Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisIn the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history. The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.Trade Review"An ingeniously researched and beautifully told story of how an avowedly secular Indian nation state goes about monumentalizing, and thereby eviscerating the lived presence of 'Muslimness' from the great Mughal city of Delhi. Deeply evocative of the doublespeak of majoritarian nationalism that the world is witnessing today." -- Shahid Amin * author of Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan *"Anand Taneja's book offers a fascinating ethnography of the dargah of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, a place whose jinns are petitioned by their devotees, as if in a courtroom. It reflects the social complexity—and poetry—of this shared sacred site, which is also a liminal space transcending caste and gender barriers. More than a study of one structure, this book narrates the history of the capital-city of India through its ruins and monuments. It is a remarkably perceptive and thought-provoking analysis of the popular culture of North India." -- Christophe Jaffrelot * Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS *"Anand Taneja's Jinnealogy is a brilliant and moving meditation on extraordinary attempts to recover a lost culture. Once you consider seriously the practice of writing letters to the jinn at a medieval ruin in Delhi, you will be drawn into an enchanted world. Highly recommended." -- Carl W. Ernst * University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *"This compelling book delves into India's enigmatic silences and unacknowledgeable memories in the aftermath of Partition. When genealogy and social memory fail, jinnealogy activates threads of desire and possibility unavailable to us in secular time. A beautiful and urgent book with a taste of Borges' stories." -- Stefania Pandolfo * Author of Knot of the Soul *"When I return to the Kotla, I know that I will pay new attention to those who come to pray, and no longer just see them as nameless and faceless but as the people Taneja discovers through his fieldwork, the flesh and blood containing hope, despair, tears and anguish, and celebration." -- Ranna Safvi * The Wire *"Anand Vivek Taneja's fluently persuasive study traces the role of jinns in the unusual social and religious space of a medieval ruin in Delhi. Along the way, his Jinneaologyoffers a surprising subaltern history of India's capital city....Jinnealogyis a rich and enriching book. As though meandering through medieval ruins, it takes its reader down unanticipated passageways, evocative detours, as well as some dusty dead ends. Along the way, it repeatedly offers unexpected vistas onto old issues such as secularism, heritage, and community....[T]he reader isirresistibly drawn into the stories of its diverse protagonists." -- Sebastian R. Prange * Pacific Affairs *"The political intervention that this book makes in the field of the history and cultural heritage of South Asia is very timely. The erasure of Indo-Persian and Islamic culture from the modern nation state of India has reached a crisis point, and this book provides a poetic and creative interpretation of the sites where a shared popular Islamic aesthetic and interpretive community remains alive....[T]he book is an excellent, creative, exhaustively researched and beautifully written intervention into the ongoing debate on the erasure of Islamic cultural heritage from the modern nation state of India." -- Nur Sobers-Khan * Global Intellectual History *"Taneja's book helps open the 'discursive tradition' to the mysteries of Islamic figuration—allowing traces, which are not signs, to be strange. His observations are gentle yet pressing, motivated by a deep sense of past possibilities, an urgency to make room for realms of Islamic tradition that need not be legible to be lived." -- Emilio Spadola * The Immanent Frame *"Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi is an elegant contemplation of the ruins of the fortress built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled Delhi from 1351-88 AD....I am most especially taken, though, by the book's elegiac quality. Even while Taneja insists upon the liveliness of the life that has emerged on the neglected grounds of the fortress...the tone of the book remains persistently and appropriately mournful." -- Naveeda Khan * The Immanent Frame *"Beautifully written....Jinnealogy constitutes an extended argument for gharib nawazi, the very kindness that opens up an aesthetics and an ethics that allow for compassionate and caring ways of being and acting in this world." -- Petra Rethmann * American Ethnologist *"This book will be essential reading for those interested in the anthropology of religion, South Asian studies, and Islamic studies. Taneja's diverse ethnographic approach depicts the multiplicities of North Indian religion and culture. At a time of increasing Islamophobia in India and globally, Jinnealogy presents a compelling argument of possibility anchored in the discourse and history of a Muslim community that is essential to the city and culture of Delhi, past and present." -- Jaclyn A. Michael * Reading Religion *"[Jinnealogy] is a shining example of what might be gained if researchers stop labouring to produce neat and linear narratives that establish unambiguous causal relationships....[It] is a harbinger of hope that the spatial turn in the social sciences does not effectively mean that history and time are irrelevant." -- Ghazala Jamil * Contributions to Indian Sociology *"In this impressive and deeply personal monograph, Taneja draws on insights gleaned from years of fieldwork in Delhi to invite the reader on a fantastic journey....Written in sparkling poetic prose, Jinnealogy is a model of ethnographic and archival research combined with theoretical sophistication. Rare for academic tomes, you will not want to put this book down once you begin to digest its wisdom." -- Patrick J. D'Silva * Religious Studies Review *"[This] book is a brilliant, evocative, and gripping account of Jinnealogy: the entanglements and traces of Jinn as a form of memory and practice that challenges the Hindu nation-state and dominant ideas of religion and social identity. The chapters capture attention, drawing the reader through historical details, ethnographic encounters, popular debates, and critical theory. It is an emblematic text for the Anthropology of Islam and South Asia." -- Shaheed Tayob * ReOrient *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Walking Away from the Theater of History chapter abstractThe introduction begins with an ethnographic anecdote of a man who walks away from a historical play being staged in the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla and is stopped short by the invisible voice of a Muslim saint. This anecdote becomes the allegorical frame through which the book is introduced. The introduction sketches out the history of Delhi from the late 18th century to the contemporary period, but more importantly argues that for those who come to Firoz Shah Kotla, it is not the past as history that is important, but more importantly, the past as holding open potentialities for life, for the present and the future. 1Jinnealogy: Archival Amnesia and Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter brings together oral history accounts, popular Urdu theological literature, and files from the Record Room of the ASI to bring together two parallel tracks; the growing presence of the jinn in post-Partition Delhi and the institutionalized amnesia of the official archives concerning everything prior to Partition and Independence in 1947. The chapter shows how the jinn are increasingly present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state attempt vast erasures of the city's Muslim landscapes, and how jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by allowing for other temporalities and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of the bureaucratic present. 2Saintly Visions: The Ethics of Elsewhen chapter abstractDrawing upon ethnographic accounts from Firoz Shah Kotla as well as Urdu literary evocations of Delhi's ruin-scape, this chapter demonstrates how the experience of the sacred amidst these ruins is that of an immersion in multiple times simultaneously, and a cessation of time's "flow". The immersion in multiple times at ruins like Firoz Shah Kotla contains transformative potential for the people who come here. Here, the jinn-saints, often seen in visitors' dreams and visions wearing medieval robes, embody another time, different from the frenetic time of the contemporary city. This chapter shows how nineteenth-century colonial violence imbued the ruin known as Pir Ghaib (the invisible saint) with sacrality. This sacrality was linked to the nostalgic remembrance of the exiled Mughal emperor and the lost political order of Mughal rule, deeply tied to Sufi ethics and ideas of justice. 3Strange(r)ness chapter abstractThis chapter explores the ethics of nameless intimacy at Firoz Shah Kotla, where people who have known each other for twenty years or more seldom acknowledge caste and religious identity, rarely learning one another's proper names, referring to each other instead by nicknames and locational epithets. It shows how this ethics of namelessness points us towards a Sufi culture of gharib-navazi (hospitality to strangers) that is central to the healing power attributed to dargah spaces. The anonymity afforded by namelessness allows people to, even if temporarily, escape the often oppressive structures of social and familial identity. This estrangement, this making strange of the self, is the beginning of a process of reinventing one's self and relation to the world. One aspect of this process is expressing and acting on one's individual desires, even when they violate the normative morality of family and community. 4Desiring Women chapter abstractThis chapter discusses male-female interactions at Firoz Shah Kotla, where unrelated men and women often sit together for hours, speaking of desire, love, and loss. This is highly unusual in Delhi, a city with a reputation for violence against women. Here, in a space of Islam, a religion associated with a highly patriarchal order, women can be freer and more open, in both their interactions with men and in talking about their desires, than they can be in most public spaces in Delhi. Drawing on letters written by women at Firoz Shah Kotla and comparing them to women's voices as portrayed in pre-modern Rekhti poetry, it establishes a long tradition of intimacy with Muslim saintly figures that has allowed women to articulate individual longings and a sense of selfhood. It shows how the anti-patriarchal potentialities of Islam have continued to coexist along with the patriarchal juridical consensus. 5Translation chapter abstractThis chapter begins with an ethnographic anecdote from Firoz Shah Kotla, where one of the author's friends equated Sat Yug (The Hindu idea of a past golden age) with contemporary Iraq. This was one of several moments in which he brought together and made equivalent things otherwise separated by vast temporal and conceptual distances. This chapter shows how we need to expand the idea of translations beyond language and texts to understand translation as a mode of being, which allows for the creation of shared sacred landscapes, ethical worlds and domains of meaning across conventional theological and communitarian divides. it discusses the historical processes of translation through which popular Islam has become an indistinguishable part of the ethical life of North India; the invisible religion which underlies the visible religious differences between Hinduism and Islam. 6Stones, Snakes, and Saints: Remembering the Vanished Sacred Geographies of Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter draws on eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts of prominent Sufi shrines in Delhi to show how these shrines were integrally connected to the ecology of the city. The author follows these accounts with his own visits to these sites in the contemporary city, where they have been completely disconnected from the ecological. Through oral histories, this chapter shows how this disconnect can be attributed to colonial policy, post-colonial growth, and pollution, all of which have radically changed the ontology of the sacred in the city from one of immanence, embedded in the local landscape, to one of immaterial transcendence. Only at a few sites like Firoz Shah Kotla, protected from development by archaeological policy, is an older memory and modality of the sacred still possible. The remembrance of older relations to the ecology includes the sanctification of the animals encountered in this space. 7The Shifting Enchantments of Ruins and Laws in Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter draws upon files from the post-colonial ASI, newspaper reports, and conversations with conservationists active in contemporary Delhi. It outlines a genealogy of conservation practice in Delhi and its changing relation to the life of the city, from the early twentieth century to the present. In the early twentieth century, for both British conservationists and Indo-Muslim antiquarians, these ruins were enchanted spaces, imaginative gateways to an otherwise irrecoverable Mughal past. The identification of Delhi's ruin-scape with Muslim sovereignty led to violent attacks on these sites during Partition violence, and this violence fundamentally changed the city's relation to its Muslim past. In the post-colonial era, Muslim monuments became spaces of darkness and death where no signs of (religious) life were permitted. Conclusion: Remnants of Despair; Traces of Hope chapter abstractThe author traces his autobiographical exploration of and investment in the ruin-scape of Delhi, and his concern that the forms of life indexed by these ruins seem impossible to recover for the majority of the contemporary city. This chapter looks at recent examples of jinn veneration from Lahore, an analysis of a recent Bombay film, and new conservation paradigms taking root in Delhi to think about how the rituals, ethics, and human and animal relations at Firoz Shah Kotla connect to wider trends in South Asia. The new conservation paradigms in Delhi wish to reconnect ruins to the human life of the city, and also to the city's ecology. While this new paradigm of preservation is secular, it shares remarkable similarities with the "religious" outlook of people at Firoz Shah Kotla.

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Book SynopsisGlobal inequalities make it difficult for parents in developing nations to provide for their children. Some determine that migration in search of higher wages is their only hope. Many studies have looked at how migration transforms the child–parent relationship. But what happens to other generational relationships when mothers migrate? Care Across Generations takes a close look at grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families, examining both the structural and gendered inequalities that motivate migration and caregiving as well as the cultural values that sustain intergenerational care. Kristin E. Yarris broadens the transnational migrant story beyond the parent–child relationship, situating care across generations and embedded within the kin networks in sending countries. Rather than casting the consequences of women's migration in migrant sending countries solely in terms of a "care deficit," Yarris shows how intergenerational reconfigurations of care serve as a resource for the wellbeing of children and other family members who stay behind after transnational migration. Moving our perspective across borders and over generations, Care Across Generations shows the social and moral value of intergenerational care for contemporary transnational families.Trade Review"Using a new and critically important multigenerational approach, Yarris' book beautifully charts the broader impacts of migration. Care Across Generations shows us how the migration of others has deep repercussions that extend far beyond the economic, into affective and social realms. A tremendously talented writer, Yarris transforms complex findings into clear, compelling stories of migrants' mothers and children." -- Jessaca Leinaweaver * Brown University *"Care Across Generations is an eloquent and sharp examination of the role of grandmothers, the unsung heroes, in providing care and love in Nicaraguan transnational families. This book will be of great interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with the well-being of children whose parents migrate in search of better livelihoods." -- Elzbieta Gozdziak * Georgetown University *"Through careful and vivid ethnography, Care Across Generations moves beyond the remittances-for-care discourse to argue convincingly for the need to value the importance of grandmother care in maintaining the well-being of family members in sending countries." -- Alison Elizabeth Lee * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Tenemos Que Hacerlo: Responsibility and Sacrifice in Grandmother Care chapter abstractThis chapter reviews patterns of gender and kinship in Nicaraguan families and shows how gendered inequalities shape grandmothers' assumption of caregiving following mother migration. The chapter uses ethnographic examples to demonstrate how grandmothers respond to these gendered inequalities, negotiating relationships with children's fathers and managing the legal and social vulnerabilities related to their roles as intergenerational caregivers. The chapter shows how grandmothers experience caregiving as both a responsibility—providing everyday care for children—and as a source of emotional connection, meaning, and motivation. The chapter documents how grandmothers respond to the prospect of family reunification—the migration of the children in their care to join mothers abroad—by drawing on values of solidarity and sacrifice. 2No Se Ajustan: Remittances and Moral Economies of Migration chapter abstractThis chapter explores the material and affective dimensions of remittances to illustrate the reconfigurations of care in transnational families and the related tensions. The chapter shows how a solely material view of the money migrants send from abroad fails to capture the complex emotional and affective dimensions of remittances from the perspective of grandmothers and the children in their care. Just as remittances are a concrete sign that mothers abroad remain pendiente (responsible) for families in Nicaragua, they also serve as an unavoidable reminder of mothers' ongoing absence from everyday family life. In this way, grandmothers' insistence of remittances that no se ajustan (they do not measure up) indexes a moral economy of care and migration that sets remittances against the values of sacrifice and solidarity that grandmothers seek to foster in transnational family life. 3Pensando Mucho: Transnational Care and Grandmothers' Distress chapter abstractThis chapter demonstrates the cultural significance of grandmothers' roles as caregivers in transnational families by exploring their experiences of embodied, emotional distress. Specifically, the chapter argues that grandmother caregivers use the expression pensando mucho (thinking too much) to express the uncertainties and troubles of transnational family life. The idiom of "thinking too much" indexes the moral ambivalence of mother migration, which grandmothers understand to be an economic necessity but which threatens values for unity and solidarity in family life. In this analysis, by thinking too much grandmothers increase the visibility of their caregiving by inscribing their significance through a specific set of somatic symptoms. This communicative aspect of pensando mucho allows grandmothers to draw attention to their embodied distress, signaling the disruption of transnational family life while emphasizing the cultural value of their care. 4Care and Responsibility Across Generations: A Family Migration Portrait chapter abstractThis chapter presents the story of one Nicaraguan transnational family, showing how migration's impacts on those who stay behind in migrant-sending countries are embedded in time and imprinted across generations. In particular, this close analysis of one family's experience with migration, taking the grandmother's perspective as the central analytical starting point, demonstrates how past experiences of migration influence family members' responses to migration in the present, and how—in turn—present uncertainties shape hopes and fears for the future. This intergenerational perspective demonstrates the importance of analyzing migration as both a temporal and a spatial process, widening our analytical lens on transnational family life across time and, cumulatively, over generations. Conclusion: Valuing Care Across Borders and Generations chapter abstractFocusing attention on grandmother caregivers' experiences of the uncertainties of transnational family life calls us to think more broadly about migration's effects on extended families across national borders, in host and home countries, and across generations, beyond mothers and children and into the networks of extended kin who assume essential caregiving roles in migrant-sending countries like Nicaragua. Grandmothers in Nicaraguan families assume responsibilities for children of mother migrants through an informal reconfiguration of caregiving and kinship obligations, although they lack legal protection and social support. This chapter reviews the social and political consequences of approaching transnational migration from an intergenerational perspective, presenting possible policy responses in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries that would value intergenerational care and support migrants, caregivers, and children in transnational families. Introduction: Solidaridad: Nicaraguan Migration and Intergenerational Care chapter abstract This chapter presents an overview of the values of solidarity and sacrifice and their meanings in relation to the reconfigurations of care and kinship that follow mother migration. The chapter reviews political and economic dynamics relevant for understanding contemporary Nicaraguan migration. The chapter situates intergenerational care in transnational families within recent research on migration and care, including care chains and care circulations, showing how grandmothers are central actors in global transformations of care economies. The chapter also reviews current anthropological theorizing about care, showing how intergenerational care is a moral practice oriented toward upholding cultural values for family continuity and for children's everyday well-being in families divided by borders.

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Book SynopsisChinese academic traditions take zuo ren—self-fulfillment in terms of moral cultivation—as the ultimate goal of education. To many in contemporary China, however, the nation seems gripped by moral decay, the result of rapid and profound social change over the course of the twentieth century. Placing Chinese children, alternately seen as China's greatest hope and derided as self-centered "little emperors," at the center of her analysis, Jing Xu investigates the effects of these transformations on the moral development of the nation's youngest generation. The Good Child examines preschool-aged children in Shanghai, tracing how Chinese socialization beliefs and methods influence their construction of a moral world. Delving into the growing pains of an increasingly competitive and changing educational environment, Xu documents the confusion, struggles, and anxieties of today's parents, educators, and grandparents, as well as the striking creativity of their children in shaping their own moral practices. Her innovative blend of anthropology and psychology reveals the interplay of their dialogues and debates, illuminating how young children's nascent moral dispositions are selected, expressed or repressed, and modulated in daily experiences. Trade Review"What is most wonderful about this contribution to the anthropology of childhood is its fine-grained analyses of actual practices, behaviors, reactions, and musings, compellingly illustrated in a series of stories distilled both from interviews with teachers, parents, other caregivers and children themselves, and from the author's own observations in this Shanghai preschool. The stories and observations both affirm the validity of the ethnographic method, and challenge any tendency to ignore the inherent tensions in a given educational philosophy or practice." -- Naomi Quinn * Duke University *"This richly detailed ethnography is full of thought-provoking findings that deepen our understanding of moral dilemmas prevalent in Chinese society, and contribute innovative new perspectives to the study of children's morality. Its deft and rigorous use of interviews, surveys, experiments, and participant observation is a model of the synergies that can result from integration of psychological and anthropological approaches." -- Vanessa Fong * Amherst College, author of Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World *"Jing Xu has opened a new window into understanding the Chinese people, taking culture seriously, reviving concerns about the relationship between socialization and moral norms, and combining insights from anthropology and psychology. The Good Child is the most significant work of sinological anthropology I have read in a long time." -- Stevan Harrell * University of Washington *"[T]his is an important book which highlights key challenges that caregivers and educators face in contemporary China. The ethnographic data is rich, and the detailed quotes of caregivers and children are fascinating and thought-provoking. In contrast to psychological literature, empathy is a relatively new topic in anthropological literature. The detailed ethnographic evidence that Xu documented and the complex analysis that Xu carried out bridge this gap and contribute to the understanding that culture and education play a significant role in cultivating empathy, as well as other moral ideas." -- Avital Binah-Pollak * China Information *"The Good Child is an eminently readable study of moral subjectification in a private preschool located in a middle-class neighbourhood of Shanghai's Pudong district....A major innovation lies in Xu's combination of immersive fieldwork with psychology experiments....Most importantly, the descriptions in the book, rich and fine-grained, are based on daily visits to Biyu Preschool....While The Good Child very much straddles the fields of cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, its contribution to China studies is unmistakable." -- Teresa Kuan * China Quarterly *"[T]his brilliant ethnographic study provides a rich analysis of the new tensions between school educators, family members, and unique children around the cultivation of moral values in contemporary China....The most brilliant element of this book definitely lies in its main purpose: the comprehension of how this environment, characterized by a moral crisis, will shape the next generation of Chinese people and, more broadly, the society itself. By putting emphasis on children's own creativity and agency in moral socialization, The Good Child shows how these little emperors, as active social actors, can reconfigure the future of China." -- André-Anee Côté * Current Anthropology *"Jing Xu, in giving us a splendid anthropologically grounded and psychologically informed study of children's moral development, has provided a nuanced assessment of the on- going efforts among Chinese to live properly as ethical people in a rapidly changing society. It is a study worthy of everyone's attention."––William Jankowiak, The China Journal"It is by no means a small feat to bring the complex topic of moral socialization in Chinese early childhood into a thesis that is sophisticated in organization, adventurous in method, and fine-grained in analysis. Xu's study provides a map for future research in this area."––Yeh Hsueh, The Journal of Asian StudiesTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Becoming a Moral Child in China chapter abstractThis chapter presents an overview of the motivation and structure of this book. The chapter introduces the theoretical vision of bridging anthropology and psychology in understanding mind-culture relations, through the important example of early moral development. It then introduces the particular case of China, traces its historical moral education traditions, and links them to the present discussions of "moral crisis" and the one-child policy. It also documents fieldwork settings in Shanghai, and explains the unique methodology of combining ethnographic and experimental methods. It also zooms into the beginning phase of fieldwork––the transitional time when children leave home and start school/collective life––to provide a detailed description of Biyu preschool, and to point to important themes to be explored in the following chapters. Lastly, the chapter summaries the research questions and outlines the content and organization of the following chapters. 1Cultivating Morality: Educational Aspirations and Anxieties chapter abstractThis chapter explores socializers' educational aspirations and anxieties under the one-child policy in an era of "moral crisis," providing an overview of moral education experiences at the Biyu preschool. On the one hand, policy and severe competition in China today have reinforced the culturally ingrained value of educational success, leading to outsize aspirations. On the other hand, parents are burdened with enormous pressure to cultivate a moral child. They believe that early childhood is critical for the child's moral upbringing and they hope to better the future society through moral education. Nonetheless, they perceive that society is not good, especially in the context of Shanghai schools, imprinted with the values of ruthless competition and materialism. This tension results in profound educational dilemmas: disorientation in the face of conflicting values, felt dissonance between ideology and reality, cynicism about moral cultivation, and despair about China's future moral prospects. 2Feeling into Another's Heart: When Empathy Is Endangered chapter abstractThis chapter explores how socialization processes tune and twist young children's nascent propensity to empathize with and care for others in the Chinese context. The education of empathy is situated in broader perceptions about contemporary China as a callous society, as Chinese people's soul-searching after and discussion about the Little Yueyue case demonstrates. These perceptions result in a tension in empathy education, between cultivating emotional sensitivity and directing empathy to others in need, and suppressing empathy in occasions that require vigilance to avoid exploitation. The chapter brings together the ancient Confucian philosophy that features empathy as a fundamental, inborn human virtue and the recent empirical studies on empathy, thus adding a developmental and educational perspective to the emerging literature in anthropology on how empathy is configured and mediated in cultural contexts. 3Negotiating Property Distribution: The Contested Space of Ownership and Fairness chapter abstractIn conversation with the burgeoning research on children's ownership and fairness cognition in developmental psychology, this chapter integrates ethnographic and experimental data to explore children's nuanced motivations, tactics, and notions of ownership and fairness in their property distribution, exchange and disputes. Educators highlight children's natural and genuine disposition toward claiming ownership and fairness. However, in educators' eyes, such natural dispositions are contested and even distorted in the Chinese social environment. The chapter demonstrates how, under such competing concerns and constrains, young children gradually develop more complex ownership notions (such as the first-possessor heuristic and then individual ownership) and fairness rules (such as equality and merit) and how ownership and fairness understandings are intricately intertwined in children's everyday interactions. All these developments are situated in the broader social critique of the traditional value of qian rang (deference, modesty, and generosity) and cynicism about "hypocrisy" in China. 4Sharing Discourse and Practice: The Selfish Child,Generosity and Reciprocity chapter abstractThis chapter explores the world of sharing behavior and probes the discrepancies between socializers' ideology and children's practice. School educators and parents promote an egalitarian norm of sharing—"share with everyone"—in the hope of cultivating altruism and cooperation, values seen as a corrective to Chinese only children's selfishness. By contrast, young children spontaneously engage in strategic sharing, such as identifying good social partners, establishing reciprocal network and pleasing authority. These strategic sharing practices resonate with the adult norm of guanxi (exchange of favors) that is the object of ambivalent attitudes in modern Chinese discourse. Combining ethnographic and experimental data, the chapter analyzes the tension between egalitarian sharing ideology and strategic sharing practice in reference to contrasting psychological dispositions identified in moral development literature, and connects it to the cultural practices of guanxi which are already visible to children early on. 5Disciplining the Little Emperors: Navigating onShifting Grounds chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on guanjiao (literally meaning "govern-educate"), an all-encompassing Chinese concept of child socialization, and the beliefs and practices regarding how parents, grandparents, and teachers educate the "little emperors"—children born under the one-child policy. Instead of treating guanjiao as a monolithic concept that emphasizes obedience and hierarchy, the chapter delves into the tensions in guanjiao beliefs and practices. It argues that middle-class parents in Shanghai today have become more and more critical and self-reflexive in guanjiao. They negotiate diverse and even conflicting values, based on their own perceptions of the past and the present, as well as what they imagine as "Chinese" versus "Western". Such negotiations occur simultaneously at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergenerational levels, as reactions to the increasingly competitive and uncertain society in which they hope their children survive and succeed. Conclusion: Becoming Human in a Time of Moral Crisis chapter abstractThis concluding chapter provides a summary of the main arguments in this book and articulates its scholarly contribution. The chapter begins with a narrative that weaves together the author's personal reflections on growing up in China and her intellectual pursuit, highlighting the centrality of the Chinese concept "zuo ren." It then summarizes the key findings of previous chapters––dilemmas that complicate the Chinese tradition of moral cultivation, as well as Chinese children's creative agency that manifests itself across moral domains. Then the chapter highlights the significant contribution of this book, that is, it draws on theoretical fertilization and methodological integration to gain a fuller understanding of moral development, foregrounds children as the center of its analysis, and emphasizes the importance of studying children in answering key questions about humanity.

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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 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"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 *"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 *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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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 SynopsisIn 1991, the Israeli government introduced emergency legislation canceling the general exit permit that allowed Palestinians to enter Israel. The directive, effective for one year, has been reissued annually ever since, turning the Occupied Territories into a closed military zone. Today, Israel's permit regime for Palestinians is one of the world's most extreme and complex apparatuses for population management. Yael Berda worked as a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem and represented more than two hundred Palestinian clients trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel from the West Bank. With Living Emergency, she brings readers inside the permit regime, offering a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population. Through interviews with Palestinian laborers and their families, conversations with Israeli clerks and officials, and research into the archives and correspondence of governmental organizations, Berda reconstructs the institutional framework of the labyrinthine permit regime, illuminating both its overarching principles and its administrative practices. In an age where terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide. Trade Review"Yael Berda's pointed and precise study plunges readers into an ugly and dark reality. A lawyer and ethnographer, she knows the jurisprudence of the Israeli 'permit regime' and sees the damages and despair it inflicts. Living Emergency tracks a form of infliction that operates on minute and life altering scales." -- Ann Stoler * The New School, and author of Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *"The next time someone tells you that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is benign—or designed only to provide Israel security—hand them Yael Berda's Living Emergency." -- Peter Beinart * author of The Crisis of Zionism *"Living Emergency is a deeply humane study of the permit regime in the West Bank. The neocolonial resonances of this malign system of control, and the technologies and institutional logics it bares for us, are fast being replicated in other places around the world, and in ways that are too loud for any reader to ignore." -- Sanjay Kak * filmmaker and editor of Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir *"Living Emergency is a groundbreaking analysis of the bureaucracy of occupation. And in Yael Berda, this intricate and obfuscated bureaucracy has met its match: Her meticulous research and brilliant insights call on us all to acknowledge the ways in which the contemporary rule of officials has developed across the globe." -- Eyal Weizman * University of London, author of Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability *"In Living Emergency, Jewish Israeli lawyer Yael Berda leverages her years of experience representing Palestinian laborers by using detailed personal anecdotes, administrative documents, and extensive historical research to construct a thorough picture of how the Israeli government manages and restricts the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank." -- Zander Guzy-Sprague * Middle East Journal *"Living Emergency argues convincingly that the permit regime functions in ways that exceed the security logics it is meant to uphold, operating instead as a powerful mechanism of population management and deepening Israeli control and surveillance of everyday life in Palestine." -- Michelle D. Weitzel * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Living Emergency is impressive in how it makes accessible and legible the way that the Occupation works in practice. It manages to lift the veil off the regime and enables us to peer into its institutional brain." -- Hilla Daya * Israel Studies Review *"Berda's [Living Emergency] and Erakat's [Justice for Some] are essential reads, not just for those who wish to understand the central place of law in both Palestinian liberation and Israel's expansionist policies. They also offer instructive perspectives for anyone who wants to think more profoundly about the law's entanglement with sovereignty, violence, liberation, and politics." -- Elif M. Babül * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue chapter abstractThe reader joins Issa, a Palestinian construction worker from the West Bank who suddenly received word from his employer that his permit has been denied by the Israeli military, on the long and convoluted journey through the bureaucracy of the occupation, to try to recover his permit. He encounters many obstacles: police detention, attempts to find clandestine ways to work during closure, and mostly, long waiting times in offices and courtyards of the bureaucracy. Following his classification as a security threat by the secret service, he engages two lawyers in his struggle, one of them the author, who represent him in Israel's Supreme Court in the attempt to annul his classification as a security threat and secure his work permit. 1Dangerous Populations chapter abstractThis chapter provides a concise history of Israel's military rule over the Occupied West Bank, focusing on population monitoring and control. It outlines the development of the messy bureaucracy of the occupation and the establishment of the permit regime by an array of agencies, technologies, rules, and practices. Following the institutional changes brought about by the Oslo Accords, the chapter shows that while it is administratively inefficient, the population management system followed an effective institutional logic to achieve two major goals. First, it makes the Palestinian population dependent on the administrative system to construct, maintain, and widen the scope of monitoring and control, based on a racial separation through laws and enforcement. Second, it produces uncertainty, disorientation, and suspicion within Palestinian society through the prevention of mobility. 2Perpetual Emergency chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the shift in the role of Israel's secret service, the Shin Bet, in the bureaucracy of the occupation, from an intelligence agency to the central organization that designed, strategized, and made administrative decisions regarding the population of the West Bank. Focusing on the expanding category of Palestinians classified as security threats that encompassed over a quarter of a million people after the Second Intifada, the chapter explores the contradictory profiling practices. It suggests that the permit regime became the major asset of the Shin Bet, increasing its capabilities to recruit thousands of low-grade informers in the West Bank. 3Labor of Uncertainty chapter abstractThe permit regime includes the Ministries of Economy, Interior, and Defense, which created a political economy that controlled the lives of Palestinian Laborers and their employers. The complex array of military and civil organizations that populated the expanding flow chart of regulations, forms, and offices created an economy of shortage, in which there were consistently fewer permit quotas than need by employers. This chapter traces how this administrative shortage, the product of the negotiation between the different fragmented institutions of the state, created the perfect conditions for a black market of permits sold, rented, and exchanged between employers and employees, ruled by middlemen, intermediaries, and semiofficials who ran networks of forgeries that were criminalized but not severely punished. 4Effective Inefficiency chapter abstractThis chapter outlines how institutional practices of the permit regime affected and shaped Palestinian daily life in the West Bank by disorientation, atomization, and routinization of emergency. Administrative flexibility and the wide discretion of clerks who actually made law during the permit process produced a different kind of bureaucracy, where contradictory decisions, overlapping policies, and secret information turned freedom of movement into an unknown variable in Palestinian life across Israel and the Occupied Territories. Attempts of international and human rights organizations to standardize practices helped develop the permit regime, while resistance to life in the emergency took various forms. People found ways to obtain permits, broke pathways into Israel and across the separation wall, and challenged the Shin Bet classifications in the High Court. Epilogue chapter abstractThe reader joins the author as she recounts her first contact with the bureaucracy of the occupation through the military courts of Judea and Samaria. She sets up a makeshift office on Saturday mornings at a restaurant in Area C, where Palestinians who are denied entry because they are classified as a security threat come to prepare documents and affidavits for their petition to the Supreme Court. She then realizes that legal attempts to retrieve permits and remove someone's classification as a security threat are futile. Understanding that legal representation of Palestinians provides legitimacy to an illegal colonial bureaucracy that constituted a security threat for both Israelis and Palestinians leads her to leave her practice.

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Book SynopsisGlobal inequalities make it difficult for parents in developing nations to provide for their children. Some determine that migration in search of higher wages is their only hope. Many studies have looked at how migration transforms the child–parent relationship. But what happens to other generational relationships when mothers migrate? Care Across Generations takes a close look at grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families, examining both the structural and gendered inequalities that motivate migration and caregiving as well as the cultural values that sustain intergenerational care. Kristin E. Yarris broadens the transnational migrant story beyond the parent–child relationship, situating care across generations and embedded within the kin networks in sending countries. Rather than casting the consequences of women's migration in migrant sending countries solely in terms of a "care deficit," Yarris shows how intergenerational reconfigurations of care serve as a resource for the wellbeing of children and other family members who stay behind after transnational migration. Moving our perspective across borders and over generations, Care Across Generations shows the social and moral value of intergenerational care for contemporary transnational families.Trade Review"Using a new and critically important multigenerational approach, Yarris' book beautifully charts the broader impacts of migration. Care Across Generations shows us how the migration of others has deep repercussions that extend far beyond the economic, into affective and social realms. A tremendously talented writer, Yarris transforms complex findings into clear, compelling stories of migrants' mothers and children." -- Jessaca Leinaweaver * Brown University *"Care Across Generations is an eloquent and sharp examination of the role of grandmothers, the unsung heroes, in providing care and love in Nicaraguan transnational families. This book will be of great interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with the well-being of children whose parents migrate in search of better livelihoods." -- Elzbieta Gozdziak * Georgetown University *"Through careful and vivid ethnography, Care Across Generations moves beyond the remittances-for-care discourse to argue convincingly for the need to value the importance of grandmother care in maintaining the well-being of family members in sending countries." -- Alison Elizabeth Lee * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Tenemos Que Hacerlo: Responsibility and Sacrifice in Grandmother Care chapter abstractThis chapter reviews patterns of gender and kinship in Nicaraguan families and shows how gendered inequalities shape grandmothers' assumption of caregiving following mother migration. The chapter uses ethnographic examples to demonstrate how grandmothers respond to these gendered inequalities, negotiating relationships with children's fathers and managing the legal and social vulnerabilities related to their roles as intergenerational caregivers. The chapter shows how grandmothers experience caregiving as both a responsibility—providing everyday care for children—and as a source of emotional connection, meaning, and motivation. The chapter documents how grandmothers respond to the prospect of family reunification—the migration of the children in their care to join mothers abroad—by drawing on values of solidarity and sacrifice. 2No Se Ajustan: Remittances and Moral Economies of Migration chapter abstractThis chapter explores the material and affective dimensions of remittances to illustrate the reconfigurations of care in transnational families and the related tensions. The chapter shows how a solely material view of the money migrants send from abroad fails to capture the complex emotional and affective dimensions of remittances from the perspective of grandmothers and the children in their care. Just as remittances are a concrete sign that mothers abroad remain pendiente (responsible) for families in Nicaragua, they also serve as an unavoidable reminder of mothers' ongoing absence from everyday family life. In this way, grandmothers' insistence of remittances that no se ajustan (they do not measure up) indexes a moral economy of care and migration that sets remittances against the values of sacrifice and solidarity that grandmothers seek to foster in transnational family life. 3Pensando Mucho: Transnational Care and Grandmothers' Distress chapter abstractThis chapter demonstrates the cultural significance of grandmothers' roles as caregivers in transnational families by exploring their experiences of embodied, emotional distress. Specifically, the chapter argues that grandmother caregivers use the expression pensando mucho (thinking too much) to express the uncertainties and troubles of transnational family life. The idiom of "thinking too much" indexes the moral ambivalence of mother migration, which grandmothers understand to be an economic necessity but which threatens values for unity and solidarity in family life. In this analysis, by thinking too much grandmothers increase the visibility of their caregiving by inscribing their significance through a specific set of somatic symptoms. This communicative aspect of pensando mucho allows grandmothers to draw attention to their embodied distress, signaling the disruption of transnational family life while emphasizing the cultural value of their care. 4Care and Responsibility Across Generations: A Family Migration Portrait chapter abstractThis chapter presents the story of one Nicaraguan transnational family, showing how migration's impacts on those who stay behind in migrant-sending countries are embedded in time and imprinted across generations. In particular, this close analysis of one family's experience with migration, taking the grandmother's perspective as the central analytical starting point, demonstrates how past experiences of migration influence family members' responses to migration in the present, and how—in turn—present uncertainties shape hopes and fears for the future. This intergenerational perspective demonstrates the importance of analyzing migration as both a temporal and a spatial process, widening our analytical lens on transnational family life across time and, cumulatively, over generations. Conclusion: Valuing Care Across Borders and Generations chapter abstractFocusing attention on grandmother caregivers' experiences of the uncertainties of transnational family life calls us to think more broadly about migration's effects on extended families across national borders, in host and home countries, and across generations, beyond mothers and children and into the networks of extended kin who assume essential caregiving roles in migrant-sending countries like Nicaragua. Grandmothers in Nicaraguan families assume responsibilities for children of mother migrants through an informal reconfiguration of caregiving and kinship obligations, although they lack legal protection and social support. This chapter reviews the social and political consequences of approaching transnational migration from an intergenerational perspective, presenting possible policy responses in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries that would value intergenerational care and support migrants, caregivers, and children in transnational families. Introduction: Solidaridad: Nicaraguan Migration and Intergenerational Care chapter abstract This chapter presents an overview of the values of solidarity and sacrifice and their meanings in relation to the reconfigurations of care and kinship that follow mother migration. The chapter reviews political and economic dynamics relevant for understanding contemporary Nicaraguan migration. The chapter situates intergenerational care in transnational families within recent research on migration and care, including care chains and care circulations, showing how grandmothers are central actors in global transformations of care economies. The chapter also reviews current anthropological theorizing about care, showing how intergenerational care is a moral practice oriented toward upholding cultural values for family continuity and for children's everyday well-being in families divided by borders.

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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 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 SynopsisFollowing the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.Trade Review"Drawing on her long-term collaboration with indigenous people, M. Bianet Castellanos eloquently critiques the dispossession of Maya in Cancún and illuminates their resistance. Her passion for revealing and dismantling the racial and gender hierarchies embedded in neoliberal projects is compelling. A nuanced contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism." -- Patricia Zavella * University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism *"In this compelling and timely work, M. Bianet Castellanos has given us a powerful indictment of neoliberalism's perpetuation of the settler project of Indigenous dispossession. She also effectively demonstrates how Indigenous peoples develop strategies of resistance to new technologies of domination like racialized debt, and in the process craft new forms of urban Indigeneity." -- Shannon Speed * University of California, Los Angeles *"A fascinating and highly readable study of how Indigenous Maya experience twenty-first-century rounds of dispossession and esclavitud—this time born of debt tied to housing financing. Focusing upon mortgage-based access to social interest housing in modern-day Cancún, M. Bianet Castellanos' account foregrounds Indigenous voices as they struggle to become homeowners." -- Peter M. Ward * University of Texas at Austin *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Indigenous Cancún chapter abstractThe central argument of this book is that as Indigenous migrants move to cities, they are no longer treated as Indigenous and instead become deracialized subjects who are disciplined through neoliberal instruments of debt, like mortgage finance and credit cards, leading to greater economic precarity and a loss of autonomy from the state. Through an ethnography of Maya migrants living in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest growing cities, I show that Maya migrants' struggles to own a home reveal the colonial and settler colonial structures underpinning the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. As they grapple with predatory lending and foreclosure, Maya families cultivate strategies of resistance, from "waiting out" the state to demanding recognition as Indigenous peoples in urban centers. Through these maneuvers, Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that counters a discourse of urban malaise and articulates dignity with democracy. 1Before Housing Reform: The Gendering of Urban Property chapter abstractChapter one maps out the history of land policies in Cancún and how they have been shaped by ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. By excluding migrants who were unmarried and childless from affordable housing and land programs, the state defined citizenship narrowly and encouraged migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wished to become citizens of this new urban space. In response, Maya women mobilized their status as wives and mothers to lobby for land. 2Promoting Housing Reform: Debt as Patrimony chapter abstractChapter two examines the transformation of Mexico's land distribution policies and property rights through a discursive analysis of the ideologies central to government campaigns promoting "dignified" housing. Analyzing news articles, government campaign documents, and one Maya family's response to these campaigns, I examine the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies used to make housing attractive and to align debt with national ideals. The language of patrimony and suburban domesticity is intended to soften the retreat of the state from land redistribution, and makes palatable and desirable the process of going into debt on a much larger scale than previously possible. 3After Housing Reform: Credit as the New Frontier chapter abstractChapter three analyzes Indigenous migrants' willingness to take on debt. Prior to 2000, Maya aspired to own, but without debt. Homeownership has increased Maya migrants access to credit, making them the "new frontier" of capitalism. But it has concomitantly increased their economic risk. It considers how credit and risk take on a gendered and "moral valence." For male migrants, going into debt to purchase a home is a risky venture that ignores lessons learned from Indigenous experiences with debt servitude. Yet for female migrants, owning a concrete block home has become a sign of progress and security from natural disasters. To tease out this moral, cultural, and gendered dilemma, I examine migrants' experiences with microfinance and credit cards. 4Foreclosure: Waiting Out the State chapter abstractChapter four centers on one Maya family's experience with foreclosure. How do Indigenous peoples cope with this loss and how does it (re)structure their attachments to place, land and nation? Even as housing reform becomes a form of discipline to produce new types of citizens and construct new narratives of progress, debt delinquency, and insecurity, I show how migrants' resistance strategies, from foot dragging to legal suits to postponing foreclosure, are transformed into a process of "waiting out" the state and capital. In so doing, Maya migrants sidestep the bureaucratic measures created to regulate the poor and convert consent into provocative acts of obstruction and defiance. 5Eviction: Invoking Indigenous Resistance chapter abstractChapter five examines the case of Maya migrants who reject social housing and instead opt to live in the squatter settlement of Colonia Mario Villanueva. Social housing, Maya migrants argue, entails great risk (due to mortgage debt) and is rife with social atomization. In contrast, life in Colonia Mario Villanueva is organized around the principles of Indigenous communal land practices. It is centered around the colonia's legal battle to avoid eviction, which was led by Maya women. These women relied on strategies of resistance derived from Indigenous land struggles. Colonias are perfect places to cultivate political subordination, but in the case of Mario Villanueva, they also become spaces of insubordination. Epilogue: A Cautionary Tale of Indebtedness chapter abstractThe book concludes by assessing how Indigenous migrants have fared under housing reform. Galvanized by the parallels between their ancestors' struggle with esclavitud and their own land and housing struggles, Maya migrants demand to be engaged as Indigenous and accorded the rights to land and self-determination. Migrants urge us to engage with a more expansive conception of territoriality, one that is not limited to the land boundaries of rural communities but is broad enough to recognize the peninsula's sacred Maya geography and to encompass Indigenous diasporas in urban centers. Through this articulation, they offer a more dynamic interpretation of Indigenous rights that aims to combat settler tactics of elimination through assimilation and dispossession. In so doing, Maya migrants are forging a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that moves beyond a colonial politics of recognition.

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Book SynopsisIn contemporary accounts of the Shining Path insurgency and Peru's internal war, the Upper Huallaga Valley has largely been overlooked—despite its former place as the country's main cocaine-producing region. From afar, the Upper Huallaga became a political and legal no-man's-land. Up close, vibrant networks of connection endured despite strict controls on human habitation and movement. This book asks what happens to such a place once prolonged conflict has ostensibly passed. How have ordinary encounters with land, territory, and law, and with the river that runs through them all, been altered in the aftermaths of war? Gathering stories and images to render the experiences of transportation workers who have ferried passengers and things across and along the river for decades, Richard Kernaghan elaborates a notion of legal topographies to understand how landscape interventions shape routes, craft territories, and muddle temporalities. Drawing on personal narratives and everyday practices of transit, this ethnography conveys how prior times of violence have silently accrued: in bridges and roads demolished, then rebuilt; in makeshift moorings that facilitate both licit and illegal trades; and above all through the river, a liquid barrier and current with unstable banks, whose intricate mesh of tributaries partitions terrains now laden with material traces and political effects of a recent yet far from finished past.Trade Review"This is a theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written book. In its lyrical style and its approach to letting stories, objects, and descriptions speak for themselves, the book situates itself with other stylistically innovative ethnographies that eschew a distinction between 'academic' and 'creative' writing. The work is fresh, individual, and makes critical contributions to scholarship on the aftermath of war and post-conflict spaces." —Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University"Crossing the Current illustrates how to do situated ethnography while building solid theory. With beautiful sweeping writing, Kernaghan calls on us to reimagine politics from a sensitive plane, and to rethink history as a plot of enduring connections." —Mario Rufer, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco

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Book SynopsisAmerica's Arab Refugees is a timely examination of the world's worst refugee crisis since World War II. Tracing the history of Middle Eastern wars—especially the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan—to the current refugee crisis, Marcia C. Inhorn examines how refugees fare once resettled in America. In the U.S., Arabs are challenged by discrimination, poverty, and various forms of vulnerability. Inhorn shines a spotlight on the plight of resettled Arab refugees in the ethnic enclave community of "Arab Detroit," Michigan. Sharing in the poverty of Detroit's Black communities, Arab refugees struggle to find employment and to rebuild their lives. Iraqi and Lebanese refugees who have fled from war zones also face several serious health challenges. Uncovering the depths of these challenges, Inhorn's ethnography follows refugees in Detroit suffering reproductive health problems requiring in vitro fertilization (IVF). Without money to afford costly IVF services, Arab refugee couples are caught in a state of "reproductive exile"—unable to return to war-torn countries with shattered healthcare systems, but unable to access affordable IVF services in America. America's Arab Refugees questions America's responsibility for, and commitment to, Arab refugees, mounting a powerful call to end the violence in the Middle East, assist war orphans and uprooted families, take better care of Arab refugees in this country, and provide them with equitable and affordable healthcare services.Trade Review"This timely and important ethnography examines the untold human cost of the crisis in the Middle East, the global interconnection of suffering, and the embodiment of war and displacement on refugees even after they are resettled. Marcia C. Inhorn has expertly woven the traumatic experiences of Arab refugees to the United States with racial disparity and poverty in America. America's Arab Refugees is a story that must be told, and read." -- Salmaan Keshavjee * Harvard Medical School *"A brilliant weaving of insights from the Black Lives Matter movement and intersectional theory, Inhorn compassionately documents the valiant struggles of Arab refugee populations to rise above discrimination in the USA. Inspiring and eye-opening, this book draws out parallels between the racism faced by African-Americans and Arab refugees, broadening the horizon of movements for social justice." -- Suad Joseph * University of California, Davis *"America's Arab Refugees illuminates issues of critical importance for everyone—especially Americans. Inhorn helps us come to grips with Arab Americans' real experiences of war, displacement, racism, poverty, and broken health care. Every reader has something to learn from these men and women negotiating infertility treatments, as they keep hope alive in the midst of adversity and show resolve to work for a better future for themselves, their families, and our world." -- Seth Holmes * author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States *"Inhorn makes a powerful argument that Arab lives, and their reproductive rights, matter. Scholars, students, and laypeople interested in rebuilding social and family life in the aftermath of conflict, in refugees and related policy, or anyone who wants to get to know their new Arab neighbors in asylum countries will find this book insightful and thought-provoking." -- Lindsay Gifford * Middle East Journal *"In this moving and thought-provoking ethnography, Inhorn reveals what seems to be absent from the US media, namely, the formidable suffering, be it physical, emotional, or financial, endured by her interlocutors... This extraordinary and original book goes where others have not, in asking the United States to fulfill its moral obligation toward this vulnerable population and urging policymakers to consider 'ethical questions about health-care equity and social justice—or lack thereof—for refugees and immigrants in the US health-care system'" -- Jonas Elbousty * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: When Arabs Fled: A Legacy of Conflict chapter abstractNo world region has been more affected by political violence than the Middle East. Prior to 2011, fifteen of the twenty-two Middle Eastern nation-states had suffered from protracted conflicts. Directly and indirectly, the United States has participated in this violence through its long history of military intervention, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, three new wars have emerged in the Middle East, including the devastating war in Syria. Arabs now constitute the largest percentage of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world. This chapter explores these wars, as well as the flight of Arab refugees to the United States, and introduces readers to the Arab ethnic enclave community known as "Arab Detroit," where the author conducted a five-year anthropological study on the poverty, vulnerability, and reproductive health challenges facing Arab refugees in America. 1Why They Fled: War and the Health Costs of Conflict chapter abstractThis chapter highlights the devastating impact of war on human health. Focusing on war "syndemics," or the interlocking health problems that surface and often kill during times of political violence, Chapter 1 examines the health costs of war in Lebanon and Iraq, the two home countries from which most residents of Arab Detroit fled. Wars in Iraq and Lebanon generated physical, mental, and reproductive health problems, as well as damage to the social structure, infrastructure, and environment. These health costs of conflict are shown through the war stories of several Lebanese and Iraqi men and women, who arrived in the United States after surviving the misery of war. As their stories show, Arab Detroit is home to many traumatized war victims, who attribute their ongoing reproductive health problems to war and its effects. 2Where They Resettled: Poverty on the Margins of Detroit chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Arab refugee resettlement in the United States. It questions the strategies of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), including the quantity and quality of assistance given to Arab refugees, especially from Iraq. The chapter asks whether refugee resettlement in economically struggling cities such as Detroit has been a wise decision. It also compares the concentrated poverty and discrimination facing both black and Arab Detroit residents. Poverty affects their ability to secure safe housing, stable employment and education, and the means to improve their standard of living. This chapter thus locates Arab poverty on the margins of Detroit, now the nation's poorest large city. Arab refugees placed in Detroit face many forms of structural vulnerability, the effects of which are shown in this chapter. 3How They Struggle: Health Disparities and Unequal Treatment chapter abstractThis chapter explores the health struggles and reproductive health disparities facing Arab refugees. Drawing inspiration from intersectionality theory forwarded by black feminist scholars, this chapter depicts the reproductive racism faced by both blacks and Arabs, who are seen as "undeserving" reproducers of "black and brown babies" (and future "terrorists," in the case of Arab refugees). Yet infertility is a major reproductive health problem for both of these populations. Among Arab refugees, men in particular face severe male infertility problems, partly due to the stresses, injuries, and toxins of war. In vitro fertilization (IVF) services are costly in the United States—approximately $12,500 per cycle—and rarely covered by insurance. Thus, affording IVF is a profound challenge for impoverished Arab couples, who are effectively banished from the world of test-tube baby making. 4What They Feel: Reproductive Exile between Moral Worlds chapter abstractThis chapter examines the existential feelings of exile among infertile couples in Arab Detroit, who find themselves straddling American secular and Muslim moral worlds in their quests for conception. Islamic religious authorities have condoned IVF to overcome infertility, leading to the growth of a robust IVF industry in the Muslim world. Some infertile Arab couples are able to undertake "reproductive tourism" back to their home countries for this purpose. However, for Iraqi refugees, their home country has been decimated by ongoing war, ISIS violence, and a shattered medical system. Thus, they exist in a state of "reproductive exile," unable to return home but also unable to access IVF in the United States, the most costly nation in the world. Because marriage and parenthood are normative dimensions of adult personhood for Arab couples, reproductive exile may invoke marital crises, as Arab men and women face pressure to achieve their reproductive dreams. Conclusion: Arab Lives Matter: Why America Must Care chapter abstractThe conclusion looks to the future, asking what will happen to vulnerable Arab refugee populations around the world. Four important strategies for improving refugee welfare are described. They include stopping wars in the Middle East, saving war orphans and uprooted Arab families, taking better care of Arab refugees in America, and ensuring health equity and reproductive justice for poor Arab couples, through a global movement for low-cost in vitro fertilization (LCIVF). Given the ongoing wars in the Middle East and the world's worst refugee crisis since WWII, Americans must take a stronger moral stance against war and do more to advocate for refugee health and well-being. Given all that they have lost, Arab refugees deserve to rebuild their family lives in America. Arab lives do matter, and America must care.

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Book SynopsisIn the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history. The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.Trade Review"An ingeniously researched and beautifully told story of how an avowedly secular Indian nation state goes about monumentalizing, and thereby eviscerating the lived presence of 'Muslimness' from the great Mughal city of Delhi. Deeply evocative of the doublespeak of majoritarian nationalism that the world is witnessing today." -- Shahid Amin * author of Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan *"Anand Taneja's book offers a fascinating ethnography of the dargah of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, a place whose jinns are petitioned by their devotees, as if in a courtroom. It reflects the social complexity—and poetry—of this shared sacred site, which is also a liminal space transcending caste and gender barriers. More than a study of one structure, this book narrates the history of the capital-city of India through its ruins and monuments. It is a remarkably perceptive and thought-provoking analysis of the popular culture of North India." -- Christophe Jaffrelot * Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS *"Anand Taneja's Jinnealogy is a brilliant and moving meditation on extraordinary attempts to recover a lost culture. Once you consider seriously the practice of writing letters to the jinn at a medieval ruin in Delhi, you will be drawn into an enchanted world. Highly recommended." -- Carl W. Ernst * University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *"This compelling book delves into India's enigmatic silences and unacknowledgeable memories in the aftermath of Partition. When genealogy and social memory fail, jinnealogy activates threads of desire and possibility unavailable to us in secular time. A beautiful and urgent book with a taste of Borges' stories." -- Stefania Pandolfo * Author of Knot of the Soul *"When I return to the Kotla, I know that I will pay new attention to those who come to pray, and no longer just see them as nameless and faceless but as the people Taneja discovers through his fieldwork, the flesh and blood containing hope, despair, tears and anguish, and celebration." -- Ranna Safvi * The Wire *"Anand Vivek Taneja's fluently persuasive study traces the role of jinns in the unusual social and religious space of a medieval ruin in Delhi. Along the way, his Jinneaologyoffers a surprising subaltern history of India's capital city....Jinnealogyis a rich and enriching book. As though meandering through medieval ruins, it takes its reader down unanticipated passageways, evocative detours, as well as some dusty dead ends. Along the way, it repeatedly offers unexpected vistas onto old issues such as secularism, heritage, and community....[T]he reader isirresistibly drawn into the stories of its diverse protagonists." -- Sebastian R. Prange * Pacific Affairs *"The political intervention that this book makes in the field of the history and cultural heritage of South Asia is very timely. The erasure of Indo-Persian and Islamic culture from the modern nation state of India has reached a crisis point, and this book provides a poetic and creative interpretation of the sites where a shared popular Islamic aesthetic and interpretive community remains alive....[T]he book is an excellent, creative, exhaustively researched and beautifully written intervention into the ongoing debate on the erasure of Islamic cultural heritage from the modern nation state of India." -- Nur Sobers-Khan * Global Intellectual History *"Taneja's book helps open the 'discursive tradition' to the mysteries of Islamic figuration—allowing traces, which are not signs, to be strange. His observations are gentle yet pressing, motivated by a deep sense of past possibilities, an urgency to make room for realms of Islamic tradition that need not be legible to be lived." -- Emilio Spadola * The Immanent Frame *"Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi is an elegant contemplation of the ruins of the fortress built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled Delhi from 1351-88 AD....I am most especially taken, though, by the book's elegiac quality. Even while Taneja insists upon the liveliness of the life that has emerged on the neglected grounds of the fortress...the tone of the book remains persistently and appropriately mournful." -- Naveeda Khan * The Immanent Frame *"Beautifully written....Jinnealogy constitutes an extended argument for gharib nawazi, the very kindness that opens up an aesthetics and an ethics that allow for compassionate and caring ways of being and acting in this world." -- Petra Rethmann * American Ethnologist *"This book will be essential reading for those interested in the anthropology of religion, South Asian studies, and Islamic studies. Taneja's diverse ethnographic approach depicts the multiplicities of North Indian religion and culture. At a time of increasing Islamophobia in India and globally, Jinnealogy presents a compelling argument of possibility anchored in the discourse and history of a Muslim community that is essential to the city and culture of Delhi, past and present." -- Jaclyn A. Michael * Reading Religion *"[Jinnealogy] is a shining example of what might be gained if researchers stop labouring to produce neat and linear narratives that establish unambiguous causal relationships....[It] is a harbinger of hope that the spatial turn in the social sciences does not effectively mean that history and time are irrelevant." -- Ghazala Jamil * Contributions to Indian Sociology *"In this impressive and deeply personal monograph, Taneja draws on insights gleaned from years of fieldwork in Delhi to invite the reader on a fantastic journey....Written in sparkling poetic prose, Jinnealogy is a model of ethnographic and archival research combined with theoretical sophistication. Rare for academic tomes, you will not want to put this book down once you begin to digest its wisdom." -- Patrick J. D'Silva * Religious Studies Review *"[This] book is a brilliant, evocative, and gripping account of Jinnealogy: the entanglements and traces of Jinn as a form of memory and practice that challenges the Hindu nation-state and dominant ideas of religion and social identity. The chapters capture attention, drawing the reader through historical details, ethnographic encounters, popular debates, and critical theory. It is an emblematic text for the Anthropology of Islam and South Asia." -- Shaheed Tayob * ReOrient *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Walking Away from the Theater of History chapter abstractThe introduction begins with an ethnographic anecdote of a man who walks away from a historical play being staged in the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla and is stopped short by the invisible voice of a Muslim saint. This anecdote becomes the allegorical frame through which the book is introduced. The introduction sketches out the history of Delhi from the late 18th century to the contemporary period, but more importantly argues that for those who come to Firoz Shah Kotla, it is not the past as history that is important, but more importantly, the past as holding open potentialities for life, for the present and the future. 1Jinnealogy: Archival Amnesia and Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter brings together oral history accounts, popular Urdu theological literature, and files from the Record Room of the ASI to bring together two parallel tracks; the growing presence of the jinn in post-Partition Delhi and the institutionalized amnesia of the official archives concerning everything prior to Partition and Independence in 1947. The chapter shows how the jinn are increasingly present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state attempt vast erasures of the city's Muslim landscapes, and how jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by allowing for other temporalities and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of the bureaucratic present. 2Saintly Visions: The Ethics of Elsewhen chapter abstractDrawing upon ethnographic accounts from Firoz Shah Kotla as well as Urdu literary evocations of Delhi's ruin-scape, this chapter demonstrates how the experience of the sacred amidst these ruins is that of an immersion in multiple times simultaneously, and a cessation of time's "flow". The immersion in multiple times at ruins like Firoz Shah Kotla contains transformative potential for the people who come here. Here, the jinn-saints, often seen in visitors' dreams and visions wearing medieval robes, embody another time, different from the frenetic time of the contemporary city. This chapter shows how nineteenth-century colonial violence imbued the ruin known as Pir Ghaib (the invisible saint) with sacrality. This sacrality was linked to the nostalgic remembrance of the exiled Mughal emperor and the lost political order of Mughal rule, deeply tied to Sufi ethics and ideas of justice. 3Strange(r)ness chapter abstractThis chapter explores the ethics of nameless intimacy at Firoz Shah Kotla, where people who have known each other for twenty years or more seldom acknowledge caste and religious identity, rarely learning one another's proper names, referring to each other instead by nicknames and locational epithets. It shows how this ethics of namelessness points us towards a Sufi culture of gharib-navazi (hospitality to strangers) that is central to the healing power attributed to dargah spaces. The anonymity afforded by namelessness allows people to, even if temporarily, escape the often oppressive structures of social and familial identity. This estrangement, this making strange of the self, is the beginning of a process of reinventing one's self and relation to the world. One aspect of this process is expressing and acting on one's individual desires, even when they violate the normative morality of family and community. 4Desiring Women chapter abstractThis chapter discusses male-female interactions at Firoz Shah Kotla, where unrelated men and women often sit together for hours, speaking of desire, love, and loss. This is highly unusual in Delhi, a city with a reputation for violence against women. Here, in a space of Islam, a religion associated with a highly patriarchal order, women can be freer and more open, in both their interactions with men and in talking about their desires, than they can be in most public spaces in Delhi. Drawing on letters written by women at Firoz Shah Kotla and comparing them to women's voices as portrayed in pre-modern Rekhti poetry, it establishes a long tradition of intimacy with Muslim saintly figures that has allowed women to articulate individual longings and a sense of selfhood. It shows how the anti-patriarchal potentialities of Islam have continued to coexist along with the patriarchal juridical consensus. 5Translation chapter abstractThis chapter begins with an ethnographic anecdote from Firoz Shah Kotla, where one of the author's friends equated Sat Yug (The Hindu idea of a past golden age) with contemporary Iraq. This was one of several moments in which he brought together and made equivalent things otherwise separated by vast temporal and conceptual distances. This chapter shows how we need to expand the idea of translations beyond language and texts to understand translation as a mode of being, which allows for the creation of shared sacred landscapes, ethical worlds and domains of meaning across conventional theological and communitarian divides. it discusses the historical processes of translation through which popular Islam has become an indistinguishable part of the ethical life of North India; the invisible religion which underlies the visible religious differences between Hinduism and Islam. 6Stones, Snakes, and Saints: Remembering the Vanished Sacred Geographies of Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter draws on eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts of prominent Sufi shrines in Delhi to show how these shrines were integrally connected to the ecology of the city. The author follows these accounts with his own visits to these sites in the contemporary city, where they have been completely disconnected from the ecological. Through oral histories, this chapter shows how this disconnect can be attributed to colonial policy, post-colonial growth, and pollution, all of which have radically changed the ontology of the sacred in the city from one of immanence, embedded in the local landscape, to one of immaterial transcendence. Only at a few sites like Firoz Shah Kotla, protected from development by archaeological policy, is an older memory and modality of the sacred still possible. The remembrance of older relations to the ecology includes the sanctification of the animals encountered in this space. 7The Shifting Enchantments of Ruins and Laws in Delhi chapter abstractThis chapter draws upon files from the post-colonial ASI, newspaper reports, and conversations with conservationists active in contemporary Delhi. It outlines a genealogy of conservation practice in Delhi and its changing relation to the life of the city, from the early twentieth century to the present. In the early twentieth century, for both British conservationists and Indo-Muslim antiquarians, these ruins were enchanted spaces, imaginative gateways to an otherwise irrecoverable Mughal past. The identification of Delhi's ruin-scape with Muslim sovereignty led to violent attacks on these sites during Partition violence, and this violence fundamentally changed the city's relation to its Muslim past. In the post-colonial era, Muslim monuments became spaces of darkness and death where no signs of (religious) life were permitted. Conclusion: Remnants of Despair; Traces of Hope chapter abstractThe author traces his autobiographical exploration of and investment in the ruin-scape of Delhi, and his concern that the forms of life indexed by these ruins seem impossible to recover for the majority of the contemporary city. This chapter looks at recent examples of jinn veneration from Lahore, an analysis of a recent Bombay film, and new conservation paradigms taking root in Delhi to think about how the rituals, ethics, and human and animal relations at Firoz Shah Kotla connect to wider trends in South Asia. The new conservation paradigms in Delhi wish to reconnect ruins to the human life of the city, and also to the city's ecology. While this new paradigm of preservation is secular, it shares remarkable similarities with the "religious" outlook of people at Firoz Shah Kotla.

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Book SynopsisFood in Cuba follows Cuban families as they struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in Cuba's faltering, post-Soviet welfare state by specifically looking at the social and emotional dimensions of shifts in access to food. Based on extensive fieldwork with families in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city, Hanna Garth examines Cuban families' attempts to acquire and assemble "a decent meal," unraveling the layers of household dynamics, community interactions, and individual reflections on everyday life in today's Cuba. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the subsequent loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship. Although trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food in Cuba, many Cubans report that they continue to live with food shortages and economic hardship. Garth tells the stories of families that face the daily challenge of acquiring not only enough food, but food that meets local and personal cultural standards. She ultimately argues that these ongoing struggles produce what the Cuban families describe as "a change in character," and that for some, this shifting concept of self and sense of social relation leads to a transformation in society. Food in Cuba shows how the practices of acquisition and the politics of adequacy are intricately linked to the local moral stances on what it means to be a good person, family member, community member, and ultimately, a good Cuban.Trade Review"Garth's in-depth and intimate ethnography portrays the shortcomings in Cuba's welfare system, and the profound consequences for the way people eat and think of themselves as Cuban. Presenting the stories of highly resourceful individuals and communities, Garth shows us that the Cuban experience and post-Soviet lives cannot be decoupled from everyday food practices."—Megan A. Carney, author of The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders"In her rich ethnography of food 'insecurity' in a place where no one starves, Hanna Garth traces the daily practices of food acquisition and the effects of inadequacy on identity. Garth depicts the experience of dependence upon a faltering socialist infrastructure, recording a longing for what was before, discontent with the seemingly changeless present, and a hope for future possibilities."—Nancy J. Burke, author of Health Travels: Cuban Health(care) On and Off the Island"Garth offers a literary masterclass in how the analysis of food can help us understand social relations while the analysis of social relations can help us understand food."—Emily Yates-Doerr, Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition"This is an ethnography rich with thick description about the politics of adequacy as seen through the lens of household food acquisition....Food in Cuba opens our eyes to all that people go through to acquire the foods they desire."—Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, Food, Culture & Society"Garth accessibly addresses important theoretical and political debates while anchoring every insight in rich ethnographic detail. She achieves a sympathetic and nuanced portrait of people who struggle more than they should for the basic elements of life while still engaging in complex social critique and political analysis and acts of solidarity, as well as, against the odds, finding ways to flourish."—Alyshia Gálvez, American Anthropology"[Food in Cuba] expands our understanding of food security, showing that it must mean more than simply access to sufficient nutrients for survival.By turning our attention to food acquisition, Garth's ethnography raises new questions about the kind of systems that people rely upon to produce enough or sufficient food."—Maggie Dickinson, PoLAR"[Food in Cuba] presents a complex picture of the tension between the socialist state and Cuban women....Garth successfully employs experiences from her fieldwork to the reader's benefit, expertly conveying the emotional highs and depressive lows that different individuals feel as they battle every day to produce a decent meal. Recommended."—S. L. Kwosek, CHOICE"As Santiagueros insist, alimentary dignity is an essential ingredient of mental health and well-being. Garth beautifully demonstrates how such notions of health deserve both analytical rigor and political weight in discussions of the body, the self, and the state in marginalized Caribbean communities."—Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, Medical Anthropology Quarterly"Food in Cuba is a thought-provoking ethnography that should appeal to multiple audiences, including policy makers, health professionals, and scholars interested in Cuba, for its critical perspective on narrow definitions of food security and for its valuable perspective on how chronic food shortages impact mental health and social dynamics on the island."—Adriana Premat, Transforming Anthropology"Garth's study of marginalized Santiagueros and their 'ingestive practices', portrays a particular kind of living, involving intimate socialities and intimate performances, where one is constantly negotiating the fine line of acting ethical and losing one's Cubanidad. It is an important part of a larger body of work in anthropology that portrays the urban precariat making do in the grey zone."—Daina Cheyenne Harvey, UrbanitiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: In Pursuit of Adequacy 1. La Lucha 2. Antes 3. Virtuous Womanhood 4. Community 5. Breakdown Conclusion: The Politics of Adequacy

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Book SynopsisWhat if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Nobody's People depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world—including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource.Trade Review"It's difficult to overemphasize the effect of this narrative: the brio with which it is written, the verve of its characters, the author's intellectual panache. This scintillating re-reading of hierarchy, most poignant where it has supposedly been banished, picks apart one of anthropology's greatest conundrums and poses profound questions for evaluations based on social equivalence." -- Marilyn Strathern * University of Cambridge *"Moving away from the ideas of ineffability and stasis that attach to understandings of caste, Piliavsky puts forward a courageous, refreshingly original position on hierarchy." -- Dilip Menon * University of Witwatersrand *"An extraordinary work. A major rethinking of the social productivity of hierarchical relations, this is ethnographically grounded anthropological theorizing at its best. It should fundamentally transform contemporary conversations about the nature of social life." -- Joel Robbins * University of Cambridge *"By exploring the politics of everyday patronage, this compelling study of a 'caste of thieves' addresses one of the most important debates in the sociology of South Asia." -- Filippo Osella, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies * Sussex University *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts0Prologue chapter abstractIn 1991 a hamlet in southern Rajasthan, where the author conducted her research, was nearly razed by a pogrom. Decades later, its perpetrators felt no regret or remorse for the violence. Their victims were Kanjars, a caste of professional thieves and the most marginal local community. Parsing out the moral logic of the pogrom, Piliavsky argues that Kanjars are untouchable among the untouchables not because they are ritually most polluted, but because they are socially least attached. Asymmetrical ties with patrons are essential to the local calculus of people's worth, making hierarchical norms central to the logic of social ambitions. Challenging the egalo-normative commitments of writings on social mobility and aspiration in South Asia, and engaging critically the work of Louis Dumont, the prologue introduces the book's central argument: that hierarchy—as opposed to inequality—can drive social ambition, recognition, and hope. 1Hierarchy as Hope chapter abstractMany in India look to hierarchy as a social good that helps them pursue better lives. Social scientists, conversely, tend to see in hierarchy a system of oppressive stasis. In a wide-ranging reflection on social theory, chapter 1 outlines how its egalo-normative bearings and the old Christian idea of hierarchy as a "pyramid" have produced a caricature of hierarchy as a motionless whole, making it impossible to see why people the world over value it. It argues that hierarchies of all kinds always involve a logic of mutual responsibility structured by difference. Expressed in the idiom of patronal or parent-child relations, these norms do not imply or produce stasis; rather, they are inherently asymmetric, unstable, and dynamic. Outlining how hierarchical norms play out in patronal relations in Rajasthan, Piliavsky challenges the hoary contrast between "holism" and individualism, and outlines a vision of hierarchical individuality. 2The Lords of Begun chapter abstractChapter 2 reveals Begun, a market town, whose layout and history reflect major hierarchical principles. The town is organized concentrically around a citadel—the home of the local hereditary lord, the Rao—according to degrees of intimacy to the royal family, not by degrees of ritual purity and pollution. The highest ranking castes, with homes in the town center, are the Rao's closest, most experienced servants, while those lower and farther out have been more loosely employed by others. Developing an old argument about "centrality" as the organizing principle of caste, this chapter shows that the town and its social hierarchy were traditionally organized like a family, where the Rao was styled as a "father" and his servants as "children." The respective obligations to care for one's servants and to serve one's master are framed in this familial moral idiom that is pivotal to the broader logic of hierarchy. 3The People Who Were Not There chapter abstractWhile relations with Kanjars are denied in polite company, local aristocrats, farmers, and policemen engage them as watchmen, thieves for hire, and dispute negotiators. As such, Kanjars enter the innermost domains of life, while being denied public recognition. Both beneficiaries and victims of their invisibility, they profit from being employed as "secret agents," while ultimately losing out on the recognition that only openly recognized bonds with patrons afford. While running an often lucrative trade, Kanjars remain reputationally offstage—invisible, masterless, unattached—and so, in the eyes of others, lack a proper, cogent self, and thus any social value. For them, the moral significance of patronal attachments is really and truly a matter of life and death. The moral and social outsider can be disposed of casually, with no moral consequence or qualms. 4The Perils of Masterless People chapter abstractThe history of people who have come to be known as Kanjars is a story of a long and frustrated search for patrons, who would care for them and imparting on the community the existentially crucial belonging they long for. Tracing Kanjar history to the 16th century, when the name "Kanjar" first applied to itinerant entertainers at the Mughal court in Delhi, the chapter follows the story of North India's "vagrant" communities engaged as bards, spies, prostitutes and watchmen-cum-thieves for centuries and until this day. "Kanjar," a name of disrepute (today synonymous with "whore," "bastard," or "pimp"), stuck to communities that failed to attach themselves securely to reputable masters, while those succeeding in doing so had acquired more attractive monikers and position in life. While showing the enduring moral significance of asymmetrical bonds, this history also demonstrates the extraordinary historical lability of caste. 5How to Make and Eat a Goddess in Nine Days chapter abstractOnce a year Kanjars, like other Hindus, stage the festival of Navaratri, the nine days during which they celebrate their patron goddesses. For Kanjars, however, the festival carries special significance. As a people who lack suitable ties with human patrons, Kanjars valorize their attachments to goddesses, seeing them as the chief source of their collective self. Through the microcosm of the ritual process, and the minutiae of the exchange that takes place in its course, the chapter demonstrates the existential significance of patron-servant ties and the mutual constitution that these involve. Here, while the goddesses are manufactured by their Kanjar servants, Kanjars quite literally eat the goddesses, and so take on their substance, or khandān. The same logic of mutual constitution guides relations with human patrons. 6Who and Whose chapter abstractA masterless, unattached people in the eyes of others, Kanjars do have human patrons, who play a decisive role in ranking inside the community. The Kanjar caste is divided into those who work as bards, watchmen or thieves, and prostitutes. The segments of the caste are ranked, it is argued, not through moral judgments of their occupation, but on the basis of how tightly their work ties them to particular, precisely specified patrons. The more narrowly specified are these ties, the better the segment's standing. Kanjars involved in prostitution entertain an unrestricted array of patrons and so rank lowest of all, while the thieves with (actual or remembered) bonds to jajmāns among Rajputs, farmers, and the police rank the highest. What matters for social integrity is the integrity of social bonds. Here to be is to belong. 7The New Lords of Begun chapter abstractThis chapter takes readers into the thick of the electoral politics of Begun. Following two Kanjars, the Rao of Begun, and other political players during the 2008 state election campaign, the chapter shows how the hierarchical principles described in Begun shape the democratic process: orienting political strategies, inflecting voters' judgment, and structuring the rise and fall of political fortunes. The expectation to care for one's people, which lies at the heart of hierarchy as a moral logic of responsibility, gives rise to pervasive disappointment and gives meaning to a distinctive local sense of "corruption," as a failure of relations, rather than a failure of public office. Hierarchy emerges as the chief normative frame of local democracy. 8Every Man a King chapter abstractUnderstood as a moral logic of mutually beholden relations, hierarchy is not confined to provincial India. It is the basic idiom, it is argued here, of social ambition and hope, anywhere in the world where these are valued. While assertively egalitarian societies (mostly small-scale communities) curb personal ambitions, hierarchy—or difference that makes a difference—is fundamental to one's ability to improve one's life. In contemporary metropolitan imaginations, where equality is now (formally) the topmost sacrosanct value, hierarchical norms have not been supplanted, they have been transvalued. People have not been leveled, but have been leveled up through the hierarchical idioms of "respect" and "dignity," which have become the pivotal tropes of current global egalitarianism. Hierarchy is thus not only important in rural North India, but remains a powerful structuring force within stridently egalitarian moralities, the "egalitarian" social settings, which make, in Huey Long's words, "every man a king."

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Book SynopsisAs politicians debate how to address the estimated eleven million unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States, undocumented youth anxiously await the next policy shift that will determine their futures. From one day to the next, their dreams are as likely to crumble around them as to come within reach. In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis M. Silver sheds light on the currents of exclusion and incorporation that characterize their lives. Silver examines the experiences of immigrant youth growing up in a small town in North Carolina—a state that experienced unprecedented growth in its Latino population in the 1990s and 2000s, and where aggressive anti-immigration policies have been enforced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interview data, she finds that contradictory policies at the national, state, and local levels interact to create a complex environment through which the youth must navigate. From heritage-based school programs to state-wide bans on attending community college; from the failure of the DREAM Act to the rescinding of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); each layer represents profound implications for undocumented Latino youth. Silver exposes the constantly changing pathways that shape their journeys into early adulthood—and the profound resilience that they develop along the way.Trade Review"Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Shifting Boundaries tells the poignant story of undocumented Latino immigrants coming of age in small-town America. Alexis Silver's narrative, both timeless and timely, is a must-read for anyone interested in America's tortuous immigration debates and the challenges they present for immigrant youth." -- Jacqueline Hagan * The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *"Alexis Silver has written a terrific book. This extraordinary study provides a fresh perspective on immigrant incorporation and the importance of place during political instability. Rich in detail, persuasively argued, and novel in its approach, this timely and relevant book shines an important light on the resilience of young immigrants in the face of unsettling and changing times." -- Roberto G. Gonzales * author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America *"Shifting Boundaries provides a compelling argument for understanding the plight of undocumented youths as they inch their way toward—and take alternative routes to—integration when the path seems impassable...Most of all, this book offers a profound analysis that shows the humanity of undocumented immigrants within an increasingly hostile national context."––Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, American Journal of Sociology

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Book SynopsisWhether motivated by humanitarianism or concern over "porous" borders, dominant commentary on migration in Europe has consistently focused on clandestine border crossings. Much less, however, is known about the everyday workings of immigration law inside borders. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, one of Europe's biggest receiving countries, Rules, Paper, Status moves away from polarized depictions to reveal how migration processes actually play out on the ground. Anna Tuckett highlights the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion produced through encounters with immigration law. The statuses of "legal" or "illegal," which media and political accounts use as synonyms for "good" and "bad," "worthy" and "unworthy," are not created by practices of border-crossing, but rather through legal and bureaucratic processes within borders devised by governing states. Taking migrants' interactions with immigration regimes as its starting point, this book sheds light on the productive nature of legal and bureaucratic encounters and the unintended consequences they produce. Rules, Paper, Status argues that successfully navigating Italian immigration bureaucracy, which is situated in an immigration regime that is both exclusionary and flexible, requires and induces culturally specific modes of behavior. Exclusionary laws, however, can transform this social and cultural learning into the very thing that endangers migrants' right to live in the country. Trade Review"This compelling book transports the reader into the maze of immigration law enforcement in Italy. A must-read for immigration scholars and anyone interested in the day-to-day workings of street-level bureaucrats and the myriad ways they make law and in the process, transform immigrants into 'cultural citizens.'" -- Kitty Calavita * University of California, Irvine *"Anna Tuckett's lively and engaging book sheds new light on the confused relationship between migrants and Italian state bureaucracy, and the gaps between formal law and 'practical stuff.' Rules, Paper, Status makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the bureaucratic and legal anomalies produced by the current 'moral panic' in Europe concerning immigration." -- Anthony Good * University of Edinburgh *"[Tuckett's] findings show that, paradoxically, even while migrants develop cultural skills in navigating bureaucratic norms, these abilities do not challenge the larger exclusionary views and practices of the Italian state and society....Tuckett's clear, concise writing makes this book an excellent gateway to a critical topic treated with analytical rigor....Highly recommended." -- A.H. Fabos * CHOICE *"By focusing on the sinewy and unstable ties between migrants and their legal status, [Tuckett] offers a rich analysis of legal and bureaucratic practices that shape migrants' economic and political opportunities as well as their social and cultural life in Italy.[Rules, Paper Status] provides a crucial contribution to theorizing about citizenship in European countries and the hegemonic discourse of integration."––Veronica Ferrari, Allegra"Rules, Paper, Status is a timely and relevant contribution to understanding the workings of the state beyond discourses of border enforcement....[it] speaks to a broader readership, including academics and state officials, and contributes to contemporary discussions on studying the 'state' at street level." -- Lisa Marie Borelli * Anthropology in Action *"Rules, Papers, Status is a vivid journey into the workaday functioning of the Italian 'documentation regime'[It] poignantly depicts a country that seems unable to come to terms with its migrants." -- Tiziana Caponio * International Migration Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter examines the historical trajectory of Italian immigration law and the political and economic context from which it emerges. In general migrants have not been welcomed into Italian society, but low birth rates and a high aging population make their presence crucial. Italian immigration law, which is a curious mixture between harsh and exclusionary policies and frequent large-scale legalizations, embodies this ambiguous attitude towards migrants. This chapter argues that equal attention must be given to processes relating to "legalization" as to those relating to "illegalization" when considering migrants' experiences of "legal" and "illegal" statuses. While other studies on experiences of immigration law tend to focus on migrants' experiences of uncertainty, this focus on the bureaucratic and documentary practices of immigration provides insights on alternative affective dimensions of immigration law and its material artefacts. 1The Center chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's central fieldsite: a trade union affiliated migrant advice center which provides support and assistance to migrants in their completion of application forms, as well as navigation of the immigration bureaucracy more generally. Trade unions have a central function in the Italian welfare state, and the center's role in completing migrants' application forms is closely connected to this. Although affiliated to the trade union, in the eyes of its visitors, and in practice, the center's role is often blurred with that of the Questura (Immigration Office) and the state in general. Because the center acts as a mediator between migrants and the Questura, the assistance which clients received could determine application outcomes. Not all staff members were equally able or interested in migration matters, however, and the quality of assistance they provided was highly variable. 2Working the Gap: Migrants' Navigation of Immigration Bureaucracy chapter abstractThrough gripping case studies, this chapter illustrates how everyday experiences with Italian immigration bureaucracy are characterized by uncertainty, arbitrariness, and frustration. By closely examining migrants' bureaucratic encounters, however, the chapter reveals that the bureaucracy's arbitrary and uncertain nature also makes it flexible and relatively easy to manipulate. By engaging in effective strategies of navigation, migrants are able to manipulate the law's loopholes and aid the acceptance of applications. Tracing migrants' strategies, this chapter argues that "formal" and "informal" spheres are interdependent and symbiotic: migrants, brokers, advisers, and officials all must engage in "informal" and extra-legal practices in order to successfully navigate the immigration bureaucracy. 3The Rules of Rule-Bending chapter abstractThis chapter argues that rule bending is revealing of broader attitudes to the state and bureaucracy in Italy which, through their bureaucratic encounters, migrants also come to hold. Bureaucratic engagements are thus forms of citizen-making. Socially acceptable rule-breaking, however, is accompanied by strict compliance with proceduralism in relation to paperwork. Successfully navigating the immigration bureaucracy requires expertise in the management of documents: paper trails must seem authentic even if false. Yet, given the documented nature of migrants' lives, rule-bending in one application can potentially create problems in others, meaning that even skillful rule-bending can result in high risks for migrants, such as the loss of legal status or foreclosing the attainment of citizenship. There thus exists a mismatch between a migrant's social knowledge – which is required to navigate the bureaucracy – and exclusionary citizenship laws that make this embeddedness precarious. 4Becoming an Immigration Adviser: Self-Fashioning through Bureaucratic Practice chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the role of community brokers – informal immigration advisers with migrant backgrounds – and shows how they style themselves as bureaucratic experts. Doing so enables these brokers to develop new subjectivities and fashion themselves in affective terms. Becoming advisers enables them a degree of professionalism, helps them gain standing in their community, satisfies charitable impulses, and places them center stage in the fight for social justice. Crucially, the role of a community broker offers possibilities for gaining social status that are generally not otherwise available to migrants in Italy. 5Disjuncture in the Documentation Regime: The Second Generation's Challenge to Citizenship Law chapter abstractReflecting on the second generation's experiences of immigration bureaucracy, this chapter considers the contradictory and divergent affects of immigration law encounters. If dealings with the immigration bureaucracy produce opportunities for first-generation migrants and their advisers, for the second-generation they create upset and disjuncture. This generation is the most vulnerable group in terms of immigration policies as its members may suddenly find themselves as "undocumented immigrants" after turning 18, due to Italy's jus sanguinis nationality policy. Their sense of ease and integration in Italian society make them strangers to the immigration bureaucracy which – due to restrictive immigration and citizenship laws – they are nonetheless subject. The disjuncture made apparent through the second generation's subjection to immigration law highlights the profound injustices and inequalities that such laws create for all migrants. 6Stepping-Stone Destinations: Migration and Disappointment chapter abstractThis chapter explores migrants' feelings of disappointment about their migration trajectory in Italy and their desire to leave the country. The disappointment of those who aspire to migrate but ultimately never leave their homelands has been extensively discussed in migration studies literature. The chapter places the focus on those who have migrated but who still feel as though they have failed due to their lack of onward mobility from Italy. Focusing on the feelings of disappointment and personal failure experienced by those who have already migrated, it highlights the differentiated inclusion of migrants into the global marketplace. The desire to leave Italy, whether imagined or acted upon, shows how the mobility enabled by neoliberal globalization reproduces hierarchies within the EU. By viewing Italy as a mere stepping stone in a longer trajectory, migrants – both those who leave and those who remain – conceptualize the country as an inferior destination. Conclusion: chapter abstractDrawing the preceding chapters together, this conclusion argues that the "border spectacle" (De Genova 2002) produces a lopsided view of migration by obscuring how immigration policies relate to broader political and economic processes of contemporary migration and globalization. Situating migrants' navigation of the documentation regime in relation to these process, the chapter argues that migrants' maneuvering provides them with only meagre benefits, while employers, lawyers, policy makers, and other stakeholders within the immigration nexus reap the rewards. The final section of the conclusion reflects on what policies could improve the current situation in light of the problems identified.

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Book SynopsisAs politicians debate how to address the estimated eleven million unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States, undocumented youth anxiously await the next policy shift that will determine their futures. From one day to the next, their dreams are as likely to crumble around them as to come within reach. In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis M. Silver sheds light on the currents of exclusion and incorporation that characterize their lives. Silver examines the experiences of immigrant youth growing up in a small town in North Carolina—a state that experienced unprecedented growth in its Latino population in the 1990s and 2000s, and where aggressive anti-immigration policies have been enforced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interview data, she finds that contradictory policies at the national, state, and local levels interact to create a complex environment through which the youth must navigate. From heritage-based school programs to state-wide bans on attending community college; from the failure of the DREAM Act to the rescinding of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); each layer represents profound implications for undocumented Latino youth. Silver exposes the constantly changing pathways that shape their journeys into early adulthood—and the profound resilience that they develop along the way.Trade Review"Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Shifting Boundaries tells the poignant story of undocumented Latino immigrants coming of age in small-town America. Alexis Silver's narrative, both timeless and timely, is a must-read for anyone interested in America's tortuous immigration debates and the challenges they present for immigrant youth." -- Jacqueline Hagan * The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *"Alexis Silver has written a terrific book. This extraordinary study provides a fresh perspective on immigrant incorporation and the importance of place during political instability. Rich in detail, persuasively argued, and novel in its approach, this timely and relevant book shines an important light on the resilience of young immigrants in the face of unsettling and changing times." -- Roberto G. Gonzales * author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America *"Shifting Boundaries provides a compelling argument for understanding the plight of undocumented youths as they inch their way toward—and take alternative routes to—integration when the path seems impassable...Most of all, this book offers a profound analysis that shows the humanity of undocumented immigrants within an increasingly hostile national context."––Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, American Journal of Sociology

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Book SynopsisThe 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange forcibly relocated one and a half million people: Muslims in Greece were resettled in Turkey, and Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey were moved to Greece. This landmark event set a legal precedent for population management on the basis of religious or ethnic difference. Similar segregative policies—such as creating walls, partitions, and apartheids—have followed in its wake. Strikingly, the exchange was purportedly enacted as a means to achieve peace. Humanism in Ruins maps the links between liberal discourses on peace and the legacies of this forced migration. Aslı Iğsız weaves together past and present, making visible the effects in Turkey across the ensuing century, of the 1923 exchange. Liberal humanism has responded to segregative policies by calling for coexistence and the acceptance of cultural diversity. Yet, as Iğsız makes clear, liberal humanism itself, with its ahistorical emphasis on a shared humanity, fails to confront an underlying racialized logic. This far-reaching and multilayered cultural history investigates what it means to be human—historically, socially, and politically. It delivers an urgent message about the politics of difference at a time when the reincarnation of fascism in different parts of the world invites citizens to participate in perpetuating a racialized and unequal world. Trade Review"Aslı Iğsız offers original and creative insight into the aftermath of the 1923 population exchange. A superb genealogy of cultural policy and the politics of culture in Turkey." -- Yael Navaro * University of Cambridge *"Humanism in Ruins incisively reveals how liberal discourses of peace and tolerance have been entangled with the racialization of social difference. An impressive contribution to the critical study of liberalism in the Middle East." -- Kabir Tambar * Stanford University *"At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people were displaced by war or violent conflict. It is virtually certain that mass population movements will continue, and it is clear that there is a pressing need to change the terms of the international debate and policy regarding the issue. This reality deems Aslı Iğsız's insightful book, Humanism in Ruins, to be not only timely but also an essential read."––Elektra Kostopoulou, Jadaliyya"[An] original and necessary work....At the center of Iğsız's virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: "the policies of biopolitics"....intellectually, politically, and in every other sense, a truly courageous book."––Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya"Iğsız's work is...unique in tracing the foundational imprint historicist humanism has made on liberal humanism....As we see the segregative logic of walls and fortresses emerging anew, as a response to the largest refugee crisis to occur since World War II, attending to the complex and contradictory histories and effects of existing humanitarian regimes takes on great urgency."––Esra Özyürek, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Humanism in Ruins] is the latest addition to the growing literature of critical analysis of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and without a doubt debunks the myth that it was a win-win solution and a clear achievement once and for all....Each part is strong enough to be a stand-alone treatise and an invitation for engaged and committed practices of cultural analysis." -- Nergis Canefe * EuropeNow *"Iğsız's perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies....Humanism in Ruins is an excellent and complex analysis of the racist legacies of population exchanges in modern-day cultural policies." -- Ceren Özgül * New Perspectives on Turkey *"Humanism in Ruins is a brilliant, path-breaking book....Igsiz makes major interventions into debates on liberalism, culture, and politics. And for those who have been decrying the paucity of works on race in Middle East studies, this book is a very welcome addition....There is much to digest in this fascinating and highly original work, so much that it is hard to do justice to it in a short review." -- Beth Baron * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Humanism in Ruins is a stimulating and well-structured book.[It] manages to move successfully through a great variety of material, historical and theoretical, and offers a fruitful contribution in the field of migration studies." -- Alexandros Sakellariou * International Migration Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsBy Way of an Introduction: The Entangled Legacies of a Population Exchange chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the key concepts as well as the general approach and methodology of the book: biopolitics, humanism, ruins, and palimpsests. These concepts are later further developed in the relevant chapters, in relation to the analysis of the sources, but here they are laid out in relation to the entangled legacies of the 1923 exchange in general. The Introduction also provides a lengthy historicization of the 1923 exchange together with the notion of "racialized thinking" that constitutes the basis for the discussion of biopolitics and humanism. Part I: Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family chapter abstractThis chapter discusses various scholars—eugenicists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars among others—and their intellectual networks to unravel a complex, transnational intellectual and cultural history, and addresses the entangled dynamics revolving around the segregative legacy of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Focusing on the first decade after 1945, this part traces how segregative biopolitics was addressed transnationally through a refugee association presided over by a Turkish eugenicist, Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and founded in collaboration with an Italian eugenicist and statistician, Corrado Gini—who also was a supporter of Mussolini's fascism. The 1923 exchange was a reference point for the association and for the research it promoted. Against this backdrop, the chapter also analyzes the rise of UNESCO-oriented cultural policies developed to address alterity and race during that period, with a special focus on liberal humanism and a photography exhibition: The Family of Man. Part II: Of Origins and "Men": Family History, Genealogy, and Historicist Humanism Revisited chapter abstractThis part turns to the notions of genealogy and origins and attends to their different uses across time and space in relation to the 1923 exchange, racialized thinking, and historicist humanism. It begins with post-1990s Turkey and traces how legacies of segregative biopolitics were primarily engaged on a personal level through family histories configured as cultural heritage. Engaging individual and institutional practices that configured family histories as sites of articulating different backgrounds—alterity—after the 1980 military coup, the part considers the implications of engaging biopolitical ruins via individual genealogies and origins configured through the family. Next, it historicizes other forms of engaging genealogies and origins and examines this process through historicist humanism and racialized thinking, which were instrumental in categorizing peoples on the paths that led to segregative policies in general, the 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange in particular. Part III: Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism chapter abstractThis part traces the palimpsests of cultural policy pertaining to contemporary liberal multiculturalism in Turkey and the European Union. Addressing liberal and historicist humanism embedded in liberal multiculturalism narratives in Turkey and beyond, this part engages the discourses and policies that enabled the building of the first 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum in Turkey as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture project. Considering the impact of UNESCO's cultural policies on the EU, which then traveled to Turkey, this part addresses the limits of liberal multiculturalism and the form it took in Turkey: neo-Ottomanism. After tracing the transnational crossing of liberal multiculturalism to Turkey, the part turns to the local historical context that neo-Ottomanism draws from: cultural policy in the post-1980 coup era and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and its broader implications for the fascistic historicist humanism mobilized during the 1980 coup era. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Cultural Analysis in an Age of Securitarianism chapter abstractThe Conclusion picks up the threads of the analysis laid out throughout the book and reconsiders the relevance of the book's key concepts such as biopolitics, segregation, and culture from the perspective of the contemporary rise of neofascism, securitarianism, and xenophobia.

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Book Synopsis"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice—inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world. Trade Review"Through meticulous and uniquely collaborative ethnography, Mafia Raj opens readers' eyes to the murky world of bosses in South Asia. With unforgettable portraits of the gangsters, politicians, hustlers, and extortionists dotting the region, this is the rare scholarly account that upends our commonly accepted notions of democracy, formality, and legitimacy."—Milan Vaishnav, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace"Why does the figure of 'the boss,' in its various guises, loom so large in South Asia? In answering this question, the authors of this engagingly written book make a path-breaking contribution to the study of South Asian politics."—John Harriss, Simon Fraser University"The authors, who are experts in anthropology and South Asian studies at several European institutions, illustrate the 'art of bossing'—techniques and methods used by such figures to climb to power and maintain their sovereignty. While some of these strategies are shared by their counterparts in different parts of the world, South Asian gangsters demonstrate a unique strength: their involvement in and utilization of electoral democracy, which, ironically, keeps them in power...This book is a timely scholarly work on a little-studied aspect of South Asian politics...Recommended."—A. Y. Lee, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Backdrops 2. The Rookie 3. The Bluffer 4. The Henchman 5. The Adjudicators 6. Lady Dabang 7. The Godfather 8. The Legend Conclusion: The Art of Bossing

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Book SynopsisSoqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state. Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.Trade Review"Islands of Heritage is at once a dazzling ethnography of everyday life and a well-researched history that is as extraordinary as its subject, the island of Soqotra in the Arabian Sea. It is truly a pleasure to read." -- Steven C. Caton * Harvard University *"Nathalie Peutz has written a beautiful account of the unsettling effects of and dynamics between international conservation efforts, national politics, and Soqotran notions of heritage, history, and place. Islands of Heritage is one of the richest ethnographies of the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean region that I have read in years." -- Mandana Limbert, Queens College and the Graduate Center * CUNY *"This book, the result of ten years of research and follow up, explores the sociopolitical transformation of Soqotra, the main island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago. Peutz offers a detailed ethnographic presentation of the complicated and unsettled recent history of the island within its larger regional and global context...Recommended." -- A. Rassam * CHOICE *"Upon closing Islands of Heritage one can only be impressed by such a piece of interdisciplinary scholarship. Nathalie Peutz brilliantly manages to bring to life and interpret the local dynamics she observed in Soqotra, updating their significance and making them meaningful beyond the archipelago of Soqotra, and that of anthropologists." -- Laurent Bonnefoy * Arabian Humanities *"Peutz's book is required reading for anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and those investigating the impact of tourism, while being readable and compelling for nonspecialists... It is a delight to read and one of the strongest anthropological texts on heritage published in recent years." -- Victoria Hightower * Arab Studies Journal *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractBeginning with an anecdote of a Soqotran teacher convening a political protest (during the Yemeni Revolution) and a poetry contest on the same day, the Introduction asks how heritage (a nominally conservative endeavor) and revolution (a nominally transformative endeavor) could be connected. It lays out the importance of studying heritage. It reviews the history and politicization of heritage in the Arab world. And it provides a geographic and historical overview of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, a UNESCO-inscribed natural World Heritage Site with a long genealogy of being deemed exceptional and "protected." It then describes the author's fieldwork and methodology. It concludes by arguing that, despite important arguments for working to transcend the nature-culture divide (in heritage making, as in other things), certain "islands" (boundaries) may be productive. 1Hospitality in Unsettling Times chapter abstractThis chapter introduces readers to a transhumant pastoralist community living in a newly established protected area (Homhil). It shows how the unprecedented opening of Soqotra gave rise to a crisis of hospitality, a long-held cultural value. Soqotrans' discourse of hospitality (karam) in crisis reveals significant mutations in the island's political economy and social structures, precipitated by its 1990 absorption into the unified Yemeni state and its transformation from a militarized enclave to a national protected area. Karam (and the ostensible lack of it) has become the idiom through which the islanders have been processing these changes. In light of current debates in the West about the dangers of "hosting" (im)migrants, this chapter points out that, in Soqotra, the crisis was exacerbated not nearly as much by Soqotrans' fears of being too hospitable as by their concern that they were no longer being hospitable enough. 2Hungering for the State chapter abstractDue to the archipelago's annual isolation during the southwest monsoon, in addition to its arid climate, Soqotrans are no strangers to food insecurity or famine. Accordingly, their interactions with each entering state—the Sultanate, the British Protectorate, South Yemen, and the Saleh regime—have been mediated by food. Yet, as this historical chapter demonstrates, it was not only the state's administration of food that governed Soqotrans' interactions with each regime. Soqotrans have a long history of feeding—and simultaneously "hungering" for—the state in return. Drawing on oral histories, archives, and interviews, this chapter surveys Soqotra's political history as one governed through food, famine, and fear. It argues that Soqotrans may have experienced physical hunger in the past, but in the 2000s they hungered for a state that would provide real and lasting sustenance. 3When the Environment Arrived chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the implementation of four major integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) between 1996 and 2013, which resulted in the archipelago's inscription as a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site. It begins by reviewing how these projects were preceded by the decades-long arrivals of foreign researchers and the continued dissemination of their ideas about Soqotra's environmental exceptionality. It then discusses the establishment of environmental legislation in unified Yemen (post-1990) and details the various ICDP projects that were implemented on Soqotra during this period. It ends by describing two "environmental awareness" meetings in the protected area (Homhil). Drawing on project documents and literature, observation of rural outreach and environmental awareness programs, and daily participation within a the protected-area community, this chapter reveals why "the Environment," as project and concept, failed to mobilize these pastoral communities so dependent on their natural surroundings. 4Arrested Development chapter abstractThis chapter presents an ethnographic narrative of the material, social, and political effects of several conservation-and-development initiatives in a pilot protected area inhabited by pastoralists (Bedouin). It focuses on the implementation of three development projects by the Socotra Conservation and Development Programme: a new tourist campground, a community home garden, and piped water. Although these projects were meant to improve the pastoralists' material well-being, they wound up pitting leaders, tribes, villages, and men and women within the community against one another. Through a close "mapping" of these tensions, this chapter underscores why, in these pastoralists' view, "the Environment" had little traction—despite its strong influence in the island. As a result, some Soqotrans sought to preserve their livelihoods by shifting their focus to cultural heritage instead. 5Reorienting Heritage chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the influence of the Soqotran diaspora in island politics in the decade preceding the 2011 revolution. Beginning with an overview of the three major phases of twentieth-century emigration from Soqotra to the Arab Gulf, it illustrates how pervasive these Soqotra-Gulf connections were and are. It explores the ways in which emigrants politicized Soqotran identity, culture, heritage, and history through their histories, their poetry, and the island's first museum. And it examines the ways in which the diaspora sought to denature and reorient Soqotran heritage by shifting the focus from nature to culture, from Soqotran autochthony to Arab descent, from Indian Ocean hybridity to genealogical purity, and from the Yemeni nation to the transnational Gulf. These heterogeneous, kaleidoscopic, and entangled processes of heritage making reveal a deep-seated anguish over past political events and an ongoing struggle to reorient Soqotra's future. 6Heritage in the Time of Revolution chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how the islanders mobilized cultural heritage in the years bracketing the Yemeni Revolution, when several positioned themselves as "para-experts" alongside foreigners working for the environmental projects. It explores three individuals' growing interest in heritage as a political and profitable resource. It examines debates over the contours of this heritage. And it traces the development of an islandwide poetry competition, its overt politicization in the wake of the Arab uprisings, and the eventual recognition of the Soqotri language in the draft constitution for the new Yemen. It argues that Soqotrans' preoccupation with their cultural heritage during this period bears a strong resemblance to nineteenth-century European nationalists' "cultivation of culture." Thus, it was not a provincial, insular, or even conservative concern. Rather, it reflects a distinctly twenty-first-century realization that vernacular languages and endemic species are on the verge of extinction. Conclusion chapter abstractThe Conclusion provides an overview of the current humanitarian crisis in Yemen and Soqotra's renewed isolation since Yemen's civil war began in 2015. It underscores what a small group of Soqotran laymen (para-experts) were able to achieve through their mobilization of cultural heritage during a time of crisis, before the war. It then briefly discusses the two most recent, and potentially competing, visions for the archipelago: UAE-funded development and a new, Global Environment Facility (GEF)-funded conservation-and-development project. It offers suggestions for how ethnic and linguistic minorities like Soqotrans can be supported in their cultural work. And it concludes with some lessons learned from the author's interlocutors.

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Book SynopsisWhether motivated by humanitarianism or concern over "porous" borders, dominant commentary on migration in Europe has consistently focused on clandestine border crossings. Much less, however, is known about the everyday workings of immigration law inside borders. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, one of Europe's biggest receiving countries, Rules, Paper, Status moves away from polarized depictions to reveal how migration processes actually play out on the ground. Anna Tuckett highlights the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion produced through encounters with immigration law. The statuses of "legal" or "illegal," which media and political accounts use as synonyms for "good" and "bad," "worthy" and "unworthy," are not created by practices of border-crossing, but rather through legal and bureaucratic processes within borders devised by governing states. Taking migrants' interactions with immigration regimes as its starting point, this book sheds light on the productive nature of legal and bureaucratic encounters and the unintended consequences they produce. Rules, Paper, Status argues that successfully navigating Italian immigration bureaucracy, which is situated in an immigration regime that is both exclusionary and flexible, requires and induces culturally specific modes of behavior. Exclusionary laws, however, can transform this social and cultural learning into the very thing that endangers migrants' right to live in the country. Trade Review"This compelling book transports the reader into the maze of immigration law enforcement in Italy. A must-read for immigration scholars and anyone interested in the day-to-day workings of street-level bureaucrats and the myriad ways they make law and in the process, transform immigrants into 'cultural citizens.'" -- Kitty Calavita * University of California, Irvine *"Anna Tuckett's lively and engaging book sheds new light on the confused relationship between migrants and Italian state bureaucracy, and the gaps between formal law and 'practical stuff.' Rules, Paper, Status makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the bureaucratic and legal anomalies produced by the current 'moral panic' in Europe concerning immigration." -- Anthony Good * University of Edinburgh *"[Tuckett's] findings show that, paradoxically, even while migrants develop cultural skills in navigating bureaucratic norms, these abilities do not challenge the larger exclusionary views and practices of the Italian state and society....Tuckett's clear, concise writing makes this book an excellent gateway to a critical topic treated with analytical rigor....Highly recommended." -- A.H. Fabos * CHOICE *"By focusing on the sinewy and unstable ties between migrants and their legal status, [Tuckett] offers a rich analysis of legal and bureaucratic practices that shape migrants' economic and political opportunities as well as their social and cultural life in Italy.[Rules, Paper Status] provides a crucial contribution to theorizing about citizenship in European countries and the hegemonic discourse of integration."––Veronica Ferrari, Allegra"Rules, Paper, Status is a timely and relevant contribution to understanding the workings of the state beyond discourses of border enforcement....[it] speaks to a broader readership, including academics and state officials, and contributes to contemporary discussions on studying the 'state' at street level." -- Lisa Marie Borelli * Anthropology in Action *"Rules, Papers, Status is a vivid journey into the workaday functioning of the Italian 'documentation regime'[It] poignantly depicts a country that seems unable to come to terms with its migrants." -- Tiziana Caponio * International Migration Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter examines the historical trajectory of Italian immigration law and the political and economic context from which it emerges. In general migrants have not been welcomed into Italian society, but low birth rates and a high aging population make their presence crucial. Italian immigration law, which is a curious mixture between harsh and exclusionary policies and frequent large-scale legalizations, embodies this ambiguous attitude towards migrants. This chapter argues that equal attention must be given to processes relating to "legalization" as to those relating to "illegalization" when considering migrants' experiences of "legal" and "illegal" statuses. While other studies on experiences of immigration law tend to focus on migrants' experiences of uncertainty, this focus on the bureaucratic and documentary practices of immigration provides insights on alternative affective dimensions of immigration law and its material artefacts. 1The Center chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's central fieldsite: a trade union affiliated migrant advice center which provides support and assistance to migrants in their completion of application forms, as well as navigation of the immigration bureaucracy more generally. Trade unions have a central function in the Italian welfare state, and the center's role in completing migrants' application forms is closely connected to this. Although affiliated to the trade union, in the eyes of its visitors, and in practice, the center's role is often blurred with that of the Questura (Immigration Office) and the state in general. Because the center acts as a mediator between migrants and the Questura, the assistance which clients received could determine application outcomes. Not all staff members were equally able or interested in migration matters, however, and the quality of assistance they provided was highly variable. 2Working the Gap: Migrants' Navigation of Immigration Bureaucracy chapter abstractThrough gripping case studies, this chapter illustrates how everyday experiences with Italian immigration bureaucracy are characterized by uncertainty, arbitrariness, and frustration. By closely examining migrants' bureaucratic encounters, however, the chapter reveals that the bureaucracy's arbitrary and uncertain nature also makes it flexible and relatively easy to manipulate. By engaging in effective strategies of navigation, migrants are able to manipulate the law's loopholes and aid the acceptance of applications. Tracing migrants' strategies, this chapter argues that "formal" and "informal" spheres are interdependent and symbiotic: migrants, brokers, advisers, and officials all must engage in "informal" and extra-legal practices in order to successfully navigate the immigration bureaucracy. 3The Rules of Rule-Bending chapter abstractThis chapter argues that rule bending is revealing of broader attitudes to the state and bureaucracy in Italy which, through their bureaucratic encounters, migrants also come to hold. Bureaucratic engagements are thus forms of citizen-making. Socially acceptable rule-breaking, however, is accompanied by strict compliance with proceduralism in relation to paperwork. Successfully navigating the immigration bureaucracy requires expertise in the management of documents: paper trails must seem authentic even if false. Yet, given the documented nature of migrants' lives, rule-bending in one application can potentially create problems in others, meaning that even skillful rule-bending can result in high risks for migrants, such as the loss of legal status or foreclosing the attainment of citizenship. There thus exists a mismatch between a migrant's social knowledge – which is required to navigate the bureaucracy – and exclusionary citizenship laws that make this embeddedness precarious. 4Becoming an Immigration Adviser: Self-Fashioning through Bureaucratic Practice chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the role of community brokers – informal immigration advisers with migrant backgrounds – and shows how they style themselves as bureaucratic experts. Doing so enables these brokers to develop new subjectivities and fashion themselves in affective terms. Becoming advisers enables them a degree of professionalism, helps them gain standing in their community, satisfies charitable impulses, and places them center stage in the fight for social justice. Crucially, the role of a community broker offers possibilities for gaining social status that are generally not otherwise available to migrants in Italy. 5Disjuncture in the Documentation Regime: The Second Generation's Challenge to Citizenship Law chapter abstractReflecting on the second generation's experiences of immigration bureaucracy, this chapter considers the contradictory and divergent affects of immigration law encounters. If dealings with the immigration bureaucracy produce opportunities for first-generation migrants and their advisers, for the second-generation they create upset and disjuncture. This generation is the most vulnerable group in terms of immigration policies as its members may suddenly find themselves as "undocumented immigrants" after turning 18, due to Italy's jus sanguinis nationality policy. Their sense of ease and integration in Italian society make them strangers to the immigration bureaucracy which – due to restrictive immigration and citizenship laws – they are nonetheless subject. The disjuncture made apparent through the second generation's subjection to immigration law highlights the profound injustices and inequalities that such laws create for all migrants. 6Stepping-Stone Destinations: Migration and Disappointment chapter abstractThis chapter explores migrants' feelings of disappointment about their migration trajectory in Italy and their desire to leave the country. The disappointment of those who aspire to migrate but ultimately never leave their homelands has been extensively discussed in migration studies literature. The chapter places the focus on those who have migrated but who still feel as though they have failed due to their lack of onward mobility from Italy. Focusing on the feelings of disappointment and personal failure experienced by those who have already migrated, it highlights the differentiated inclusion of migrants into the global marketplace. The desire to leave Italy, whether imagined or acted upon, shows how the mobility enabled by neoliberal globalization reproduces hierarchies within the EU. By viewing Italy as a mere stepping stone in a longer trajectory, migrants – both those who leave and those who remain – conceptualize the country as an inferior destination. Conclusion: chapter abstractDrawing the preceding chapters together, this conclusion argues that the "border spectacle" (De Genova 2002) produces a lopsided view of migration by obscuring how immigration policies relate to broader political and economic processes of contemporary migration and globalization. Situating migrants' navigation of the documentation regime in relation to these process, the chapter argues that migrants' maneuvering provides them with only meagre benefits, while employers, lawyers, policy makers, and other stakeholders within the immigration nexus reap the rewards. The final section of the conclusion reflects on what policies could improve the current situation in light of the problems identified.

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Book SynopsisThe 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange forcibly relocated one and a half million people: Muslims in Greece were resettled in Turkey, and Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey were moved to Greece. This landmark event set a legal precedent for population management on the basis of religious or ethnic difference. Similar segregative policies—such as creating walls, partitions, and apartheids—have followed in its wake. Strikingly, the exchange was purportedly enacted as a means to achieve peace. Humanism in Ruins maps the links between liberal discourses on peace and the legacies of this forced migration. Aslı Iğsız weaves together past and present, making visible the effects in Turkey across the ensuing century, of the 1923 exchange. Liberal humanism has responded to segregative policies by calling for coexistence and the acceptance of cultural diversity. Yet, as Iğsız makes clear, liberal humanism itself, with its ahistorical emphasis on a shared humanity, fails to confront an underlying racialized logic. This far-reaching and multilayered cultural history investigates what it means to be human—historically, socially, and politically. It delivers an urgent message about the politics of difference at a time when the reincarnation of fascism in different parts of the world invites citizens to participate in perpetuating a racialized and unequal world. Trade Review"Aslı Iğsız offers original and creative insight into the aftermath of the 1923 population exchange. A superb genealogy of cultural policy and the politics of culture in Turkey." -- Yael Navaro * University of Cambridge *"Humanism in Ruins incisively reveals how liberal discourses of peace and tolerance have been entangled with the racialization of social difference. An impressive contribution to the critical study of liberalism in the Middle East." -- Kabir Tambar * Stanford University *"At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people were displaced by war or violent conflict. It is virtually certain that mass population movements will continue, and it is clear that there is a pressing need to change the terms of the international debate and policy regarding the issue. This reality deems Aslı Iğsız's insightful book, Humanism in Ruins, to be not only timely but also an essential read."––Elektra Kostopoulou, Jadaliyya"[An] original and necessary work....At the center of Iğsız's virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: "the policies of biopolitics"....intellectually, politically, and in every other sense, a truly courageous book."––Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya"Iğsız's work is...unique in tracing the foundational imprint historicist humanism has made on liberal humanism....As we see the segregative logic of walls and fortresses emerging anew, as a response to the largest refugee crisis to occur since World War II, attending to the complex and contradictory histories and effects of existing humanitarian regimes takes on great urgency."––Esra Özyürek, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Humanism in Ruins] is the latest addition to the growing literature of critical analysis of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and without a doubt debunks the myth that it was a win-win solution and a clear achievement once and for all....Each part is strong enough to be a stand-alone treatise and an invitation for engaged and committed practices of cultural analysis." -- Nergis Canefe * EuropeNow *"Iğsız's perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies....Humanism in Ruins is an excellent and complex analysis of the racist legacies of population exchanges in modern-day cultural policies." -- Ceren Özgül * New Perspectives on Turkey *"Humanism in Ruins is a brilliant, path-breaking book....Igsiz makes major interventions into debates on liberalism, culture, and politics. And for those who have been decrying the paucity of works on race in Middle East studies, this book is a very welcome addition....There is much to digest in this fascinating and highly original work, so much that it is hard to do justice to it in a short review." -- Beth Baron * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Humanism in Ruins is a stimulating and well-structured book.[It] manages to move successfully through a great variety of material, historical and theoretical, and offers a fruitful contribution in the field of migration studies." -- Alexandros Sakellariou * International Migration Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsBy Way of an Introduction: The Entangled Legacies of a Population Exchange chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the key concepts as well as the general approach and methodology of the book: biopolitics, humanism, ruins, and palimpsests. These concepts are later further developed in the relevant chapters, in relation to the analysis of the sources, but here they are laid out in relation to the entangled legacies of the 1923 exchange in general. The Introduction also provides a lengthy historicization of the 1923 exchange together with the notion of "racialized thinking" that constitutes the basis for the discussion of biopolitics and humanism. Part I: Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family chapter abstractThis chapter discusses various scholars—eugenicists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars among others—and their intellectual networks to unravel a complex, transnational intellectual and cultural history, and addresses the entangled dynamics revolving around the segregative legacy of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Focusing on the first decade after 1945, this part traces how segregative biopolitics was addressed transnationally through a refugee association presided over by a Turkish eugenicist, Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and founded in collaboration with an Italian eugenicist and statistician, Corrado Gini—who also was a supporter of Mussolini's fascism. The 1923 exchange was a reference point for the association and for the research it promoted. Against this backdrop, the chapter also analyzes the rise of UNESCO-oriented cultural policies developed to address alterity and race during that period, with a special focus on liberal humanism and a photography exhibition: The Family of Man. Part II: Of Origins and "Men": Family History, Genealogy, and Historicist Humanism Revisited chapter abstractThis part turns to the notions of genealogy and origins and attends to their different uses across time and space in relation to the 1923 exchange, racialized thinking, and historicist humanism. It begins with post-1990s Turkey and traces how legacies of segregative biopolitics were primarily engaged on a personal level through family histories configured as cultural heritage. Engaging individual and institutional practices that configured family histories as sites of articulating different backgrounds—alterity—after the 1980 military coup, the part considers the implications of engaging biopolitical ruins via individual genealogies and origins configured through the family. Next, it historicizes other forms of engaging genealogies and origins and examines this process through historicist humanism and racialized thinking, which were instrumental in categorizing peoples on the paths that led to segregative policies in general, the 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange in particular. Part III: Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism chapter abstractThis part traces the palimpsests of cultural policy pertaining to contemporary liberal multiculturalism in Turkey and the European Union. Addressing liberal and historicist humanism embedded in liberal multiculturalism narratives in Turkey and beyond, this part engages the discourses and policies that enabled the building of the first 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum in Turkey as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture project. Considering the impact of UNESCO's cultural policies on the EU, which then traveled to Turkey, this part addresses the limits of liberal multiculturalism and the form it took in Turkey: neo-Ottomanism. After tracing the transnational crossing of liberal multiculturalism to Turkey, the part turns to the local historical context that neo-Ottomanism draws from: cultural policy in the post-1980 coup era and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and its broader implications for the fascistic historicist humanism mobilized during the 1980 coup era. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Cultural Analysis in an Age of Securitarianism chapter abstractThe Conclusion picks up the threads of the analysis laid out throughout the book and reconsiders the relevance of the book's key concepts such as biopolitics, segregation, and culture from the perspective of the contemporary rise of neofascism, securitarianism, and xenophobia.

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Book SynopsisWaste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.Trade Review"There are so many reasons to read this book: it's brilliantly written, theoretically innovative, and politically necessary. Waste Siege is not only one of the most original accounts of waste to date, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the ongoing occupation of the West Bank from the perspective of ordinary Palestinians."—Joshua Reno, author of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill"Waste Siege is an original and innovative account of living with the inundation of debris and toxicity in Palestine. Taking the reader on a journey through landfills and rubbish markets, encounters with bags of bread left hanging on the sides of dumpsters, and the movement of sewage across political barriers, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins brilliantly excavates the ambient politics of waste and its management."—Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics"[An] insightful, penetrating account of life under six decades of military occupation for the nearly three million Palestinians....In this well-written, intelligent account based on firsthand ethnographic fieldwork, the author displays a keen understanding of both waste ecology and contemporary life in occupied Palestine. Highly recommended."—G. M. Massey, CHOICE"Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance."—Kareem Rabie, PoLAR"Waste Siege is a welcome addition to the sparse literature about the environment, waste, and infrastructure in Palestine and the Middle East more broadly.[An] important work."—Basma Fahoum, Arab Studies Quarterly"By tracing the flows and forces of waste siege, this text enables a more refined understanding of the socio-political worlds forged with, under, and against occupation....In Stamatopoulou-Robbins's ethnography, environment, occupation, and everyday life are grasped in a single frame."—Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Benjamin Kaplan Weinger, Cultural Geographies"Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste."—Sharon Stephens Book Prize Committee"Stamatopoulou-Robbins provides a visceral and theoretically sophisticated guide to the disposability, toxicity, and ethical dilemmas that Palestinians confront in the West Bank today.Grounded in the anthropology of waste, the state, the environment, and infrastructure,Waste Siegeis a theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, beautifully written exploration of the 'kind of living we do in the constantly changing ruins we have made.'"—Andy Clarno,Journal for Palestine Studies"Waste Siege is a captivating book on the impact of the global inundation of waste, and waste infrastructure, on the lives of Palestinians. In a sense, Stamatopoulou-Robbins carves out the constellation surrounding waste, and in a bigger picture, a global economy of inundation... This book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in the lives of Palestinians under occupation from a refreshing perspective on the nation, and the nation-state. It is a wonderful analysis of Palestinian statehood and the ensuing debate on the Authority's success as a governing body."—Christina Bouri, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy"Stamatopoulou-Robbins's interviews are a particular strength of Waste Siege. Some of her interlocutors are the men of the rabish and the consumers of second-hand goods who tell a story about garbage intertwined with the issues of class and views of the other, all set within the sprawling networks of flea markets."—Lauren Banko, International Journal of Islamic Architecture"Waste Siegeis a brilliant and insightful ethnography into the West Bank's inundation of waste dumped from Israel, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian cities. Stamatopoulou-Robbins does not just focus on what the Israeli military does to the Palestinians, but the role Palestinian political parties, bureaucrats, humanitarian NGOs, and the international community play in the slow degradation of Palestinian life through waste."—Tina Guirguis, Society and SpaceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Compression: How to Make Time at an Occupied Landfill 2. Inundated: Wanting Used Colonial Goods 3. Accumulation: Toxicity and Blame in a Phantom State 4. Gifted: Unwanted Bread and Its Stranger Obligations 5. Leakage: Sewage and Doublethink in a "Shared Environment" Conclusion

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Book Synopsis"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice—inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world. Trade Review"Through meticulous and uniquely collaborative ethnography, Mafia Raj opens readers' eyes to the murky world of bosses in South Asia. With unforgettable portraits of the gangsters, politicians, hustlers, and extortionists dotting the region, this is the rare scholarly account that upends our commonly accepted notions of democracy, formality, and legitimacy."—Milan Vaishnav, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace"Why does the figure of 'the boss,' in its various guises, loom so large in South Asia? In answering this question, the authors of this engagingly written book make a path-breaking contribution to the study of South Asian politics."—John Harriss, Simon Fraser University"The authors, who are experts in anthropology and South Asian studies at several European institutions, illustrate the 'art of bossing'—techniques and methods used by such figures to climb to power and maintain their sovereignty. While some of these strategies are shared by their counterparts in different parts of the world, South Asian gangsters demonstrate a unique strength: their involvement in and utilization of electoral democracy, which, ironically, keeps them in power...This book is a timely scholarly work on a little-studied aspect of South Asian politics...Recommended."—A. Y. Lee, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Backdrops 2. The Rookie 3. The Bluffer 4. The Henchman 5. The Adjudicators 6. Lady Dabang 7. The Godfather 8. The Legend Conclusion: The Art of Bossing

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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 SynopsisPhilosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole.Trade Review"This stunning book is unlike any other I have read on the topic of death. Hans Ruin's philosophical analysis does important work that previous books simply have not attempted or achieved. His investigation into what we do with the dead allows us to gain purchase on what is at stake in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, literature, religion, and above all history."—Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University"Hans Ruin's excellent book extends the phenomenology of death in new and interesting ways. His insights into the cultural significance of death, integrating it with the philosophical literature, make this a remarkable achievement."—James Risser, Seattle University"What is the historian's relationship to death? What does it mean to be with the dead: as their caretakers, keepers of their legacy, guardians of their afterlife? These are the questions at the center of Hans Ruin's highly original exploration of the connections between burial practices and historical writing. This beautifully written book is an example of interdisciplinarity at its best, combining deft philosophical argument with the insights of social and cultural history. It should provoke historians, especially, to think critically about the ethical, spiritual, and political stakes of the work they do."—Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study"Being with the Dead is beautifully written and offers interdisciplinary breadth and philosophical rigour on a subject that lies at the very core of memory studies."—Siobhan Kattago, Memory Studies"Being with the Dead [is] a work whose clarity, interdisciplinary prowess, and originality rank it among the best and most provocative philosophical works in the continental idiom in recent years."—Jason M. Wirth, Los Angeles Review of Books"Ruin's study offers a subtle yet by no means recondite project, broad and interdisciplinary in scope."—Babette Babich, History and Theory"Ruin's critique offers a compelling argument for the ways in which necropolitics reveal the othering practices and colonialist discourse of many disciplines in the academy."—Candi K. Cann, Journal of the American Academy of Religion"Ruin's book is... a well-written reading that seems incredibly worthwhile for historians. His thoughts about what it means 'to be with the dead' open the view to the fact that death and the deceased are playing a role in every area of society. This is supported above all by the logical structure and the clearly structured argumentation in the book. Numerous connectivities for further research are offered to the reader, through which the ontological, ethical and political dimensions of what it means to be with the dead can be explored. And, above all, Being with the Dead is a successful contribution to give the dead more space in the human sciences." –Ekkehard Coenen, Human Studies"In contemporary phenomenology, grief and death are growing areas: Ruin's interdisciplinary attempt to think of being-with as a being with the dead in a spectral community makes of his book a novel approach in this field. More generally, it is a fascinating reading for sociologists, historians and anyone interested in how the relation to the dead shapes the sense of history and of the community."—Manon Piette, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences"One of the finest philosophical works in the Continental idiom in the last two decades."—Jason M. Wirth, Research in PhenomenologyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Thinking after Life: Historicity and Having-Been 2. Thanatologies: On the Social Meanings of Burial 3. Ancestrality: Ghosts, Forefathers, and Other Dead 4. Necropolitics: Contested Communities and Remains of the Dead 5. Ossuary Hermeneutics: Necropolitical Sites of Archaeology 6. Visiting the Land of the Dead: History as Necromancy 7. The Tomb of Metaphysics: Writing, Memory, and the Arts of Survival

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book investigates the emergence and evolution of the organ trade across North Africa and Europe. Seán Columb illuminates the voices and perspectives of organ sellers and brokers to demonstrate how crime and immigration controls produce circumstances where the business of selling organs has become a feature of economic survival. Drawing on the experiences of African migrants, Trading Life brings together five years of fieldwork charting the development of the organ trade from an informal economic activity into a structured criminal network operating within and between Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, and Europe. Ground-level analysis provides new insight into the operation of organ trading networks and the impact of current legal and policy measures in response to the organ trade. Columb reveals how investing financial and administrative resources into law enforcement and border securitization at the expense of social services has led to the convergence of illicit smuggling and organ trading networks and the development of organized crime. Trading Life delivers a powerful and grounded analysis of how economic pressures and the demands of survival force people into exploitative arrangements, like selling a kidney, that they would otherwise avoid. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, organized crime, and exploitation.Trade Review"Trading Life vividly and persuasively shows that anti-trafficking law and policy directed at suppressing the organ trade in Cairo has precisely the opposite effect, predictably resulting in greater brutality and exploitation of the most vulnerable. A compelling and powerful look at how law generates violence." -- Audrey Macklin * University of Toronto *"Trading Life is a real exploration that finally gives victims a voice and allows an understanding of the mechanisms and conditions leading them to sell their organs. One of the most concrete books on organ trafficking." -- Agnès Noël * Le Monde *"This is a timely, scholarly study, based on rich and at times risky fieldwork. It will be of great interest to the general public, as well as scholars in criminology, law and society, and public policy." -- Federico Varese * Oxford University *"Columb has succeeded in writing a book that is accessible and understandable for a broad audience, including law -and policy makers, scholars, teachers and students with an interest in migration issues, exploitation, trafficking, smuggling and illicit networks. It is also insightful for those aiming to understand what happens to a market once it becomes illegal. Scientifically, Columb has provided essential building blocks that help to advance knowledge of the organ trade, both empirically and theoretically. His insights have opened up new methods of approach, demonstrating the need to incorporate corporate crime perspectives, crimmigation, and legal/state-induced forms of exploitation to the study of the organ trade. Columb's book should be a core resource for anyone studying this crime." -- Frederike Ambagtsheer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Excavating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe introductory chapter provides contextual background on the organ trade and outlines the key themes and arguments in the book. The current legal and policy response to the organ trade is critically examined at the international level. This analysis leads to an explanation of how law and policy produce and construct vulnerability to exploitation in organ markets. Egypt is introduced as the main research site, where in-depth narrative interviews were carried out with organ sellers, brokers, and transplant professionals. 2The Illegal Trade in Organs chapter abstractChapter 2 examines how an illegal market in organs emerged in the Egyptian-Sudanese context. Contrary to popular opinion, the organ trade is not a direct consequence of a global shortage in organs. Rather, the trade in organs is causally related to the transfer of transplant capabilities to the global South. Accordingly, the commercial expansion of the transplant industry is linked to the emergence of organ trading as an economic activity. The organ trade is thus better understood as an informal economy activity as opposed to a human trafficking offense. 3Organ Trading Networks chapter abstractThe findings in Chapter 3 reflect personal encounters with Sudanese (North and South) nationals who sold or arranged the sale of kidneys. Their accounts provide unique insights into the organization and activities of organ trading networks in Cairo and the political and social arrangements that compel people to consider selling a kidney. 4Disqualified Bodies chapter abstractChapter 4 examines the background conditions and legal structures that underpin exploitative relations in organ markets. Although some of the study respondents were physically coerced into organ removal, it is exploitation experienced at the structural level that ultimately pushes people into organ sale. In this regard, the oppressive processes of exploitation that position migrant populations as organ sellers in Cairo are explored through the social and legal context in which migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have sold a kidney. The wider implications of legal measures established in response to reports of organ trafficking are considered. 5Exodus chapter abstractChapter 5 engages with the narratives of African migrants who attempted to make the journey to Europe using irregular routes. Unable to finance the cost of travel, people smugglers (referred to as samsara by the respondents) encouraged them to sell a kidney to raise the necessary capital. The experiences of the Sudanese, Eritrean, and Ethiopian migrants interviewed in Cairo are used to examine the impact of crime and immigration controls on informal market dynamics and to explore the convergence of smuggling and organ trading networks in Cairo's informal economy. 6Organ(ized) Crime chapter abstractChapter 6 explores how changes to the regulatory environment influenced the level of physical violence involved in the organ trade and the organizational structure of a criminal group operating within and between Khartoum, Sudan, and Cairo, Egypt. The criminal organization described in this chapter should not be taken as representative of the organ trade as a whole, as it exists in Egypt or elsewhere. It does, however, signal a need for policy change to prevent the development of more pernicious forms of organized crime. 7Regulating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe adverse effects of crime and immigration policies suggest that more far-reaching legal reforms are needed with regard to the organ trade and to other forms of exploitation nominally defined as trafficking offenses. In this final chapter alternative regulatory approaches beyond criminal sanction are explored.

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Book SynopsisThe military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.Trade Review"A forgotten struggle; a glorious but fated political moment in which peasants took on Pakistan's military might and for more than a decade seemed to be winning. Rizvi tells this complex story with a lot of flare and feeling, providing historical and social context for a remarkable movement with the most unlikely of heroes." -- Mohammed Hanif * The New York Times *"In this incisive study Rizvi blends history and ethnography to analyze the continuing impacts of colonial land colonization on relationships between state and society, city and country. Theoretically sophisticated, the book represents a milestone in reorienting how we think about contemporary, agrarian Pakistan." -- David Gilmartin * North Carolina State University *"[The Ethics of Staying] addresses urgent questions, such as: How did sharecroppers disarm the Pakistani Army in the midst of dictatorial rule? Why and on what basis did they risk their lives for land they didn't legally own? How have they managed to survive in the context of extreme repression?....[This] book is a hopeful and necessary read." -- Mel Gurr * PoLAR *"[An] engaging ethnographic account....The Ethics of Staying is a fascinating read and should be of interest to scholars of rural social movements, subaltern studies, and development." -- Kurt Schock * Mobilization *"[Rizvi's] detailed and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is the real strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims that exceed legal property rights." -- Humeira Iqtidar * Pacific Affairs *"The Ethics of Staying is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on land conflicts and popular politics in South Asia. Rizvi's account of the [Punjab Tenants Association's] successful mobilisation for rights to land and livelihood also offers a glimmer of hope at a conjuncture where both Pakistan and India are turning increasingly authoritarian and display ever-decreasing tolerance for the rights-based claims of subaltern movements." -- Kenneth Bo Nielsen * Journal of Contemporary Asia *"In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir Rizvi provides an immense depth of ethnographic detail surrounding a farmers' movement that captured the national imagination during a time of military rule. In its endeavour to examine the many internal and external dynamics that shaped the biography of a social movement, it also speaks to the future of any politics against commodification and dispossession. As such, it forms an extremely important contribution to scholarship on civil-military relations, social movements, and land in contemporary Pakistan." -- Aisha Ahmad * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction chapter abstractThis chapter describes the series of events by which a local struggle became a national event. It introduces the primary interlocutors and takes the reader to three different villages where the author conducted most of the interviews. These villages varied between the oldest predominantly Christian village, another predominantly Muslim village and a third largely mixed Muslim-Christian village in Okara district. It introduces the different occupational castes, the traditional forms of solidarity, and how these bonds of solidarity changed with the rise of the tenants' mobilization. It outlines arguments on the spatial history of rights, the provisional solidarities enabled by social movements, and the varied effect of NGOs and urban activists on rural grassroots mobilizations. 2Politics as Process in Okara Military Farms chapter abstractThis chapter describes the political negotiation, ruptures, and innovations that allowed disparate groups of tenant farmers to come together across caste, gender, and religious differences and mobilize around a class identity as sharecroppers. The ethnographic analysis of AMP mobilization challenges the bifurcation of social movements between the "the politics of distribution" and "the politics of recognition." This chapter argues that the fate of social movements is forged by how they negotiate both sides of power. It argues that peasant movements foreground different concepts of political possibilities from their own alternative and deeply rooted traditions as refracted through social histories. Hence, AMP does not presume an organic, essentialist position that is sometimes projected onto indigenous or peasant communities, nor does it posit a utopian open future. The politics of AMP are provisional, based around tenants' ability to translate customary rights and obligations into political action. Chapter 3: The Afterlife of Colonial Infrastructure chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the regional history of canal colonization and provides a context for the establishment of military farms at the turn of 20th century Punjab. The canal irrigation projects ushered in a new era of regional modernity in Punjab with far reaching consequences for the relationship between land and people in this region. This chapter analyzes the formation of a distinct regional modernity in Punjab that brought the colonial state and peasantry in a direct relationship. It develops the classic theory of gift exchange to analyze the highly personalized relationship between people and colonial institutions that was created through large infrastructure projects that worked through dual idioms of modern technology and customary identities. This chapter illustrates how these dual links are appropriated and repurposed by tenant farmers to make claims over land. Chapter 4: What Remains Buried Under Property? chapter abstractThis chapter examines the moral economy of land rights and the broader understanding of land rights politics as they are understood by different members of AMP. Land is one of the most important yet overlooked elements of social movements because it is often regarded as an economic resource, or exclusively as the object of contestation. However, the variation of land settlements, land relations, and the evolution of the property regime showcase varied cultural understandings of rights, value, and political subjectivity that is shaped by different conceptions of land rights. This abstract question also became an important source of discussion for the tenant farmers once they were able to occupy and cultivate their lands. 5Movement and Mobilization chapter abstractThis chapter describes the subaltern meaning of land rights, which is different from the conception of rights based on citizenship and/or property ownership. This chapter argues that the central force of a social movement is ontological: it ushers a new way of seeing and relating to the world. Social movements have the ability to take particular issues and universalize them as a form knowledge and praxis. For instance, the AMP enlarged tenants' objections to cash contract farming into a discussion of land reform, citizenship rights, democracy, and human rights in Pakistan by relating them to a history of the hardships of settlement, the experience of partition, and the poverty of the sharecropping regime. This provisional political identity is built around a narrative that allowed the tenant farmers to bridge gender, caste, and religious differences. However, this provisional source of solidarity grew weaker as the tenants made some gains. 6Solidarities, Fault Lines, and the Scale of Struggle chapter abstractThis chapter examines the problems faced by AMP as the tenants' leadership allied with urban activists, civil society groups, and NGOs to gain publicity and visibility for their struggle. The aim here is to understand how scalability figures into subaltern politics of survival. The AMP subaltern and highly local articulations of land rights were represented in the abstract and universal framework of "Rights" favored by NGOs and "Class struggle" advocated by Left activists. These organization helped increase the visibility of AMP but they also created strong differences between the tenant farmers causing a split in the movement. 7Coda chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the author's approach to the study of AMP as a relationship between land (spatiality), rights, and political subjectivity in Punjab. Rather than looking at the settlement of the Okara military farms or the rise of peasant mobilization in isolation, the author demonstrates the relational aspects of technology, territory, identity, and power in shifting relations of rule and political agency.

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Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

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Book SynopsisThe military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.Trade Review"A forgotten struggle; a glorious but fated political moment in which peasants took on Pakistan's military might and for more than a decade seemed to be winning. Rizvi tells this complex story with a lot of flare and feeling, providing historical and social context for a remarkable movement with the most unlikely of heroes." -- Mohammed Hanif * The New York Times *"In this incisive study Rizvi blends history and ethnography to analyze the continuing impacts of colonial land colonization on relationships between state and society, city and country. Theoretically sophisticated, the book represents a milestone in reorienting how we think about contemporary, agrarian Pakistan." -- David Gilmartin * North Carolina State University *"[The Ethics of Staying] addresses urgent questions, such as: How did sharecroppers disarm the Pakistani Army in the midst of dictatorial rule? Why and on what basis did they risk their lives for land they didn't legally own? How have they managed to survive in the context of extreme repression?....[This] book is a hopeful and necessary read." -- Mel Gurr * PoLAR *"[An] engaging ethnographic account....The Ethics of Staying is a fascinating read and should be of interest to scholars of rural social movements, subaltern studies, and development." -- Kurt Schock * Mobilization *"[Rizvi's] detailed and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is the real strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims that exceed legal property rights." -- Humeira Iqtidar * Pacific Affairs *"The Ethics of Staying is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on land conflicts and popular politics in South Asia. Rizvi's account of the [Punjab Tenants Association's] successful mobilisation for rights to land and livelihood also offers a glimmer of hope at a conjuncture where both Pakistan and India are turning increasingly authoritarian and display ever-decreasing tolerance for the rights-based claims of subaltern movements." -- Kenneth Bo Nielsen * Journal of Contemporary Asia *"In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir Rizvi provides an immense depth of ethnographic detail surrounding a farmers' movement that captured the national imagination during a time of military rule. In its endeavour to examine the many internal and external dynamics that shaped the biography of a social movement, it also speaks to the future of any politics against commodification and dispossession. As such, it forms an extremely important contribution to scholarship on civil-military relations, social movements, and land in contemporary Pakistan." -- Aisha Ahmad * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction chapter abstractThis chapter describes the series of events by which a local struggle became a national event. It introduces the primary interlocutors and takes the reader to three different villages where the author conducted most of the interviews. These villages varied between the oldest predominantly Christian village, another predominantly Muslim village and a third largely mixed Muslim-Christian village in Okara district. It introduces the different occupational castes, the traditional forms of solidarity, and how these bonds of solidarity changed with the rise of the tenants' mobilization. It outlines arguments on the spatial history of rights, the provisional solidarities enabled by social movements, and the varied effect of NGOs and urban activists on rural grassroots mobilizations. 2Politics as Process in Okara Military Farms chapter abstractThis chapter describes the political negotiation, ruptures, and innovations that allowed disparate groups of tenant farmers to come together across caste, gender, and religious differences and mobilize around a class identity as sharecroppers. The ethnographic analysis of AMP mobilization challenges the bifurcation of social movements between the "the politics of distribution" and "the politics of recognition." This chapter argues that the fate of social movements is forged by how they negotiate both sides of power. It argues that peasant movements foreground different concepts of political possibilities from their own alternative and deeply rooted traditions as refracted through social histories. Hence, AMP does not presume an organic, essentialist position that is sometimes projected onto indigenous or peasant communities, nor does it posit a utopian open future. The politics of AMP are provisional, based around tenants' ability to translate customary rights and obligations into political action. Chapter 3: The Afterlife of Colonial Infrastructure chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the regional history of canal colonization and provides a context for the establishment of military farms at the turn of 20th century Punjab. The canal irrigation projects ushered in a new era of regional modernity in Punjab with far reaching consequences for the relationship between land and people in this region. This chapter analyzes the formation of a distinct regional modernity in Punjab that brought the colonial state and peasantry in a direct relationship. It develops the classic theory of gift exchange to analyze the highly personalized relationship between people and colonial institutions that was created through large infrastructure projects that worked through dual idioms of modern technology and customary identities. This chapter illustrates how these dual links are appropriated and repurposed by tenant farmers to make claims over land. Chapter 4: What Remains Buried Under Property? chapter abstractThis chapter examines the moral economy of land rights and the broader understanding of land rights politics as they are understood by different members of AMP. Land is one of the most important yet overlooked elements of social movements because it is often regarded as an economic resource, or exclusively as the object of contestation. However, the variation of land settlements, land relations, and the evolution of the property regime showcase varied cultural understandings of rights, value, and political subjectivity that is shaped by different conceptions of land rights. This abstract question also became an important source of discussion for the tenant farmers once they were able to occupy and cultivate their lands. 5Movement and Mobilization chapter abstractThis chapter describes the subaltern meaning of land rights, which is different from the conception of rights based on citizenship and/or property ownership. This chapter argues that the central force of a social movement is ontological: it ushers a new way of seeing and relating to the world. Social movements have the ability to take particular issues and universalize them as a form knowledge and praxis. For instance, the AMP enlarged tenants' objections to cash contract farming into a discussion of land reform, citizenship rights, democracy, and human rights in Pakistan by relating them to a history of the hardships of settlement, the experience of partition, and the poverty of the sharecropping regime. This provisional political identity is built around a narrative that allowed the tenant farmers to bridge gender, caste, and religious differences. However, this provisional source of solidarity grew weaker as the tenants made some gains. 6Solidarities, Fault Lines, and the Scale of Struggle chapter abstractThis chapter examines the problems faced by AMP as the tenants' leadership allied with urban activists, civil society groups, and NGOs to gain publicity and visibility for their struggle. The aim here is to understand how scalability figures into subaltern politics of survival. The AMP subaltern and highly local articulations of land rights were represented in the abstract and universal framework of "Rights" favored by NGOs and "Class struggle" advocated by Left activists. These organization helped increase the visibility of AMP but they also created strong differences between the tenant farmers causing a split in the movement. 7Coda chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the author's approach to the study of AMP as a relationship between land (spatiality), rights, and political subjectivity in Punjab. Rather than looking at the settlement of the Okara military farms or the rise of peasant mobilization in isolation, the author demonstrates the relational aspects of technology, territory, identity, and power in shifting relations of rule and political agency.

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Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFew places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair—a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment—which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In this book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond.Trade Review"Richly ethnographic, this study of an environmental movement in Bangladesh takes a fresh and contemporary look at the role of the crowd in democratic politics, distinguishing it from the citizen and the people. Focusing on such everyday phenomena as money, ID cards, accidents, and social media, Nusrat Chowdhury provides unusual glimpses into emotions such as hope, despair, opportunism, and fear that animate crowds assembled for political action." -- Partha Chatterjee * Columbia University *"Theorists of democracy and public life have long been unsettled by the unstable energy of popular assemblies—their capacity both to destroy and create, to betray authority and imagine it anew. Chowdhury's bold, compelling analysis, in contrast, puts the paradoxical power of the street at the center of Bangladeshi history: the spontaneous crowd, she shows, is the very embodiment of popular sovereignty, conjuring the volatile fervor and the 'imperceptible politics' that fuel mass democracy, not only in South Asia, but way beyond." -- Jean Comaroff * Harvard University *"Chowdhury's fascinating ethnography of popular protest in Bangladesh will resonate far beyond her home discipline of anthropology. Paradoxes of the Popular makes an essential contribution to the study of crowd politics in the international contexts of modern mass democracy." -- Jason Frank, Robert J. Katz Chair of Government * Cornell University *"[Paradoxes of the Popular] introduces readers to a novel theoretical terrain, and notions such as the 'imperceptible politics' of mass protests and the act of 'seeing like a crowd' force a reappraisal of anthropological approaches to 'public' life and space. In an era of rising populism, Chowdhury's ethnography has much to offer scholars interested in mass democracy and its inherent paradoxes in South Asia and beyond. Highly recommended." -- E. R. Swenson * CHOICE *"[A] especially rich ethnography of the political....Paradoxes of the Popular shows how mass feelings (from fear and despair to joy and possibility) become political, and how the political (from notions of democracy to demagoguery) is conceptualized in the everyday. The book will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students interested in contemporary Bangladesh, South Asian democracies, and political anthropology more generally." -- Rashmi Sadana * Political and Legal Aanthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the idea of "paradox" to make sense of the contingencies that make up Bangladesh's political modernity as well as the constitutive paradoxes of popular sovereignty. I introduce the Bangla term janata as a vernacular iteration of the concept of the crowd of social and political theory. Drawing on literary representations and scholarly work, the chapter shows why the crowd is the ethnographic object and analytical locus of the book. It sets the theoretical and conceptual stage for locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass politics. 1Picture-Thinking chapter abstractIn chapter 1, I analyze a set of public texts in circulation during a state of emergency—letters published in newspapers, a national identification card, a controversial photograph. Doing so has two ends: First, the chapter expands on the impasse that South Asian democracies often experience when confronting the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. In this logic, a repressive and undemocratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified as a way to protect the masses from their own nature. Second, the chapter expounds on the presumed distinctions between a reading public versus unruly crowds. The letters written by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning "guru of micro credit," remind us how the distinction between the stranger/citizen and an embodied crowd was mobilized at this time so as to usher in a novel era in politics. 2Seeing Like a Crowd chapter abstractAgainst the backdrop of the transparency fetish of the emergency, Phulbari's protest culture presents an alternative politics of seeing—what I describe as "seeing like a crowd." By identifying the significance of money in aesthetic productions and political acts, I show how the preoccupation with money differed from the nationwide drive against corruption. The chapter focuses first on a painting by a Phulbari artist. I argue that its message contrasts with the viciously apolitical desire for efficiency and good governance in a globally recognized language of neoliberal transparency. I then present the recollections of a socially marginalized woman who became the face of grassroots mobilization. I situate the looting and burning of money by the crowds within the larger context of the national political crisis. These popular strategies were a form of a transparency-making enterprise, if only with different political effect than the anticorruption agenda of the state. 3Accidental Politics chapter abstractChapter 3 is an ethnographic account of the accidental, the contingent, and the imperceptible nature of crowd politics. To understand the political possibilities of accidents and to assess their ethnographic significance, in this chapter I approach accidents both literally and conceptually. Can accidents be political? What kinds of politics take shape in the wake of an accident? And what are the ethico-political possibilities that are made available, or are foreclosed, within various discourses of the accidental? Anthropological perspectives on accidents, I argue in this chapter, rescue the concept from its usual modernist and technicist moorings while opening up spaces of radical contingencies that are enframed in local logics of culture and politics. 4Crowds and Collaborators chapter abstractCollaboration, in the sense of working for the enemy and benefiting from it, has given rise to a particular kind of crowd politics. From the vantage point of most protesters, a collaborator (dalal) was a figure that straddled the boundaries of the community and whatever stood beyond it. A dalal was by definition a local, though his ties to the foreign were exposed through suspicion, gossip, jokes, and assaults. Chapter 4 examines this culture of accusation of collaboration in order to illuminate the entangled effects of aggressive resource extraction, collective sovereignty, and popular and state-initiated attempts at settling the score with the nation's past. Following Walter Benjamin's writing on the "intriguer" and scholarly interest in the "neighbor," I submit that the dalal is a third type that disturbs the duality of friend and enemy. This ambivalence produces a culture of doubt and suspicion that demands certainty, often through violence. 5The Body of the Crowd chapter abstractChapter 5 is located in post-emergency Bangladesh. Its primary sites are spaces of politics and activism that are both emergent and historically poignant. I explore a particular fascination with the body and its relationship to crowd politics in the context of protests against the International Crimes Tribunal. The chapter comments on the proliferation of technologies that has impacted social and political communication. Increased surveillance in public spaces indicates more rigorous efforts to control spaces and bodies, illustrated by two events I analyze: an exposé of public sexual harassment and a viral video of a public lynching. On the one hand, I argue, secular and religious crowds, in their desires to be seen and heard, often end up mirroring each other. On the other hand, individual social media users often act collectively, performing the excess and volatility associated with crowds. Conclusion chapter abstractIn August 2017, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division released the text of a verdict that scrapped the sixteenth constitutional amendment. Passed in 2014, the amendment gave Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges for misconduct or incapacity. After it went public, Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha faced the wrath of politicians and party loyalists. "No nation, no country is made of or by one person," Sinha wrote in a judgment partly aimed at salvaging the collectivity that played a formative role in achieving national independence. This single line was excerpted and disparate meanings were tagged onto it in order to cast Sinha as disloyal. The fact that his relatively straightforward commitment to a normative assumption of liberal democracy was enough to cost him his job reveals a heightened role of paranoia in Bangladeshi politics. Indeed, it has raised anew the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and political representation in Bangladesh.

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Book SynopsisThis book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.Trade Review"How often do anthropologists rethink field materials from a long-completed project? It's rare. And it's even more rare for them to do so with the depth of commitment and breadth of knowledge Silber brings to this remarkable book. Writing with clarity, humility, and a deep sense of engagement, she has produced an ethnography unlike any I've ever read."—Danilyn Rutherford, The Wenner-Gren Foundation"After Storiesis a beautiful example of how profoundly powerful reflexive, long-term ethnographic research can be! Silber urges us to question the relationships between the 'befores' and 'afters' of transformative change, reframes our understandings of truth and justice, and reorients the project of anthropology as a whole. A real tour de force!"—Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"Ethnographic studies like Silber's tend to defy singular theses, meaning the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts....Recommended."—E. Ching, CHOICE"After Stories is accessible to a wide audience and written in the voice of an ethnographer who has spent time listening to, and learning to tell, stories about rural El Salvador.... The book contains several creative interventions, including a critical, disquieting reflexivity and addressing the reader directly with the use of the second person singular. It is a valuable addition to the social sciences and opens multiple possibilities for interdisciplinary theorizing and collaboration."—Mike Anastario, Journal of Anthropological ResearchTable of ContentsOne: Before Two: Numbers Three: Bodies Four: Objects Five: After

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Book SynopsisFrom the US to Nepal, author J. Bradley Wigger travels five countries on three continents to hear children describe their invisible friends—one-hundred-year-old robins and blue dogs, dinosaurs and teapots, pretend families and shape-shifting aliens—companions springing from the deep well of childhood imagination. Drawing on these interviews, as well as a new wave of developmental research, he finds a fluid and flexible quality to the imaginative mind that is central to learning, co-operation, and paradoxically, to real-world rationality. Yet Wigger steps beyond psychological territory to explore the religious significance of the kind of mind that develops relationships with invisible beings. Alongside Cinderella the blue dog, Quack-Quack the duck, and Dino the dinosaur are angels, ancestors, spirits, and gods. What he uncovers is a profound capacity in the religious imagination to see through the surface of reality to more than meets the eye. Punctuated throughout by children's colorful drawings of their see-through interlocutors, the book is highly engaging and alternately endearing, moving, and humorous. Not just for parents or for those who work with children, Invisible Companions will appeal to anyone interested in our mind's creative and spiritual possibilities.Trade Review"Brad Wigger took the time to shed his professorial skin, entering with empathy into the world of children who trusted him enough to reveal themselves. He's now returned from their world to make the invisible visible. Read this book to open your eyes—wide!" -- Jerome Berryman * Godly Play Foundation *"Brad Wigger's artful mix of storytelling and new research captivates the imagination, drawing us into his own journey of discovery. One of the best reads I have enjoyed for some time, his delightful book shares valuable reflections on human uniqueness, early childhood development, and the origins of religion." -- Justin Barrett * Fuller Theological Seminary *"In this captivating book, Brad Wigger's intriguing research on young children's imaginary friends leads us into deep consideration of our remarkable human capacity for social imagination. Whether your primary interest is child development, the cognitive foundations of religion, or human nature itself, you will find much to think about here." -- Peter Gray * author of Free to Learn *"Theologian J. Bradley Wigger interviewed hundreds of children from diverse cultures and found evidence of imaginary friends wherever he looked. His wonderful book documents his quest to understand how these imaginary friends fit into the larger worlds of invisible beings." -- Marjorie Taylor * author of Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them *"Its riveting stories of children and adults aside, this engaging book is ultimately a work of theology that poses a profound question: Is God just another imaginary friend? And, if not, what is the difference?" -- Robert Wuthnow * author of The Left Behind *"[A] charming, insightful, generally persuasive book....The fruits of children's relationships to their invisible friends, as Wigger convincingly presents them, are uncommonly sweet. For that sweetness alone, his book is worth the reading." -- David J. Halperin * Society for Psychical Research *"J. Bradley Wigger challenges us to keep an open mind when it comes to friends that we cannot see. This eloquent book...poses that by having a clearer understanding the imagined world, we have a better grasp on reality." -- Mike Findlay * Psychreg *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: See-through Knowing chapter abstractThe book opens with the author, twenty years earlier, discovering his daughter has an imaginary friend, Crystal. The scene brings together the origins of his interest in invisible friends (IFs) as both personal and professional. Wonder and curiosity forge the motivation driving the research and book: Why do children make up such companions? And beneath this psychological question is a religious one: Is there a connection between a relationship to an invisible friend and one to an invisible God? The notion of "see-through knowing" is inspired by the name Crystal, which, like the glass, is see-through. The narrative style of the chapter introduces the style of the entire book, which itself is inspired by the children it presents, based upon firsthand interviews. Children take in the world around them and create scenes and characters much as novelists (or narrative nonfiction writers) do. 1Life-Givers chapter abstractThe chapter immediately jumps into descriptions of IFs based upon interviews with children over the course of a year: "Meet Quack Quack." It uses children's own words and drawings to highlight large themes that are explored throughout the book: play and pretense, unpredictability and flexibility, and the intensity of childhood relationships. Addressed as well are the ways the research was carried out, previous studies (which are very limited), ethical considerations, definitions of IFs, and the ways children with IFs were recruited (through parents). It draws upon a notion of saints as "life-givers" to frame the friends and the children who created them. 2Flexibility chapter abstractThe chapter presents more descriptions of IFs, focusing upon the theme of flexibility. Categories such as gender and form are less rigid among the IFs of many of the children: Jeff, a boy, is sometimes a girl, Jeffette; Dino is sometimes a dinosaur and at other times a space alien. Space and time are fluid as well: an IF is here one moment, in Florida the next; another IF is thousands of years old. Even life and death are stretched: an IF died but has returned; another went away to be with an aunt who died; another is a girl's grandfather who died but comes back to comfort her when she's sad. The chapter makes connections to a religious imagination (also not limited by death), which, in turn, sets up a discussion of the work and influence of Freud and the parallels between his view of religion and childhood imagination. 3Logic and Imagination chapter abstractThe chapter makes clear that children know the difference between their imaginary friends and "real-life" people. A prevalent fear stoked by Freud's and Piaget's assumptions about early childhood is that children with IFs may be psychologically troubled. Both believed young children were unable to differentiate fantasy from reality and the developmental task is to move from such confusion to a real-world orientation. Drawing upon a new wave of research into early childhood development, the chapter demonstrates how the Freudian/Piagetian framework got the picture wrong, backwards. Imagination is the developmental achievement and actually aids the development of logic and real-world rationality. 4Sharing chapter abstractBeginning with brothers who share an IF named Baby Bear, the chapter draws out the social dimensions of imaginative play. It provides a brief description of the evolutionary emergence and importance of the deeply social qualities of the human mind. The roots of this mind likely grow in the evolutionary soil of care-taking and food sharing; and the chapter highlights themes of sharing and eating found in the interviews (e.g., IFs eat dinner with the family). The chapter takes the notion of a deeply social mind even deeper and makes soft connections to the theme of sharing and eating in religion. 5Wild Mind chapter abstractThe chapter returns to the phenomenon of shapeshifting among some children's IFs. Lucy is a mom, a tiger, a rabbit, a mouse, and more, depending upon the day or hour. But she is still Lucy. Childhood studies of psychological "essentialism" help illumine how and why the essence of Lucy could remain even as her appearance changes. Moreover, the chapter focuses upon play itself in learning and development. When children pretend or imagine, they are "playing with mind." That is, children are playing with the points of view, motivations, and knowledge others have in order to understand the social world with more agility. 6Who Knows What? chapter abstractThe chapter builds a bridge between Parts I and II and provides a more direct discussion of religion. Not only did the author interview children about IFs, he conducted theory-of-mind cognitive tests with them. Theory of mind refers to the ways in which children (or adults) think about the knowledge others possess. "Would Quack Quack know what's in this box if nobody showed him?" The author describes the significance of this research (especially in relation to religion) through his travels and work at the University of Oxford. "Would God know what's in this box?" The results create important challenges to Piaget's theory of development. Primarily, children are not nearly as "concrete" or "egocentric" in thinking as had been thought. They easily think about a mind (like God's) who has never been encountered concretely and can differentiate such a special mind from those of ordinary (limited) humans. 7Ancestors and Angels chapter abstractThe chapter describes interviews conducted among over 300 children in Kenya and Malawi. Over 20% of the Kenyan children had IFs, and over 25% of the children in Malawi did, answering the first question: Do children in developing countries even have IFs? Lack of recreational facilities or toys did not seem to inhibit imagination. Using theory-of-mind tests, the author asked not only about an IF or Christian God in Kenya but about the ancestors and the Sun (both important to the local culture) as well. In Malawi, children were asked about the minds of spirits and angels as well as Allah (among Muslims) and God (among Christians). Results showed strong similarities between the ways children in Kenya, Malawi, and the US think about ordinary and extraordinary minds, including the minds of IFs. 8Gods and Godsibbs chapter abstractThe chapter describes interviews in Nepal (Hindu and Buddhist) and the Dominican Republic (Christian). Only 5% of Nepali children had IFs, while in the DR over a third had them. Reasons for the differences are explored, but generally there seems to be a cultural emphasis upon realism in Nepal that discourages fantasy and imagination. Nonetheless, children in this polytheistic culture tend to think of the minds of gods and goddesses in a way similar to the way children in monotheistic cultures think of God's mind. The deities know in extraordinary ways. In the DR, over a third of the children described IFs and drew pictures of them. In the DR, theory-of-mind results challenge even further Piaget's theory of childhood egocentrism. The chapter turns to evolutionary theories of gossip as a suggestive angle on IFs and our deeply social, if not religious natures. 9Original Knowing chapter abstractThe chapter explores, from an evolutionary perspective, the type of mind that can imagine, and it focuses upon the power of a "social imagination" that not only learns but intentionally teaches and cooperates, which is unique among primates. The capacity leads to "accumulated cultural learning" and the vast differences between humans and others (especially chimps) despite being so similar in DNA makeup. The chapter makes a moral point that our cognition and cooperation do not make us inherently better, but make us dangerous. The temptation is to reduce others and claim our own beliefs ultimate. Religion can do this too. But religion can also resist the temptation and stoke the ability to recognize the irreducible nature of others, the world. Religion can stoke wonder. 10Friends of God chapter abstractThe chapter opens with a friend who has imaginary conversations with his late father (over coffee). It looks at the parallels between novelists with their characters and children with IFs. But the chapter uses these to raise the big question: Are they real? This leads to the question, Is God just an imaginary friend? Some evolutionary psychologists use theory of mind to explain (away) religion. The chapter acknowledges the possible truth of the claim but also some shortcomings: one philosophical (it does not wrestle with why there is a world at all), the other psychological (it does not address the prevalence of unbelief or skepticism even among the religious). Ultimately, drawing upon Jewish mysticism, the chapter turns the question around, raising the possibility that we are God's imaginary friends, born of the Creator's imagination (like an author) for the sake of relationship.

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Book SynopsisIn recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.Trade Review"Chiara De Cesari provides a creative and thoroughly researched account of the way space and the material reality of buildings have become an important, if also contradictory, site for Palestinian claims. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural and architectural heritage, urban transformation, museums, or landscape—and how these are used to counter dispossession." -- Helga Tawil-Souri * New York University *"Chiara De Cesari boldly and creatively shows that politics does not always happen where we expect it to be. In this book, heritage emerges as a site of political mobilization, one in which Palestinian women do more than play a central part: They shape the idioms and create the very materiality in which the temporalities of struggle are woven through people's lives. Through the stories of activists, architects, and residents of Palestine, De Cesari makes a strong case for how Palestinian heritage can make claims and demands on the Israeli state." -- Ann Laura Stoler * The New School for Social Research *"This pathbreaking book links cultural heritage and the postcolonial condition in new and provocative ways. Chiara De Cesari's nuanced ethnography of Palestine reconfigures our understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and culture." -- John F. Collins * author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy *"De Cesari's rigorous analysis takes the reader through a web of complexities which show the different dynamics of heritage. A meticulous treatise indeed—the book makes for valuable reading, in particular when it comes to understanding the many layers of resistance against cultural dispossession and Israel's colonial violence." -- Ramona Wadi * The New Arab *"Chiara De Cesari's book on Palestine appears as a groundbreaking work that offers a different option for understanding how heritage is deployed in a proxy state, a political entity under siege, whose international sovereignty is still being renegotiated." -- Cheikh Lo * Journal of Folklore Research *"De Cesari argues convincingly that NGOs and museums are initiating processes of institutionalization and governance in the absence of a stable [Palestinian] state....This book provides an important opening for a critical discussion regarding the ways in which the word "Palestine" has not lost meaning." -- Rasmieyh R. Abdelnabi * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Chiara de Cesari's study is noteworthy for its acute analysis of the relations between cultural heritage and the nation-state, and for the thoroughness with which she examines this relationship in the case of Palestine." -- Rosemary Sayigh * Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies *"Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine is an illuminating study, useful for both a better understanding of life and struggles in Palestine, and for a broader discussion of the politics of heritage." -- Adi Kuntsman * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Stakes of Heritage and the Politics of Culture chapter abstractThe introduction opens with the story of the Palestinian heritage organization rehabilitating the occupied and colonized Old City of Hebron. This story encapsulates many facets of the book, particularly the relationship between heritage making and Palestinians laying claims to sovereignty (that is, resisting colonization) and instantiating provisional, improvised, resourceful forms of government. It lays out the key argument of the book that Palestinian heritage has transformed from a practice of resistance into a mode of "governing" the Palestinian landscape and society that is deeply connected to transnational regimes of development and a precarious if resourceful process of state building in the absence of a sovereign state. Finally, the introduction outlines the book's key theoretical concerns: how heritage functions in mutating colonial formations and as a form of anticolonial governmentality beyond the nation-state as well as the work of heritage as expanding transnational framework of practices and meanings. 1A Political History of Palestinian Heritage chapter abstractChapter 1 examines the history of heritage preservation in Palestine in the 20th century. It begins with the work of Palestinian orientalists and ethnographers under the British Mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, to analyze how they rework colonial science in the spirit of a nascent Palestinian cultural nationalism. It then focuses on the Folklore Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and particularly its connection to the national liberation movement and the women's movement as well as its practice of anticolonial resistance and activist preservation in the occupied territories. 2Government Through Heritage in Old Hebron chapter abstractChapter 2 discusses the project of historic conservation and urban revitalization in the Old City of Hebron, which remained under Israeli control after the Oslo Accords because of the presence of several Jewish settlements. The chapter explores informal governmentalities through heritage. Countering the settlers' takeover of the Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has restored and repopulated a large part of the city's dilapidated central quarters. But in order to sustain livelihoods in difficult conditions, it has begun to work on socioeconomic development through a broad set of interventions, adopting the language and practices of international development. Over the years, with the Palestinian Authority not being able to work in the occupied Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has come to function as a hybrid institution of local government. 3Heritage, NGOs, and State Making chapter abstractChapter 3 examines the state-building role of heritage NGOs and the complex relationship between these organizations and the heritage body of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It argues that the Palestinian heritage movement or "heritage by NGOs" helps create and sustain not only icons and rituals of cultural nationalism but also a national infrastructure of heritage preservation and a set of national institutions alternative to those of the PA, like inventories, heritage units, master plans, and laws. In addition to preserving Palestinian identity and reclaiming Palestinian lands, West Bank organizations wish to ameliorate the living conditions of historic districts' residents and villagers and so intervene in the spaces and habits of their everyday life. In so doing—and in the context of the PA's structural weakness—they experiment with a range of modes of planning and governance, and enact a form of resourceful statecraft from the margins of the state. 4Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo chapter abstractPlacing heritage initiatives in the context of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank, Chapter 4 discusses the peculiar history of post-Oslo museums; if the Palestinian Authority has failed to create a major national museum—as a key institution of national representation—also due to a fundamental lack of objects and museum collections, Palestinian artists and cultural producers have instead experimented with different museum formats, creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile, thus producing creative national institutions in transnational spaces. These alternative museums walk a tightrope between establishing authority (as institutionality, as rules and regulations, as an authoritative museum voice) and challenging such authority to promote radical, democratic practices. Conclusion: Cultural Governmentality and Activist Statehood chapter abstractThe conclusion opens with an examination of the Islamic Movement and Palestinian activist preservation in Israel targeting the remains of the Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 when the Israeli state was established. It compares this heritage work with the work of Palestinian NGOs in the West Bank, which have moved toward development and institution building, or a kind of activist statehood. The conclusion then makes an argument for the relevance of new forms of cultural governmentality and heritage-led development well beyond Palestine.

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Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

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Book SynopsisFew places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair—a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment—which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In this book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond.Trade Review"Richly ethnographic, this study of an environmental movement in Bangladesh takes a fresh and contemporary look at the role of the crowd in democratic politics, distinguishing it from the citizen and the people. Focusing on such everyday phenomena as money, ID cards, accidents, and social media, Nusrat Chowdhury provides unusual glimpses into emotions such as hope, despair, opportunism, and fear that animate crowds assembled for political action." -- Partha Chatterjee * Columbia University *"Theorists of democracy and public life have long been unsettled by the unstable energy of popular assemblies—their capacity both to destroy and create, to betray authority and imagine it anew. Chowdhury's bold, compelling analysis, in contrast, puts the paradoxical power of the street at the center of Bangladeshi history: the spontaneous crowd, she shows, is the very embodiment of popular sovereignty, conjuring the volatile fervor and the 'imperceptible politics' that fuel mass democracy, not only in South Asia, but way beyond." -- Jean Comaroff * Harvard University *"Chowdhury's fascinating ethnography of popular protest in Bangladesh will resonate far beyond her home discipline of anthropology. Paradoxes of the Popular makes an essential contribution to the study of crowd politics in the international contexts of modern mass democracy." -- Jason Frank, Robert J. Katz Chair of Government * Cornell University *"[Paradoxes of the Popular] introduces readers to a novel theoretical terrain, and notions such as the 'imperceptible politics' of mass protests and the act of 'seeing like a crowd' force a reappraisal of anthropological approaches to 'public' life and space. In an era of rising populism, Chowdhury's ethnography has much to offer scholars interested in mass democracy and its inherent paradoxes in South Asia and beyond. Highly recommended." -- E. R. Swenson * CHOICE *"[A] especially rich ethnography of the political....Paradoxes of the Popular shows how mass feelings (from fear and despair to joy and possibility) become political, and how the political (from notions of democracy to demagoguery) is conceptualized in the everyday. The book will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students interested in contemporary Bangladesh, South Asian democracies, and political anthropology more generally." -- Rashmi Sadana * Political and Legal Aanthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the idea of "paradox" to make sense of the contingencies that make up Bangladesh's political modernity as well as the constitutive paradoxes of popular sovereignty. I introduce the Bangla term janata as a vernacular iteration of the concept of the crowd of social and political theory. Drawing on literary representations and scholarly work, the chapter shows why the crowd is the ethnographic object and analytical locus of the book. It sets the theoretical and conceptual stage for locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass politics. 1Picture-Thinking chapter abstractIn chapter 1, I analyze a set of public texts in circulation during a state of emergency—letters published in newspapers, a national identification card, a controversial photograph. Doing so has two ends: First, the chapter expands on the impasse that South Asian democracies often experience when confronting the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. In this logic, a repressive and undemocratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified as a way to protect the masses from their own nature. Second, the chapter expounds on the presumed distinctions between a reading public versus unruly crowds. The letters written by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning "guru of micro credit," remind us how the distinction between the stranger/citizen and an embodied crowd was mobilized at this time so as to usher in a novel era in politics. 2Seeing Like a Crowd chapter abstractAgainst the backdrop of the transparency fetish of the emergency, Phulbari's protest culture presents an alternative politics of seeing—what I describe as "seeing like a crowd." By identifying the significance of money in aesthetic productions and political acts, I show how the preoccupation with money differed from the nationwide drive against corruption. The chapter focuses first on a painting by a Phulbari artist. I argue that its message contrasts with the viciously apolitical desire for efficiency and good governance in a globally recognized language of neoliberal transparency. I then present the recollections of a socially marginalized woman who became the face of grassroots mobilization. I situate the looting and burning of money by the crowds within the larger context of the national political crisis. These popular strategies were a form of a transparency-making enterprise, if only with different political effect than the anticorruption agenda of the state. 3Accidental Politics chapter abstractChapter 3 is an ethnographic account of the accidental, the contingent, and the imperceptible nature of crowd politics. To understand the political possibilities of accidents and to assess their ethnographic significance, in this chapter I approach accidents both literally and conceptually. Can accidents be political? What kinds of politics take shape in the wake of an accident? And what are the ethico-political possibilities that are made available, or are foreclosed, within various discourses of the accidental? Anthropological perspectives on accidents, I argue in this chapter, rescue the concept from its usual modernist and technicist moorings while opening up spaces of radical contingencies that are enframed in local logics of culture and politics. 4Crowds and Collaborators chapter abstractCollaboration, in the sense of working for the enemy and benefiting from it, has given rise to a particular kind of crowd politics. From the vantage point of most protesters, a collaborator (dalal) was a figure that straddled the boundaries of the community and whatever stood beyond it. A dalal was by definition a local, though his ties to the foreign were exposed through suspicion, gossip, jokes, and assaults. Chapter 4 examines this culture of accusation of collaboration in order to illuminate the entangled effects of aggressive resource extraction, collective sovereignty, and popular and state-initiated attempts at settling the score with the nation's past. Following Walter Benjamin's writing on the "intriguer" and scholarly interest in the "neighbor," I submit that the dalal is a third type that disturbs the duality of friend and enemy. This ambivalence produces a culture of doubt and suspicion that demands certainty, often through violence. 5The Body of the Crowd chapter abstractChapter 5 is located in post-emergency Bangladesh. Its primary sites are spaces of politics and activism that are both emergent and historically poignant. I explore a particular fascination with the body and its relationship to crowd politics in the context of protests against the International Crimes Tribunal. The chapter comments on the proliferation of technologies that has impacted social and political communication. Increased surveillance in public spaces indicates more rigorous efforts to control spaces and bodies, illustrated by two events I analyze: an exposé of public sexual harassment and a viral video of a public lynching. On the one hand, I argue, secular and religious crowds, in their desires to be seen and heard, often end up mirroring each other. On the other hand, individual social media users often act collectively, performing the excess and volatility associated with crowds. Conclusion chapter abstractIn August 2017, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division released the text of a verdict that scrapped the sixteenth constitutional amendment. Passed in 2014, the amendment gave Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges for misconduct or incapacity. After it went public, Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha faced the wrath of politicians and party loyalists. "No nation, no country is made of or by one person," Sinha wrote in a judgment partly aimed at salvaging the collectivity that played a formative role in achieving national independence. This single line was excerpted and disparate meanings were tagged onto it in order to cast Sinha as disloyal. The fact that his relatively straightforward commitment to a normative assumption of liberal democracy was enough to cost him his job reveals a heightened role of paranoia in Bangladeshi politics. Indeed, it has raised anew the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and political representation in Bangladesh.

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Book SynopsisIn Mexican American communities in the central United States, the modern tradition of playing fastpitch softball has been passed from generation to generation. This ethnic sporting practice is kept alive through annual tournaments, the longest-running of which were founded in the 1940s, when softball was a ubiquitous form of recreation, and the so-called "Mexican American generation" born to immigrant parents was coming of age. Carrying on with fastpitch into the second or third generation of players even as wider interest in the sport has waned, these historically Mexican American tournaments now function as reunions that allow people to maintain ties to a shared past, and to remember the decades of segregation when Mexican Americans' citizenship was unfairly questioned. In this multi-sited ethnography, Ben Chappell conveys the importance of fastpitch in the ordinary yearly life of Mexican American communities from Kansas City to Houston. Traveling to tournaments, he interviews players and fans, strikes up conversations in the bleachers, takes in the atmosphere in the heat of competition, and combs through local and personal archives. Recognizing fastpitch as a practice of cultural citizenship, Chappell situates the sport within a history marked by migration, marginalization, solidarity, and struggle, through which Mexican Americans have navigated complex negotiations of cultural, national, and local identities.Trade Review"Ben Chappell'sMexican American Fastpitch is among the best ethnographies about Mexican Americans. Documenting the rich story of a community that has been too often overlooked in terms of vernacular tradition and geographic location, he pushes anthropologists and Chicanx Studies scholars to reconsider our academic notions of 'culture' and 'ethnic/racial' identity and performance. Chappell's evocative description made me a fan of a sport that I previously knew little about."—Michael L. Trujillo, University of New Mexico"Fast-pitch softball provides a social space unique to Mexican Americans. It supplies elements vital to the community: a place where traditions, language, and culture thrive. It is a vehicle for leyendas who have inspired generations. Ben Chappell's work informs us that local sport is a powerful tool for community uplift and solidarity."—Jorge Iber, Texas Tech UniversityTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction presents fastpitch softball as a sport that has been historically of interest to Mexican Americans, who have used it as a cultural resource to navigate their history and identity in the United States. A tradition of playing softball in Mexican American communities is an example of sport as cultural poetics on the vernacular scale. 1Mexican Questions chapter abstractThis chapter develops the historical frame for fastpitch as part of a long saga of Mexican people's contested belonging in the United States. This history examines the expansion of the United States by military conquest and the attendant racialization of Mexicans for purposes of Anglo domination. It includes over a century of Mexicans making their home in the center of what is now the United States, including Kansas, and effectively creating the region I call mid-América through travel and interaction with the southern borderlands, mainly Texas. Mexican American fastpitch emerged close in time to famous moments in political mobilization for civil rights and equality. Against this backdrop, athletic clubs and tournaments were among the vernacular organizations through which people have negotiated questions of belonging and identity. 2Hecho in America con Mexican Parts chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on softball as a national pastime in the early twentieth-century United States and the segregated everyday life of barrio communities as the ground on which Mexican American fastpitch teams and tournaments emerged. Recognizing how fastpitch is deeply embedded in social relationships is key to understanding the enduring interest and commitment to the sport that are evident in Mexican mid-América. Within that social base, I suggest that softball provided Mexican American communities with a source of both competition and camaraderie. 3Home Teams: Making Place for Mexican Tournaments chapter abstractThis chapter digs into specific tournaments, playing fields where they took place, and the teams that hosted them in order to represent the process of building a racial tradition of sport. As Mexican American communities did this, they negotiated a shifting balance between tournaments as barrio institutions invested in particular people and relationships and as a staging ground for those interested in bringing their athletic capabilities to a broader field of competition. The relative merits and limitations of remaining identified as a "Mexican tournament" as opposed to "opening up" in different ways remain debatable, even as the boundaries established under segregation crumble and fade. This remains true for the identity of tournaments across changing circumstances, as well as for the people personally and collectively invested in them. 4Ballplayers in Barrio Life chapter abstractThis chapter examines the "ballplayer" identity that playing fastpitch produced in barrio communities. As a kind of discipline of self-making, being a ballplayer provided Mexican Americans with a resource to counter racist constructions of Mexicanness. Part of what made the prospect of being a ballplayer a path to prestige was that it offered a means of performing valorized and legible versions of masculinity. This process produced local legends who distinguished themselves on the field. But many former players maintain that a more important outcome was the camaraderie among ballplayers and their communities, fostering enduring relationships that were ultimately more valuable even than victory in the game. 5Men and Women in Gendered Fastpitch chapter abstractThis chapter further develops the implications of the fact that modern sport is socially gendered, including softball itself in particularly complicated ways. Recognizing that fastpitch has been celebrated as a Mexican American tradition mostly as an activity of men, contrary to the mainstream of fastpitch today, I highlight some of the women who have participated in this tradition and claim it as theirs. As the position of softball in the gender-divided field of sport has changed over the past century, I argue that the social base of Mexican American fastpitch has made it a resource that can be shared across generations. 6Between the Lines: Softball as Utopian Form chapter abstractThis chapter draws on scholarship that treats sport as a symbolic or narrative idiom to unpack how softball is articulated with Mexican American experience. I consider the narratives specific to softball and baseball in terms of the appeal they might hold in a Mexican American context. These include enactments of individual-collective relationships, opportunity, and meritocracy that are part of the formal structure of the game. Reading these narrative forms against the ongoing political dynamics of Mexican identity in the United States shows the particular relation of softball to the larger social formation. Despite the fact that softball and baseball have at times played an ideological role to support unequal social relations, sport functions differently for Mexican Americans, when the demarcated space of the playing field takes on utopian meanings in the ways that it contrasts with social life. Conclusion: Patriotic, But We Love Our Culture Too chapter abstractThe conclusion examines the view expressed by people involved in Mexican American fastpitch that their sport of choice is their "culture," understanding that term to signal a legitimate difference from a mainstream national identity. This discussion underscores that the particular appeal of fastpitch for its devotees is embedded in the ongoing dynamics of Mexican American history and experience. Indeed, maintaining a particular tradition of playing the game is a way to materialize and recognize people's relation to that history. Participants mark this relationship by calling it culture.

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Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe Pakistan Army is a uniquely powerful and influential institution, with vast landholdings and resources. It has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death? Taking ritual commemorations of fallen soldiers as one critical site of study, Rashid argues that these "spectacles of mourning" are careful manipulations of affect, gendered and structured by the military to reinforce its omnipotence in the lives of its subjects. Grounding her study in the famed martial district of Chakwal, Rashid finds affect similarly deployed in recruitment and training practices, as well as management of death and compensation to families. She contends that understanding these affective technologies is crucial to challenging the appeal of the military institution globally.Trade Review"This absorbing and troubling book grapples with the puzzle of how the Pakistani military can hold the devotion and loyalty of so many citizens while promising them endless wars, death, and impairment. Rashid's thoughtful and at times harrowing account draws on sensitive ethnography with families of martyrs and unprecedented access to military ceremonies to weave a persuasive argument about the power of martyrdom and ritualistic mourning as technologies of rule."—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London"This is a unique contribution to critical studies of contemporary militarism as a global phenomenon, while simultaneously casting light on an institution that is not well understood outside its own national context. Ethnographic studies of military organizations are extremely rare due to the excessive secrecy of the defense sector, but Maria Rashid is able to demonstrate why and how gender is so central to this web of institutional and ideological power. This highly original study shows that we can learn about the appeal of military service by engaging with those who stand to lose the most from its allure: the women whose sons and husbands die in uniform."—Vron Ware, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Kingston University"This book is the only text on the Pakistan army that ethnographically focuses on the lives (and deaths) of non-commissioned soldiers and not of senior commissioned officers. By sharing with us the voices of next-of-kin of martyred soldiers, especially women, it weaves a nuanced argument that shows the affective dissonance between women's feelings of regret and anger about their lost sons and husbands and the public affirmation of their sacrifice. It hence explores the gap between the everyday experiences of families that mourn their dead sons in rural Pakistan and the idealized image of the martyr that saturates nationalist representations. Maria Rashid, by brilliantly using tropes of paradox and ambivalence in this excellent book, tells us a story that interplays between nationalism, sacrifice, and masculinity in contemporary Pakistan. Further, unlike many renditions on the Pakistani military, this exceptional text does not focus on the coercive aspect of the army; rather, it enables us to understand the persuasive powers through which this potentially hegemonic entity seeks to create consensus in an effort to produce ideological conformity."—Kamran Asdar Ali, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin"A good read for those who want to understand militarism in Pakistan as well as why the military has become the centerpiece of Pakistani society for decades."—Shuja Nawaz, The Friday Times"[A] must-read for all, especially those who once believed in the narrative of militarism and the sanctity of military deaths but were confused when the layers of this social construct began to peel off."—Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu, Strife"Rashid's book is a sobering reminder that military dominance over civilians is unlikely to change in Pakistan in the foreseeable future."—Rana Banerji, The Indian Express"Psychologist Maria Rashid has produced an extraordinary survey in which she seeks to demonstrate the Pakistan military has used death in combat, particularly the concept of martyrdom, as a tool to extend its domination over the country's political and civil society."—Arnold Zeitlin, South Asia Journal"Every story [I've encountered] demonstrated a dangerous doubt at the very heart of the military; a sign that this powerful institution—which likes to present itself as homogenous, disciplined, heroic and united—is more broken than the generals would have us believe. Maria Rashid's new book,Dying To Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, is a powerful intervention in studies of Pakistani militarism for precisely this reason."—Mahvish Amad, Jamhoor"A compelling account of how micro-level developments fit with the broader pursuit of the Pakistan Army's agenda and narrative, Dying to Serve should be compulsory reading for students and scholars of the army, politics and nationalism at the grassroots level."—Dr. Azma Faiz, Dawn"Dying to Serveboth broadens the anthropology of militarism's geographic focus, which has largely been the United States, and deepens anthropological understandings of militarism as a cultural system through Rashid's rigorous analysis of its gendered and affective dimensions."—Kristin V. Monroe, American Ethnologist"Rashid's book is a remarkable study, providing a social lens through which to see and understand the layered complexities of the relationship between the army, its 'immediate' subjects (families of deceased soldiers) and the nation at large. The book has also opened up space for further research on pacifist, cultural, feminist and post-colonial themes in the context of the Pakistani military."—Faiza Farid, International Affairs"[Dying to Serve] provides a fresh contribution to the study of militarization in Pakistan by drawing upon a psychosocial approach and by focusing on aspects of subjectivity and intimacy in investigating the role played by gender and families in the constitution of the Pakistan Army. The book will certainly prompt fresh discussions and debates in thinking about the Pakistan Army in relationship to kinship, particularly given that so much of the existing scholarship is either focused on [the War on Terror] through the perspective of foreign policy, global geopolitics and military strategy, or where the Pakistan Army is discussed as an important actor in domestic politics and in the country's economy."—Sanaullah Khan, Journal of South Asian Development"The Pakistan Army...has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death?"—Nadia H. Barsoum, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies"One of the most important contributions ofDying to Serveis elucidating the materialist grounds on which militarism stands, undergirded by a historical colonial political economy that is reworked for contemporary Pakistani militarism."—Zahra Khalid, Security Dialogue"Over the course of the last decade, scholarship on the Pakistan Army has proliferated; however, Rashid's Dying to Serve stands out because she has done what others have been unable to do: conduct research among and on the enlisted ranks of the Pakistan Army and their families, with a particular focus on the district of Chakwal. That Rashid identified these men as a site of important empirical work is to her commendation; that she devised a suitable research methodology to conduct the work is remarkable."—C. Christine Farr, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisContemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy—but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care—a healing labor—that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.Trade Review"This is an intelligent and insightful study of Japanese female sex workers who provide iyashi or 'healing care' to Japan's depleted male workers. Koch makes a compelling and provocative case for the productive role of sex work in the Japanese gendered economy. It is both marginalized and necessary, caught in a gray area between legality and illegality, and dependent on the perception that it is done by amateurs. Yet, these characteristics shape the risks sex workers face and undermine their claims to labor rights. In contrast to anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution activists, they do not consider themselves as exploited and coerced."—Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh"Exceptional sensibility and true originality characterize Gabriele Koch's Healing Labor, which has sex workers tell their stories on their own terms while bringing to life the globally most pertinent debates about labor, care, and sexual commerce. An elegantly written, pathbreaking book that carries its theoretical sophistication and great erudition lightly."—Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara"One of the pleasures of Gabriele Koch's new book...is how its erudition is mixed with an anthropologist's ear on the ground."—Nicolas Gattig, The Japan Times"[Rather] than simply use her interviews as interesting details to supplement an analysis that lies elsewhere, a problem present in many ethnographies, [Koch] grounds her argument about the Japanese economy firmly in the methodology of anthropology....Koch strikes the perfect balance between detail and analysis. Highly recommended."—M. J. Wert, CHOICE"Koch's well-organized and fluently written book will not only enlighten anthropologists with an interest in gender issues, the sex industry, labor relations, and women's rights, but will also provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the Japanese economic system and workplace. It should certainly be recommended reading for anyone planning to work in Japan."—Brigitte Steger, The Journal of Japanese Studies"[Healing Labor] is an incisive exploration of sex work as both a form of gendered work and care that is helpful to scholars of Japan in particular, and East Asia more generally; scholars interested in health, caregiving, and labor or economics regardless of geographic focus; and scholars interested in sex and sexuality, gender, and social justice."—Pamela Runestad, H-Japan"Koch's well-informed and eloquent work provides an outstanding example of an ethnography that remains close to the voices of her interlocutors, but never loses sight of the larger structural issues of the environment within which they eke out a living. It opens up a whole range of important questions concerning the sex industry in Japan and beyond... Future researchers will be well counseled to take Koch's book as a starting point in their own inquiries. With its stringent analysis and clarity of voice, it is well suited for a range of courses and, in my experience, a great hit with undergraduate and post-graduate students alike."—Fabio Gygi, Monumenta Nipponica"[T]his book demonstrates a conceptual advance for this area of study via its introduction of the key term 'healing labor,' to explain the above-noted fundamental contradictions of sex work and the social values they are embedded within in Japan."—Kaoru Aoyama, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sex in Gray Spaces 2. First-Timers Welcome! 3. Stigma and the Moral Economy 4. Healing Customers 5. Victims All 6. Risk and Rights Epilogue

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Book SynopsisFaith in Rights explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. It argues that Christianity is deeply entangled in the texture of the United Nations and shapes the methods and areas of work of Christian NGOs. To capture these entanglements, Amélie Barras analyzesthrough interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysisthe everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN

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Book SynopsisFood in Cuba follows Cuban families as they struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in Cuba's faltering, post-Soviet welfare state by specifically looking at the social and emotional dimensions of shifts in access to food. Based on extensive fieldwork with families in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city, Hanna Garth examines Cuban families' attempts to acquire and assemble "a decent meal," unraveling the layers of household dynamics, community interactions, and individual reflections on everyday life in today's Cuba. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the subsequent loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship. Although trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food in Cuba, many Cubans report that they continue to live with food shortages and economic hardship. Garth tells the stories of families that face the daily challenge of acquiring not only enough food, but food that meets local and personal cultural standards. She ultimately argues that these ongoing struggles produce what the Cuban families describe as "a change in character," and that for some, this shifting concept of self and sense of social relation leads to a transformation in society. Food in Cuba shows how the practices of acquisition and the politics of adequacy are intricately linked to the local moral stances on what it means to be a good person, family member, community member, and ultimately, a good Cuban.Trade Review"Garth's in-depth and intimate ethnography portrays the shortcomings in Cuba's welfare system, and the profound consequences for the way people eat and think of themselves as Cuban. Presenting the stories of highly resourceful individuals and communities, Garth shows us that the Cuban experience and post-Soviet lives cannot be decoupled from everyday food practices."—Megan A. Carney, author of The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders"In her rich ethnography of food 'insecurity' in a place where no one starves, Hanna Garth traces the daily practices of food acquisition and the effects of inadequacy on identity. Garth depicts the experience of dependence upon a faltering socialist infrastructure, recording a longing for what was before, discontent with the seemingly changeless present, and a hope for future possibilities."—Nancy J. Burke, author of Health Travels: Cuban Health(care) On and Off the Island"Garth offers a literary masterclass in how the analysis of food can help us understand social relations while the analysis of social relations can help us understand food."—Emily Yates-Doerr, Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition"This is an ethnography rich with thick description about the politics of adequacy as seen through the lens of household food acquisition....Food in Cuba opens our eyes to all that people go through to acquire the foods they desire."—Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, Food, Culture & Society"Garth accessibly addresses important theoretical and political debates while anchoring every insight in rich ethnographic detail. She achieves a sympathetic and nuanced portrait of people who struggle more than they should for the basic elements of life while still engaging in complex social critique and political analysis and acts of solidarity, as well as, against the odds, finding ways to flourish."—Alyshia Gálvez, American Anthropology"[Food in Cuba] expands our understanding of food security, showing that it must mean more than simply access to sufficient nutrients for survival.By turning our attention to food acquisition, Garth's ethnography raises new questions about the kind of systems that people rely upon to produce enough or sufficient food."—Maggie Dickinson, PoLAR"[Food in Cuba] presents a complex picture of the tension between the socialist state and Cuban women....Garth successfully employs experiences from her fieldwork to the reader's benefit, expertly conveying the emotional highs and depressive lows that different individuals feel as they battle every day to produce a decent meal. Recommended."—S. L. Kwosek, CHOICE"As Santiagueros insist, alimentary dignity is an essential ingredient of mental health and well-being. Garth beautifully demonstrates how such notions of health deserve both analytical rigor and political weight in discussions of the body, the self, and the state in marginalized Caribbean communities."—Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, Medical Anthropology Quarterly"Food in Cuba is a thought-provoking ethnography that should appeal to multiple audiences, including policy makers, health professionals, and scholars interested in Cuba, for its critical perspective on narrow definitions of food security and for its valuable perspective on how chronic food shortages impact mental health and social dynamics on the island."—Adriana Premat, Transforming Anthropology"Garth's study of marginalized Santiagueros and their 'ingestive practices', portrays a particular kind of living, involving intimate socialities and intimate performances, where one is constantly negotiating the fine line of acting ethical and losing one's Cubanidad. It is an important part of a larger body of work in anthropology that portrays the urban precariat making do in the grey zone."—Daina Cheyenne Harvey, UrbanitiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: In Pursuit of Adequacy 1. La Lucha 2. Antes 3. Virtuous Womanhood 4. Community 5. Breakdown Conclusion: The Politics of Adequacy

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Book SynopsisContemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy—but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care—a healing labor—that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.Trade Review"This is an intelligent and insightful study of Japanese female sex workers who provide iyashi or 'healing care' to Japan's depleted male workers. Koch makes a compelling and provocative case for the productive role of sex work in the Japanese gendered economy. It is both marginalized and necessary, caught in a gray area between legality and illegality, and dependent on the perception that it is done by amateurs. Yet, these characteristics shape the risks sex workers face and undermine their claims to labor rights. In contrast to anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution activists, they do not consider themselves as exploited and coerced."—Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh"Exceptional sensibility and true originality characterize Gabriele Koch's Healing Labor, which has sex workers tell their stories on their own terms while bringing to life the globally most pertinent debates about labor, care, and sexual commerce. An elegantly written, pathbreaking book that carries its theoretical sophistication and great erudition lightly."—Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara"One of the pleasures of Gabriele Koch's new book...is how its erudition is mixed with an anthropologist's ear on the ground."—Nicolas Gattig, The Japan Times"[Rather] than simply use her interviews as interesting details to supplement an analysis that lies elsewhere, a problem present in many ethnographies, [Koch] grounds her argument about the Japanese economy firmly in the methodology of anthropology....Koch strikes the perfect balance between detail and analysis. Highly recommended."—M. J. Wert, CHOICE"Koch's well-organized and fluently written book will not only enlighten anthropologists with an interest in gender issues, the sex industry, labor relations, and women's rights, but will also provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the Japanese economic system and workplace. It should certainly be recommended reading for anyone planning to work in Japan."—Brigitte Steger, The Journal of Japanese Studies"[Healing Labor] is an incisive exploration of sex work as both a form of gendered work and care that is helpful to scholars of Japan in particular, and East Asia more generally; scholars interested in health, caregiving, and labor or economics regardless of geographic focus; and scholars interested in sex and sexuality, gender, and social justice."—Pamela Runestad, H-Japan"Koch's well-informed and eloquent work provides an outstanding example of an ethnography that remains close to the voices of her interlocutors, but never loses sight of the larger structural issues of the environment within which they eke out a living. It opens up a whole range of important questions concerning the sex industry in Japan and beyond... Future researchers will be well counseled to take Koch's book as a starting point in their own inquiries. With its stringent analysis and clarity of voice, it is well suited for a range of courses and, in my experience, a great hit with undergraduate and post-graduate students alike."—Fabio Gygi, Monumenta Nipponica"[T]his book demonstrates a conceptual advance for this area of study via its introduction of the key term 'healing labor,' to explain the above-noted fundamental contradictions of sex work and the social values they are embedded within in Japan."—Kaoru Aoyama, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sex in Gray Spaces 2. First-Timers Welcome! 3. Stigma and the Moral Economy 4. Healing Customers 5. Victims All 6. Risk and Rights Epilogue

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Book SynopsisCourt of Injustice reveals how immigration lawyers work to achieve just results for their clients in a system that has long denigrated the rights of those they serve. J.C. Salyer specifically investigates immigration enforcement in New York City, following individual migrants, their lawyers, and the NGOs that serve them into the immigration courtrooms that decide their cases. This book is an account of the effects of the implementation of U.S. immigration law and policy. Salyer engages directly with the specific laws and procedures that mandate harsh and inhumane outcomes for migrants and their families. Combining anthropological and legal analysis, Salyer demonstrates the economic, historical, political, and social elements that go into constructing inequity under law for millions of non-citizens who live and work in the United States. Drawing on both ethnographic research conducted in New York City and on the author's knowledge and experience as a practicing immigration lawyer at a non-profit organization, this book provides unique insight into the workings and effects of U.S. immigration law. Court of Injustice provides an up-close view of the experiences of immigration lawyers at non-profit organizations, in law school clinics, and in private practice to reveal limitations and possibilities available to non-citizens under U.S. immigration law. In this way, this book provides a new perspective on the study of migration by focusing specifically on the laws, courts, and people involved in U.S. immigration law. Trade Review"This book does such a powerful job of recounting the sad, complicated and disempowering history of immigration laws. It clarifies not just for academics but for everyone that the denial of due process is central to how the legal system responds to immigrants. But what I love about this work is the humanity that J.C. Salyer brings with it. In the end we see that we are all these immigrants and refugees. They are our future and our past and every single one of us is called upon now to see this and act." -- Maria Hinojosa * Latino USA *"Court of Injustice identifies the real structural and procedural problems for noncitizens facing removal from the United States. Salyer's unique perspective on legal services for immigration clients reveals the inequities inherent in the court system and how enforcement policies often preordain outcomes. Policymakers should play close attention to this book." -- Bill Ong Hing * University of San Francisco *"Salyer combines vast legal knowledge with deft anthropological analysis to produce a comprehensive and engaging account of today's immigration system. Highlighting the lawyers navigating a treacherous legal system, this book is a unique, essential, urgent read for anyone who cares about immigration and immigrants today." -- Cecilia Menjívar, University of California * Los Angeles *"Court of Injustice brings a critical ethnographic lens to understanding the reproduction of inequality, xenophobia and racism in U.S. immigration. Salyer dismantles the fictions of 'rule of law' and 'national security' to reveal an arbitrary and punitive federal system decades in the making, and how local governments, lawyers, and civil society are fighting back." -- Shannon Gleeson * Cornell University *"Salyer's focus on disparities across jurisdictions and among individual immigration judges, and particularly the unique role of the NYIFUP as a countervailing force, highlights how local contexts deeply shape immigrants' experiences of justice or lack thereof. This firsthand, detailed account of how the U.S. immigration legal system creates inequality is an important read for sociologists interested in immigration, criminal justice reform, and law and society." -- Ariela Schachter * American Journal of Sociology *"Court of Injustice impressively combines legal and anthropological expertise, contrasting the nuance of law and practice with the on-the-ground experiences of individuals working within the system. There is much to deconstruct in the realm of immigration law, but by interrogating the every day experiences of lawyers, we are able to catch a glimpse of effective forms of resistance, such as the program in New York City, absent legislative reform. By understanding the intricacies of the practice of immigration law, Salyer offers his readers insight into both the challenges and complexities of practicing within this system, and the possibilities for liberatory change." -- Anita Maddali * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Paradoxes of U.S. Immigration Law and Deportation chapter abstractBy introducing the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration, this chapter explores the broader nature and history of anti-immigrant policies and the deprivation of the rights and interests of immigrants. It introduces the main arguments of the book, which are that immigration law fears migrants in a manner that is so overbroad that it punishes, detains, and deports immigrants who bear little resemblance to the stated fears used to justify the laws and that these practices go unchecked by the courts, which defer to the political branches of government under the plenary power doctrine. Finally, the introduction argues that we can learn a lot about the potential for resistance and reform by understanding how lawyers advocating for their clients in immigration courts are sometimes able to achieve just results for their clients even within this unfair system. 1Migrants, Criminal Aliens, and Folk Devils chapter abstractThis chapter uses the ethnographic example of a young man named Omar to illustrate how history, political and economic changes, and race are intertwined in the production of sweeping immigration laws aimed at the perceived dangers of criminal aliens and explores how the 1996 amendments to immigration laws were a manifestation of a neoliberal ideology that constructed "aliens and citizens as different kinds of persons" (Greenhouse 2013, 104). The chapter shows how a key aspect of these changes was removing discretion to make individualized judgments from immigration judges and how the restoration of this discretion is necessary to reach just results. 2A Social History of the Development of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter addresses how the contemporary position of migrants relates to the historical development of U.S. immigration law. The chapter explores how more than a century of immigration legislation and judicial interpretation created both substantive and procedural limits on the protection of migrants' rights. In particular, the chapter shows that the trend has been for perceived threats to be projected in the form of an abstract alien, who embodies those dangers, but for the laws that are passed to be so broad that they affect actual individuals who do not present those threats. 3The Role of Lawyers and Judges in U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter draws on participant observation and interviews to examine current immigration law and focuses, in part, on areas in which immigration judges still retain some discretion: asylum cases and cancellation-of-removal cases. The chapter explores how, even within the relatively rigid system of laws that make up current immigration law, immigration lawyers are able to retain and exploit some flexibility to achieve favorable outcomes for the individuals they assist. 4Law Without Recognition: Excluded Equities and Judges Without Discretion chapter abstractThis chapter explores the particular provisions of contemporary immigration law and the effects they have on individuals. Drawing on participant observation and the experiences of immigration lawyers who were interviewed, the chapter illustrates areas where current immigration law is inflexible and fails to account for individual circumstances and equities and focuses on examples that illustrate both the possibility of a more humane immigration law and the process by which that possibility has been lost under current law. 5The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project: A Revolution Such as Lawyers Would Mount chapter abstractThis chapter provides a detailed account of NYIFUP, which is the first government-funded assigned counsel system for indigent detained migrants facing deportation. The chapter shows how NYIFUP is able to not merely improve access to counsel for individual clients but also use its institutional structure to make broader challenges to existing laws and practices and to systematically document abuse, mistreatment, and injustice suffered by migrants in detention and in removal. Conclusion: The Limitations and Possibilities of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter concludes the book by arguing that one of the main failings of the current immigration system is its refusal to recognize individual equities, such as family relationships, hardships, and social participation and contributions. By examining the Supreme Court's rationale in Trump v. Hawaii, this chapter analyzes how the socio-legal position of migrants is conceptualized. The chapter argues that although immigration law is not itself the sole or main cause of (or solution to) issues of inequality and injustice that relate to migration, its current formalistic and inflexible nature should not be allowed to reduce complex individual, historic, political, and economic events and relationships to narrow legal categories that limit the ability to provide justice to people in precarious positions not of their own making. The chapter ends by recommending areas for reform.

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Book SynopsisDigital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core activity of the twenty-first century. Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models from media studies and political economy, Digital Pirates reveals how the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps between texts—in this case, digital content. Dent's analysis includes his fieldwork in and around São Paulo with pirates, musicians, filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policymakers, politicians, activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of "digital textuality," this book offers crucial insights into the qualities of today's mediascape as well as the particularized political and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how twenty-first century capitalism generates piracy and its enforcement simultaneously, while producing fraught consumer experiences in Latin America and beyond.Trade Review"Digital Pirates is an insightful and often beautiful exploration of digitization as a dissolving agent for older cultural forms, a catalyst for new ones, and a context for reconsolidating the boundaries that define markets, institutions, laws, and publics. Alex Dent moves fluidly between theoretical and empirical registers to weave a rich account of lived experience in Brazil that illuminates global cultural change." -- Joe Karaganis * Columbia University *"Smart, sly, and generatively disconcerting, Digital Pirates is an ethnographically textured and theoretically rambunctious charting of emerging mediascapes. Dent provides a complex and challenging account of contemporary Brazil and a principled exploration of the unpredictable resonances at the contested confluence of media, technology, regulatory regimes, and creativity. And he does so with piratical panache." -- Donald L. Brenneis * University of California, Santa Cruz *

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