles an immersive environment populated in art with gods and heroes of the ancient world. With painting, sculpture, interior decoration, and theater, they created seductive dreams of imperial glory that far outshone political reality. They presented France as heir to Rome and already in a process of classical revival. They made the king and state seem capable of creating a great empire. The nobility at court learned a new political logic through a cultural experience of it. 2In, On, and Of the Inviolable Soil: Pottery Fragments and the Materiality of Italian Nationhood Fiona Greenland chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the relationship between fragmentary objects and national culture in Italy. Drawing on theories and analytical methods from cultural sociology, archaeology, and anthropology, it engages with the following questions: (1) Given the focus on complete objects in the study of material culture and nationhood, how might we construct an analytical framework for fragments? (2) Why did pottery fragments become embedded in processes of Italian nationhood formation at the state and regional levels in a specific historical moment (last quarter of the nineteenth century)? In the course of generating answers to these questions, the chapter also outlines the principle of beni culturali (cultural goods) in the state's management of cultural objects with historic significance. It concludes that ancient pottery effects a symbolic double-hit: it is found in the sacralized national soil and made of that soil. 3Raw Materials: Natural Resources, Technological Discourse, and the Making of Canadian Nationalism Melissa Aronczyk chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the genealogy and reactivation of Canada's most enduring origin myth, the "National Dream," which tells the story of a modern nation joined literally and symbolically by technology. Drawing on recent scholarship on the material and visual embodiment of national consciousness, it explores the material conditions that made possible the articulation of a distinct Canadian identity in the first place and then argues that the exploitation of the tar sands in Canada is positioned by corporate, government, and labor interests as a moral referendum on Canadian independence and a determining feature of contemporary Canadian national identity. This framing of the controversial exploitation of that raw matter sits well with state leadership seeking to reinvest the mythic National Dream with meaning in order to legitimate itself and mobilize civic support to its program. 4Simultaneously Worlds Apart: Placing National Diversity on Display at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts Peggy Levitt chapter abstractCreating successful multicultural societies and a global community that can respond to global problems is the challenge of the day. If museums in the past helped create national citizens, do they now help create global citizens too? How is the nation displayed in relation to the globe and what is it about the countries and cities where museums are located that helps explain their curatorial choices? This chapter answers these questions by analyzing where Boston's Museum of Fine Arts falls on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum—a position produced by the intersection between national and urban cultural politics and the globalization of culture, an encounter that not only transforms museums but to which they are important contributors. 5A Brief History of Sweat: Inscribing "National Feeling" on and through a Football Jersey Claudio E. Benzecry chapter abstractThis chapter shows how the jersey for Boca Juniors, one of Argentina's main soccer teams, went almost unchanged from 1926 to 1980, and how the continuity guaranteed the recognition of the team, its colors, and what it stood for. The continuity of the jersey in time also made for a longer chain that connected different generations of players and of fans. In telling the story of how the jersey for Boca Juniors changed thanks to the intervention of brands by transnational corporations, this chapter aims to also answer what happens to the lineage of the team, its genealogy, and the bonds formed between and among team members and their fans. The chapter has a subsidiary objective as well, to explain not only what gets lost with the new jersey, but also the new lines of action afforded by the object in its new configuration. 6That Banal Object of Nationalism: "Old Stones" as French Heritage in the Early Days of Public Television Alexandra Kowalski chapter abstractThe chapter offers an object-centric analysis of banal nationalism in mainstream heritage culture. How do banal objects come to feature in national imaginations in addition to extraordinary ones, and how do these two categories relate to each other symbolically? Which kinds of social bonds do these ordinary objects create and support? And what does an object-centric approach contribute in return to our understanding of ordinary, "cold" types of nationalism? The chapter answers these questions through a semiotic analysis of the popular show Chefs d'œuvre en péril, produced and broadcast on French public television (the ORTF) between 1964 and 1974, at the dawn of the heritage age. 7The Mythical Power of Everyday Objects: The Material Culture of Radical Nationalism in Postsocialist Hungary Virág Molnár chapter abstractThe chapter explores the intersections between markets and new forms of nationalism in contemporary Hungary by looking at the manufacturing, sale, and consumption of radical nationalist consumer objects. It argues that the increasing rightwing radicalization of Hungarian politics has been fueled by an expanding industry that effectively commodifies these sentiments. The analysis focuses on two key areas of radical nationalist cultural production: book publishers that specialize in printing and disseminating nationalist literature, and clothing brands that market explicitly nationalist fashion items. By tracing the symbolic economies of new forms of radical nationalism, the chapter highlights an important dimension of everyday nationalism. This analytical lens also helps to demonstrate that contemporary rightwing radicalism is not a codified political ideology but a more fluid subculture in which expressive symbols, material objects, rituals, everyday consumption, and lifestyle patterns are essential carriers of political convictions and markers of group boundaries. 8Engaging Objects: A Phenomenology of the Tea Ceremony and Japaneseness Kristin Surak chapter abstractNations are made real not only through concrete symbols, icons, and institutions, but also through lived experiences. Yet the production and reproduction of nations at a phenomenological level remains little explored. This chapter examines how cultural practices engage objects to sense, enact, and even embody the nation. To explore these processes, it takes up the tea ceremony as a site that facilitates a concentrated experience of Japaneseness within Japan. It examines how the material components and practices of the tea ceremony bear similarities to—yet are fundamentally different from—mundane counterparts in everyday life. This disjuncture, as the tea ceremony transforms the ordinary into the extra-ordinary, demands an attentiveness that sustains what many practitioners call a "Japanese experience." 9Traces and Steps: Expanding Polishness through a Jewish Sensorium? Geneviève Zubrzycki chapter abstractBefore World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. With the Holocaust and a country left in ruins, Jewish life all but disappeared from that country. This chapter analyzes non-Jewish Poles' material discovery of Jewish traces and the recovery of Polish Jewish history, as well as the performance and consumption of Jewishness in various venues. It argues that for many activists involved in acts of salvage remembrance and performance, postwar Jewish absence has come to represent the loss of a multicultural Poland. Their activities are meant not only to recall past Jewish presence on Polish lands, but to re-member; to attach a prosthetic Jewish limb to the Polish national body to expand the symbolic boundaries of Polishness. 10A Temple of Social Hope? Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and Its Transformation Dominik Bartmański chapter abstractIn the fall of 2008 one of the oldest city airports in the world, the iconic Berlin Tempelhof, was closed and with it an eventful chapter of German history. The airfield was reborn in the spring of 2010, albeit in a different capacity as a public park. It quickly became a celebrated leisure space in Berlin, one of the most spectacular parks in the world. How was this remarkable transformation possible? What made such a radical reshuffling of land use and social meaning feasible and successful? In order to answer these questions, this chapter refocuses analytical emphasis from political intent to phenomenological content. Understanding urban places, especially their transformations and meanings, requires accounting for their experiential aspects in relation to the city- and time-specific cultural context. A phenomenological analysis sensitive to materially mediated experiences is presented as a necessary component of cultural sociological explanation of such cases.

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