Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisUber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis vs. Uber examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how.Trade Review"This beautifully written account of the dramatic arrival of Uber in Buenos Aires poses fundamental questions about public life and politics in the technologized spaces of contemporary capitalism. Juan M. del Nido's vivid ethnography shows how the rhetorical resources of late capitalism can produce a world that appears beyond politics, as fairness and efficiency become problems to be addressed by the deployment of algorithms rather than debate and contestation." —Penny Harvey, University of Manchester"This timely and important book opens up a refreshing analytical lens on questions of class and the nature of the political that are truly at stake in contemporary Argentina. Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically evocative, it will be invaluable to any reader interested in the politics of new economic formations in the region and beyond." —Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"We all know Uber exists only on the back of the taxi industry's long historical efforts to acclimatize the middle class to entering cars driven by strangers.JuanM. delNidoshows us in his imaginative ethnography that this is only the tip of the iceberg in understanding the changes Uber brings.He persuasively demonstrates how crucial it is to understand the legal and practical rubrics shaping the working lives of taxi cab drivers—that Uber hopes to disrupt—as well as the middle-class economic logics that Uber appeals to." —Ilana Gershon, Indiana University"This is an impressive contribution to analyses of the origins and consequences of late-capitalist rhetoric, everyday ethics, and how societal affects and discourses attach themselves to new technology."—Bronwyn Frey, Anthropology Book Forum"del Nido's contributions in this book go far beyond the conflict between these two industries, and postpolitical reasoning is widely applicable in thinking about how new innovations are legitimized. Moreover, del Nido skillfully demonstrates the importance of studying something as intricate and complex as reasoning itself, and doing so ethnographically, by tracing how nonexperts make sense of economic and political processes. As new technological innovations continue to penetrate our society, it is vital we understand how they are legitimized, especially if we want to have the grammar to challenge them in any meaningful way."—Annika Pinch, H-Sci-Med-Tech"del Nido's argument about how middle-class economic logics neutralize, if not foreclose, disagreement in particular ways is a theoretically sophisticated and convincing one developed in dialogue with classical and current work in moral economy. The book offers a timely discussion about rhetorical power and infrastructure in late capitalism that will be of interest to students and scholars in and beyond anthropology and provides a fresh and astute analysis of the language of neoliberalism."—Kristin V. Monroe, Anthropological Quarterly"Taxis vs. Uber offers rich reading for anyone interested in the changing dynamics of (post)political discourse, making it distinct among studies of the gig economy.... Its critical insights about the pervasiveness and influence of gladiatorial truths resonate well beyond Uber and Buenos Aires. It brings a welcome anthropological sensibility to the study of major platform companies and their impact.... Taxis vs. Uber's compelling analysis highlights the importance of scrutinizing how certain rationalities and rhetorical devices aid in legitimizing technological developments and bypassing political debate."—Kathryn Henne, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"Theoretically refreshing and ethnographically rich, Taxis vs. Uber brilliantly demonstrates how a 'postpolitical reasoning' can emerge and how this reasoning can have dire consequences for our capacity to engage in debate and decide our futures. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in learning more about the fate of the few thousand taxi drivers driving around Buenos Aires and by all those who care about the current state of democracy, everywhere."—Jean-Philippe Warren, Economic Anthropology"Both precise in terms of economic knowledge as well as rigorous in his use of anthropological canon,... this is an insightful anthropology of neoclassical economic thinking as it unfolds during a process of market disruption... [making] the familiar landscape of platforms appear strange. Taxis vs Uber constitutes a grounded contribution to understanding how and why the phenomenon of platforms spreading around the world eventually makes sense..., reading Uber's success as an epistemological battle fought with logical tools, rhetorical devices and affective weapons. Taxis vs. Uber offers an excellent analysis of the social imaginaries of late capitalism."—Maribel Casas-Cortés, European Journal of SociologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Storm Blowing from Paradise 1. The Terms of Engagement 2. The Intractable Question 3. A Most Perfect Kind of Hustling 4. On Gladiatorial Truths 5. The Stranger That Stays as Such 6. A Copernican Phantasmagoria 7. The Political on Trial 8. The Scarlet P Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMigranthood chronicles deportation from the perspectives of Indigenous youth who migrate unaccompanied from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States. In communities of origin in Guatemala, zones of transit in Mexico, detention centers for children in the U.S., government facilities receiving returned children in Guatemala, and communities of return, young people share how they negotiate everyday violence and discrimination, how they and their families prioritize limited resources and make difficult decisions, and how they develop and sustain relationships over time and space. Anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink shows that Indigenous youth cast as objects of policy, not participants, are not passive recipients of securitization policies and development interventions. Instead, Indigenous youth draw from a rich social, cultural, and political repertoire of assets and tactics to navigate precarity and marginality in Guatemala, including transnational kin, social networks, and financial institutions. By attending to young people's perspectives, we learn the critical roles they play as contributors to household economies, local social practices, and global processes. The insights and experiences of young people uncover the transnational effects of securitized responses to migration management and development on individuals and families, across space, citizenship status, and generation. They likewise provide evidence to inform child protection and human rights locally and internationally.Trade Review"Heidbrink brings nuance, clarity, and depth to the lived experiences of Indigenous youth fleeing violence, hunger, and lack of opportunity in Guatemala. Migranthood unpacks contemporary post-conflict political, economic, and criminal violence as markers of youth migration. A must-read for anyone who cares about migrant youth, and a wake-up call for policymakers recycling failed immigration and development policies." -- Victoria Sanford * City University of New York *"This gripping account of contemporary migration sheds much needed light on the experiences of unaccompanied Indigenous minors as they navigate border controls and violence. With keen insights and eloquent prose, Migranthood reveals the real-life consequences of securitization policies on the most vulnerable. An essential read." -- Roberto G. Gonzales * author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America *"[Heidbrink] offers rich portraits of young people eager to help their families through 'irregular migration' and ashamed of their failed attempts. Their stories are made more meaningful by Heidbrink's deft analysis of the historical abuse of indigenous groups by Guatemalan political and economic elites....This nuanced assessment suggests the narrowness of increasingly securitizing policy making and denying families' cultural and economic realities. Recommended." -- M. Morrissey * CHOICE *"[A] poignant juxtaposition of the contrasting perspectives of migrant youth and the multiple governmental and non-governmental authorities, both in Guatemala and the United States, responsible for migration management. By weaving the detailed chronicles of migration and deportation provided by youth with the discourses circulating in legal, medical, and humanitarian interventions, Heidbrink effectively debunks reductionist images of monolithic depictions of migranthood.'" -- Virginia Diez and Jayanthi Mistry * Teachers College Record *"[This book] makes key contributions to methodology and scholarly debates and is a must-read for scholars and students of international migration, development, and childhood studies....Migranthood is an ambitious book that lays the groundwork for future research to continue investigating the contradictory effects of the link between development and migration, and the perspectives and roles of youths as independent migratory actors embedded in larger communities." -- Chiara Galli * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Migranthood validates youth agency, clearly making connections between systemic failures in immigration policy, securitization, and development. It is a much-needed contribution that gives depth not only to the consequences of migration and deportation beyond youth and their families but also to how the effects reverberate across communities, temporally and spatially." -- Diane Sabenacio Nititham * Jeunesse *"[A] robust understanding of youth migration....[Anchored] in an honest and systematic effort to listen to, understand, and learn from the migration experiences of Indigenous youth, Heidbrink's skillfully crafted arguments challenge many dominant frameworks." -- María V. Barbero * Children's Geographies *"[Heidbrink] contributes important insights regarding how policy affects migrant youths' experiences pre- and post deportation. This text has the potential to engage interdisciplinary audiences in education, sociology, and anthropology as well as scholars wanting to challenge misconceptions of migration and its impact on youth, families, and communities." -- Sophia Rodriguez * Anthropology and Education Quarterly *"[A] methodologically sophisticated study.It captures the tragic social cost of displacement and deportation from the view of Indigenous youth, as well as their efforts to understand and resist the old and new forms of dispossession and exploitation they experience." -- Alison Elizabeth Lee * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *"As I was reading Migranthood, record numbers of child migrants were arriving at the southern border of the United States, the vast majority from Central America. I was immediately struck by how clearly Heidbrink's analysis of migranthood – the complex political and social construction of migration – critically responded to the simplistic narratives presented in the media. Heidbrink's theoretical framework has given me a much more nuanced lens to bring to the so-called "border crisis" and the media and political representations of it.... Beautifully and clearly written, this is a book of urgent theoretical and political importance." -- Leah Schmalzbauer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's three main arguments. First, the narratives of migrant and deported youth challenge the ways that the law and public policy homogenize the complex, multifaceted, and varied experiences of young migrants. Second, securitized approaches to migration management, often under the guise of "development," is a mode of governance that moves across and beyond geopolitical space, increasingly ensnaring children and youth in this global immigration dragnet. Third, in Central America, Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the adverse consequences of the securitization of migration management revealing the enduring and transnational reach of public policy across geopolitical space and generation. By interrogating how violence is produced and practiced across borders and how Indigenous youth navigate this violence following deportation, Heidbrink rethinks how and why youth are on the move. The chapter describes the mixed-methods enlisted in this 5-year, multi-sited study and outlines the forthcoming chapters. 1Youth as Agents, Caregivers, and Migrants chapter abstractSeemingly new patterns of migration among Central American children suggest that young people are engaged in intergenerational survival strategies that are increasingly transnational and youth-led. Enlisting multi-sited ethnography with young people and their families across the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala, this chapter examines how young people enlist social agency through their care work, paid labor, and mobility. As seasonal, regional and transnational migrants, young people enlist migration as a collective and historically-rooted survival strategy that responds to their past experiences of violence and marginalization and to their present and future needs. In tracing the ways young people enact care and belonging through social and physical mobility, this chapter argues that the contemporary transnational migration of Indigenous youth is a cultural elaboration of care, one rooted in historical displacements of Indigenous communities. 2Widening the Frame chapter abstractChapter two utilizes the method of multi-media elicitation with young people to dissect discourses that emerged from official media campaigns intended to deter child migration. Youth identifies the ways these official messages infantilize young people, criminalize their parents, and pathologize migration. Analyzing discourses about youth alongside narratives by youth reveals the consequential disconnect between the imagined and lived experiences of young people and their families. In critiquing the campaign and its many pitfalls, young people widen the frame of reference by alternatively interpreting the reasons for and consequences of migration and deportation. In so doing, they evaluate the efficacy of policy responses to child migration in Central America. 3The Making of a Crisis chapter abstractIn spite of media headlines which claim that child migration is the crisis du jour, chapter three argues that the influx of young migrants in 2014 and 2018 are policy-made crises. Chapter three situates the testimonio of Liseth, a Mam woman who was a refugee in Mexico as a child, alongside key historical and contemporary policy initiatives to illustrate how colonialism, armed conflict, the proliferation of plantations, and extractive industries have displaced Indigenous communities across generations. The chapter argues that these displacements are emblematic of the growing securitization of migration management and of development aid in "post-conflict" Guatemala. Key policies analyzed include the Southern Border Program, the Central American Minors program, and the Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the securitization of aid spurs rather than deters migration. 4¿Quédate y qué? chapter abstractChapter four analyzes how discourses about child migration seep into government interventions and institutional practice and how young people experience them. The chapter begins by recounting the narrative of 16-year-old Delia as she is deported from a U.S. facility for unaccompanied children to a government processing center in Guatemala City. The chapter continues with the examination of development initiatives that explicitly claim to support returned youth like Delia, to reintegrate them into communities, and to create alternatives to (re)migration. These development initiatives not only fail to effectively support young people but also reinforce long-standing social hierarchies between the ladino (mixed-race) elite and Indigenous communities in Guatemala. 5Negotiating Returns chapter abstractChapter five examines how young people variously experience removal following deportation—as children of deported parents or madres y padres deportados; as U.S. citizen children who arrive in Guatemala as they accompany their parents following removal or as llegadas; and as unaccompanied children who are deported as retornados. The in-depth narratives of young people focus on the social, emotional, and financial impacts of removal on intimate, familial relationships over time. Conceptually, these diverse and multiple experiences of removal allow us to recognize the depth and breadth of deportation's impacts on young people and their families. The chapter argues that deportation is a process, one with rippling effects on individuals and families over time and geopolitical space. 6Debt and Indebtedness chapter abstractMoving beyond the individual and familial impacts of migration and deportation, Chapter six details the community-level impacts of securitization and development in the highland town of Almolonga. Known as the "breadbasket" of Central America, Almolonga enjoys a thriving agricultural economy including abundant employment opportunities given the multiple seasons of crops, selling in local markets, and commerce to and from Mexico and El Salvador. Yet, the migration of young people continues unabated. Enlisting a household survey, this chapter examines local critiques of development and explores how community members alternatively navigate precarity through the growing use of credit and debt, often with detrimental effects across generations. 7El derecho a no migrar chapter abstractChapter seven reflects on the policy lessons learned from Indigenous youth, arguing that there is an urgent need for rigorous, publicly-accessible, and engaged research. The book concludes with the ways young people envision "the right to not migrate" as a transformative process that aspires to 'el buen vivir (the good life)', an Indigenous political project rooted in the valorization of Indigenous ways of knowing and the advancement of a collective well-being, broadly conceived. Young people link internal and community-based decolonizing projects as critical to broader social and, indeed, global transformation.

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Book SynopsisDark Finance offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.Trade Review"As financialization and populism reshape the world, Fabio Mattioli's rich and timely analysis traces the intersection of finance-fueled construction and authoritarian rule in Macedonia. It critically highlights the illiberal politics that drive financialization and urban development, while carefully attending to the everyday lives of construction workers who are building Skopje's new skyline." -- Sohini Kar * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Dark Finance offers fresh insight on contemporary populism in Europe and fine-grained descriptions of how illiquidity functions. This is the most compelling, persuasive, and chilling analysis of North Macedonia's place in the global economy, and the cynical exploitation of a people by their elected government, that I have read in the past decade." -- Keith Brown * Arizona State University *"Dark Finance takes the anthropology of financialization to the next level. From gender relations and exploitation to the volatile politics of popular desires and authoritarianism in North Macedonia in the years after the global financial crisis, Fabio Mattioli's holistic and relational take on the contradictions of global finance in the postsocialist periphery is pathbreaking." -- Don Kalb * University of Bergen and Utrecht University *"Mattioli excels in this respect: documenting the operations and implications of finance and financialization beyond its own narrow social domain—the one of financial markets, institutions, expert knowledge, and so on—and within the life-worlds, relations, and practices of a variety of social actors. This allows him to analyze aspects likely to be missed by other perspectives." -- Marek Mikuš * Journal of Cultural Economy *"Fabio Mattioli has written a vibrant book, mapping the networks sustaining Nikola Gruevski's power and the lived experience of "authoritarian financialization," and offering novel insights into Macedonia's and Europe's political economy. The book combines ethnographic and an almost-poetic sensitivity, rich in its description of economic, urban, and social landscapes. In addition to being a skillfully executed ethnography, Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe is a fascinating case study, a crime story, a political drama, and a political thriller. Highly recommended not only for those seeking to understand Gruevski's regime but anyone interested in illiberal finance." -- Gábor Scheiring * Review of Democracy *"Original, timely, and gorgeously written, Dark Finance makes key theoretical contributions to several fields of inquiry, including economic anthropology, political economy, anthropology of the state, social studies of time and gender, and Europeanization as a cultural and financial process. It represents anthropology at its best and should be read and taught widely." -- Emanuela Grama * American Anthropologist *"Through its analysis, the book unravels the social, political, and gendered relations that mediated financialization and that produced a centralized power apparatus. Mattioli develops an original take on both financialization and what he calls authoritarianism. . .In contrast to these understandings, Mattioli illuminates how capital "flows" and state capture depend on, constitute, and are exercised through social relations.In its acuity and originality,Dark Financeis thus an important example of how research in "the margins of Europe" contributes to our understanding of global political economic processes." -- Jane Cowan * on behalf of the 2021 William A. Douglass Prize Jury *"Dark Finance creatively reimagines the concept of financialization to provide fresh insights into politics and society in Macedonia, with implications for our understanding of the postcommunist region more broadly. Beginning from an eth visible Skopje 2014 construction projects sponsored by the Gruevski government, Mattioli demonstrates the centrality of illiquidity—the prevalence and significance of non-cash transactions—to both the nature of authoritarian politics and the shape of everyday life, with especially compelling attention to gendered politics and identities. Far from a bounded case study, the book's ethnography and analysis extend outward into the European Union and global economy to argue that Macedonia presents an illustrative instance of 'peripheral financialization.' Mattioli's novel conceptual framing, multi-scale range of vision, sensitivity to long-term histories, and captivating writing style combine to showcase an innovative way of studying political economy." * Ed A. Hewett Book Prize committee *"With Dark Finance, Mattioli manages successfully to articulate the global, the local and the intimate in peripheral European contexts... Overall, Dark Finance is a riveting study aided by comprehensive ethnographic observations." -- Tringa Bytyqi * Anthropology Book Forum *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Making of Illiquidity in Macedonia chapter abstractFrom stocks to illnesses, financialization is at the core of contemporary life. But what is financialization? How can it be studied ethnographically? And how does it relate to the rise of global authoritarianism? This chapter introduces the book's main arguments and situates them within the debates surrounding financial expansion. Rather than a function of calculative devices or liquid capital, the chapter describes financialization as a multi-scalar political process and offers an example of how to interrogate ethnographically the different relationships that generate financial expansion. 1The Magic of Building chapter abstractUntil 2015, Macedonia's authoritarian regime received international coverage largely in relation to the Skopje 2014 project and the hundreds of new buildings and statues that celebrated a fictional Hellenic and neo-baroque past. Chapter 1 describes how Skopje 2014 constituted a mask—obscuring shady businessmen who colluded with former secret agents, plotted to ruin former socialist companies, and invested in a wealth of real estate developments in Skopje. The chapter describes the financial networks that are at the core of Skopje's construction expansion, their connection to the socialist era's need for foreign currency, and their crucial role in supporting Gruevski's political ambitions. Following the trajectory of these networks through the postsocialist transition, the chapter shows how the built environment has become a magical device through which dirty money is made clean, and ambiguous power relations are recast as a national identity. 2Peripheral Financialization chapter abstractPostsocialist-transition Macedonia is a country with few natural resources, high unemployment, and few value-added industries. Where did the money for Skopje 2014 and other construction-related public investments come from? Chapter 2 details the international conditions that favored and structured the inflow of capital in Macedonia, focusing on two pillars of financial expansion at the periphery: foreign direct investment (FDI) and aid. It describes why international investors and agencies decided to provide funds to the Macedonian government despite the lack of credit that characterized the global economy. The chapter also follows the peregrinations of a group of Italian businessmen who tried to escape global illiquidity by intercepting international investments in Macedonia. Their stories portray the domestic, rent-seeking structures put in place by Gruevski's rule and illustrate how an increasingly unequal and subdivided European Union generates financial peripheries and supports authoritarian regimes. 3Forced Credit and Kompenzacija chapter abstractHow did international loans translate into domestic power for Gruevski's government? Chapter 3 explores the characteristics of Macedonia's domestic financialization, focusing on the reemergence of in-kind exchanges, known as kompenzacija, that followed the global financial crisis. Outlining kompenzacija's postsocialist trajectory and its relation to the Macedonian banking system, the chapter describes how politically disconnected companies receive payments in goods they don't want. These objects, such as apartments or eggs, lose value, thus obligating businesses either to absorb losses or offload these properties on subcontractors and workers. By describing the political coercion and financial dispossession that ensues, the chapter shows that kompenzacija constitutes a form of forced credit fully integrated into global financial flows. At the periphery of the European and global financial systems, the need to convert value across means of payments allows authoritarian regimes to increase their power by reaching deeply into people's social networks. 4Illiquid Times chapter abstractIn a landscape punctuated by illiquidity, production is not constant but is rather subordinated to the rhythms of debt repayment. Chapter 4 focuses on the disruption of daily routines that takes place once illiquidity makes manual work almost irrelevant. Based on a fine-grained description of the actions, rituals, discussions, and pauses that characterize work under illiquidity, this chapter details the strategies used by workers to regain agency and meaning. The chapter narrates the poetic resilience of workers and their capacity to generate spaces for empathy in the interstices of financial uncertainty. Filled with potential for social transformation, the tempo of workers' acts, jokes, and conversations does not remain merely performative. Framed by financial precariousness, their tricky conversations slide toward opportunism and reduce their moral capacity to oppose the Gruevski regime. 5Speculative Masculinity chapter abstractIlliquidity affects not only workers' self-conception but also their collective identity. Chapter 5 shows how Macedonian illiquidity generates gendered paradoxes that dislodge earlier models of work-centered, hegemonic masculinity despite the regime's insistence on aggressive manhood as a fundamental component of Macedonian identity. The chapter follows a group of male Macedonian construction workers as they try to restore patriarchal authority within their company. Unable to provide for their families, challenged by economically ascendant ethnic Albanian males, and dislodged from the nurturing attentions of Macedonian female colleagues, their failures leave them exhausted. Scorn and mockery emerge as hierarchical ways to keep male solidarity alive, forcing workers to consume their energy in containing their microaggression and projecting the regime as their only anchor. 6Finance and the Pirate State chapter abstractIlliquidity is without doubt a process intertwined with Macedonia's socialist and postsocialist history, intrinsically linked to its geopolitical marginality. And yet, it also enlightens some of the social dynamics that fuel authoritarian processes at the global level. This chapter expands on the insights derived from the Macedonian case, highlighting the importance of financial paradoxes and predatory relationships to map out how finance encounters (or emerges from) social life. Suspended between dreams and exploitation, financialization delineates a crucial domain of politics.

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Book SynopsisThe 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story. After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA+) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance.Trade Review"Legal Phantoms is the rare book that captures both the structural and human costs imposed by America's patchwork approach to immigration. It offers richly faceted analysis of how DACA has operated, its relationship to racist crimmigration regimes, and the tolls of temporariness on recipients. This is urgent reading for anyone who is concerned with immigrant precarity."—Elizabeth Cohen, Boston University"Impressive in focus and scope and meticulously researched, Legal Phantoms renders accessible the mesmerizing complexity of the immigration system that spews temporality into immigrants' lives while humanizing those who are entangled in its web. This superb team of scholars has crafted a lasting, indispensable resource for scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about immigrants today."—Cecilia Menjívar, University of California-Los Angeles

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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 SynopsisMigranthood chronicles deportation from the perspectives of Indigenous youth who migrate unaccompanied from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States. In communities of origin in Guatemala, zones of transit in Mexico, detention centers for children in the U.S., government facilities receiving returned children in Guatemala, and communities of return, young people share how they negotiate everyday violence and discrimination, how they and their families prioritize limited resources and make difficult decisions, and how they develop and sustain relationships over time and space. Anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink shows that Indigenous youth cast as objects of policy, not participants, are not passive recipients of securitization policies and development interventions. Instead, Indigenous youth draw from a rich social, cultural, and political repertoire of assets and tactics to navigate precarity and marginality in Guatemala, including transnational kin, social networks, and financial institutions. By attending to young people's perspectives, we learn the critical roles they play as contributors to household economies, local social practices, and global processes. The insights and experiences of young people uncover the transnational effects of securitized responses to migration management and development on individuals and families, across space, citizenship status, and generation. They likewise provide evidence to inform child protection and human rights locally and internationally.Trade Review"Heidbrink brings nuance, clarity, and depth to the lived experiences of Indigenous youth fleeing violence, hunger, and lack of opportunity in Guatemala. Migranthood unpacks contemporary post-conflict political, economic, and criminal violence as markers of youth migration. A must-read for anyone who cares about migrant youth, and a wake-up call for policymakers recycling failed immigration and development policies." -- Victoria Sanford * City University of New York *"This gripping account of contemporary migration sheds much needed light on the experiences of unaccompanied Indigenous minors as they navigate border controls and violence. With keen insights and eloquent prose, Migranthood reveals the real-life consequences of securitization policies on the most vulnerable. An essential read." -- Roberto G. Gonzales * author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America *"[Heidbrink] offers rich portraits of young people eager to help their families through 'irregular migration' and ashamed of their failed attempts. Their stories are made more meaningful by Heidbrink's deft analysis of the historical abuse of indigenous groups by Guatemalan political and economic elites....This nuanced assessment suggests the narrowness of increasingly securitizing policy making and denying families' cultural and economic realities. Recommended." -- M. Morrissey * CHOICE *"[A] poignant juxtaposition of the contrasting perspectives of migrant youth and the multiple governmental and non-governmental authorities, both in Guatemala and the United States, responsible for migration management. By weaving the detailed chronicles of migration and deportation provided by youth with the discourses circulating in legal, medical, and humanitarian interventions, Heidbrink effectively debunks reductionist images of monolithic depictions of migranthood.'" -- Virginia Diez and Jayanthi Mistry * Teachers College Record *"[This book] makes key contributions to methodology and scholarly debates and is a must-read for scholars and students of international migration, development, and childhood studies....Migranthood is an ambitious book that lays the groundwork for future research to continue investigating the contradictory effects of the link between development and migration, and the perspectives and roles of youths as independent migratory actors embedded in larger communities." -- Chiara Galli * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Migranthood validates youth agency, clearly making connections between systemic failures in immigration policy, securitization, and development. It is a much-needed contribution that gives depth not only to the consequences of migration and deportation beyond youth and their families but also to how the effects reverberate across communities, temporally and spatially." -- Diane Sabenacio Nititham * Jeunesse *"[A] robust understanding of youth migration....[Anchored] in an honest and systematic effort to listen to, understand, and learn from the migration experiences of Indigenous youth, Heidbrink's skillfully crafted arguments challenge many dominant frameworks." -- María V. Barbero * Children's Geographies *"[Heidbrink] contributes important insights regarding how policy affects migrant youths' experiences pre- and post deportation. This text has the potential to engage interdisciplinary audiences in education, sociology, and anthropology as well as scholars wanting to challenge misconceptions of migration and its impact on youth, families, and communities." -- Sophia Rodriguez * Anthropology and Education Quarterly *"[A] methodologically sophisticated study.It captures the tragic social cost of displacement and deportation from the view of Indigenous youth, as well as their efforts to understand and resist the old and new forms of dispossession and exploitation they experience." -- Alison Elizabeth Lee * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *"As I was reading Migranthood, record numbers of child migrants were arriving at the southern border of the United States, the vast majority from Central America. I was immediately struck by how clearly Heidbrink's analysis of migranthood – the complex political and social construction of migration – critically responded to the simplistic narratives presented in the media. Heidbrink's theoretical framework has given me a much more nuanced lens to bring to the so-called "border crisis" and the media and political representations of it.... Beautifully and clearly written, this is a book of urgent theoretical and political importance." -- Leah Schmalzbauer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's three main arguments. First, the narratives of migrant and deported youth challenge the ways that the law and public policy homogenize the complex, multifaceted, and varied experiences of young migrants. Second, securitized approaches to migration management, often under the guise of "development," is a mode of governance that moves across and beyond geopolitical space, increasingly ensnaring children and youth in this global immigration dragnet. Third, in Central America, Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the adverse consequences of the securitization of migration management revealing the enduring and transnational reach of public policy across geopolitical space and generation. By interrogating how violence is produced and practiced across borders and how Indigenous youth navigate this violence following deportation, Heidbrink rethinks how and why youth are on the move. The chapter describes the mixed-methods enlisted in this 5-year, multi-sited study and outlines the forthcoming chapters. 1Youth as Agents, Caregivers, and Migrants chapter abstractSeemingly new patterns of migration among Central American children suggest that young people are engaged in intergenerational survival strategies that are increasingly transnational and youth-led. Enlisting multi-sited ethnography with young people and their families across the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala, this chapter examines how young people enlist social agency through their care work, paid labor, and mobility. As seasonal, regional and transnational migrants, young people enlist migration as a collective and historically-rooted survival strategy that responds to their past experiences of violence and marginalization and to their present and future needs. In tracing the ways young people enact care and belonging through social and physical mobility, this chapter argues that the contemporary transnational migration of Indigenous youth is a cultural elaboration of care, one rooted in historical displacements of Indigenous communities. 2Widening the Frame chapter abstractChapter two utilizes the method of multi-media elicitation with young people to dissect discourses that emerged from official media campaigns intended to deter child migration. Youth identifies the ways these official messages infantilize young people, criminalize their parents, and pathologize migration. Analyzing discourses about youth alongside narratives by youth reveals the consequential disconnect between the imagined and lived experiences of young people and their families. In critiquing the campaign and its many pitfalls, young people widen the frame of reference by alternatively interpreting the reasons for and consequences of migration and deportation. In so doing, they evaluate the efficacy of policy responses to child migration in Central America. 3The Making of a Crisis chapter abstractIn spite of media headlines which claim that child migration is the crisis du jour, chapter three argues that the influx of young migrants in 2014 and 2018 are policy-made crises. Chapter three situates the testimonio of Liseth, a Mam woman who was a refugee in Mexico as a child, alongside key historical and contemporary policy initiatives to illustrate how colonialism, armed conflict, the proliferation of plantations, and extractive industries have displaced Indigenous communities across generations. The chapter argues that these displacements are emblematic of the growing securitization of migration management and of development aid in "post-conflict" Guatemala. Key policies analyzed include the Southern Border Program, the Central American Minors program, and the Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the securitization of aid spurs rather than deters migration. 4¿Quédate y qué? chapter abstractChapter four analyzes how discourses about child migration seep into government interventions and institutional practice and how young people experience them. The chapter begins by recounting the narrative of 16-year-old Delia as she is deported from a U.S. facility for unaccompanied children to a government processing center in Guatemala City. The chapter continues with the examination of development initiatives that explicitly claim to support returned youth like Delia, to reintegrate them into communities, and to create alternatives to (re)migration. These development initiatives not only fail to effectively support young people but also reinforce long-standing social hierarchies between the ladino (mixed-race) elite and Indigenous communities in Guatemala. 5Negotiating Returns chapter abstractChapter five examines how young people variously experience removal following deportation—as children of deported parents or madres y padres deportados; as U.S. citizen children who arrive in Guatemala as they accompany their parents following removal or as llegadas; and as unaccompanied children who are deported as retornados. The in-depth narratives of young people focus on the social, emotional, and financial impacts of removal on intimate, familial relationships over time. Conceptually, these diverse and multiple experiences of removal allow us to recognize the depth and breadth of deportation's impacts on young people and their families. The chapter argues that deportation is a process, one with rippling effects on individuals and families over time and geopolitical space. 6Debt and Indebtedness chapter abstractMoving beyond the individual and familial impacts of migration and deportation, Chapter six details the community-level impacts of securitization and development in the highland town of Almolonga. Known as the "breadbasket" of Central America, Almolonga enjoys a thriving agricultural economy including abundant employment opportunities given the multiple seasons of crops, selling in local markets, and commerce to and from Mexico and El Salvador. Yet, the migration of young people continues unabated. Enlisting a household survey, this chapter examines local critiques of development and explores how community members alternatively navigate precarity through the growing use of credit and debt, often with detrimental effects across generations. 7El derecho a no migrar chapter abstractChapter seven reflects on the policy lessons learned from Indigenous youth, arguing that there is an urgent need for rigorous, publicly-accessible, and engaged research. The book concludes with the ways young people envision "the right to not migrate" as a transformative process that aspires to 'el buen vivir (the good life)', an Indigenous political project rooted in the valorization of Indigenous ways of knowing and the advancement of a collective well-being, broadly conceived. Young people link internal and community-based decolonizing projects as critical to broader social and, indeed, global transformation.

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Book SynopsisA Financial Times Best Book of the Year The first book that examines India's mega-publicity campaigns to theorize the global transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination. The early twenty-first century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was the emergence of the BRICS nations—leading stars in the great spectacle of capitalist growth stories, branded afresh as resource-rich hubs of untapped talent and potential, and newly opened up for foreign investments. The old third-world nations were rapidly embracing the script of unbridled capitalism in the hope of arriving on the world stage. If the tantalizing promise of economic growth invited entrepreneurs to invest in the nation's exciting futures, it offered utopian visions of "good times," and even restoration of lost national glory, to the nation's citizens. Brand New Nation reaches into the past and, inevitably, the future of this phenomenon as well as the fundamental shifts it has wrought in our understanding of the nation-state. It reveals the on-the-ground experience of the relentless transformation of the nation-state into an "attractive investment destination" for global capital. As Ravinder Kaur provocatively argues, the brand new nation is not a mere nineteenth century re-run. It has come alive as a unified enclosure of capitalist growth and nationalist desire in the twenty-first century. Today, to be deemed an attractive nation-brand in the global economy is to be affirmed as a proper nation. The infusion of capital not only rejuvenates the nation; it also produces investment-fueled nationalism, a populist energy that can be turned into a powerful instrument of coercion. Grounded in the history of modern India, the book reveals the close kinship among identity economy and identity politics, publicity and populism, and violence and economic growth rapidly rearranging the liberal political order the world over.Trade Review"A hugely thoughtful and innovative analysis of the phenomenon known as 'India Inc.'. Skillfully written—with a good measure of irony, humor, and bite—this book will set the standard for our understanding of this topic and period." -- Sumathi Ramaswamy, James B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies * Duke University *"Brand New Nation takes us on a tour—a tour de force, really—of the changing trajectory of the nation-state: specifically, its transformation from a liberal democratic polity into a business enterprise, underpinned by the neoliberal faith in the capacity of markets to produce utopic futures. Ravinder Kaur has a wonderfully acute eye for the telling example, the revealing case, the moment of historical rupture that opens a window onto the process of nation branding and the corporatization of the state. As a result, Brand New Nation is a riveting read—in addition to being a pathbreaking piece of work." -- John Comaroff * Harvard University *"Ravinder Kaur convincingly argues that the era of 'happy globalization' is over in India and that it is largely responsible for the dominant repertoire of national-populism under Modi. It is not only the new middle class that has asserted itself after the 1991 liberalization that is very supportive of Hindu nationalism, but the aspiring categories coming from the plebeians are also finding a sense of belonging in Hindutva politics. Kaur's book is a truly remarkable exploration of the unintended political consequences of economic developments, as in India capitalism and religious national-populism have clear affinities." -- Christophe Jaffrelot, Research Director * Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique *"[Brand New Nation] offers a new, enriching, and also, counter-intuitive perspective....This important book is a must-read." -- Roshan Kishore * Hindustan Times *"This book addresses...[many] questions with clarity and insight, and is an important read for all interested in contemporary India, media and cultural studies, and the making of a hegemonic imaginary." -- Aparna Gopalan * New Books Network *"This is an original and highly provocative book." -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times *"[Kaur] peels off layers and layers of contemporary Indian history to prove, on her own terms, that the 'manifestation of Hindu cultural nationalism and market liberalisation' owe their dominance to each other....Following the course of Kaur's arguments is a sheer treat." -- Ullekh NP * Open Magazine *"Ravinder Kaur has written a perceptive, compelling, and very engaging book. This is the first systematic treatment of the remaking of politics and ideology in the wake of the economic resurgence in India and offers a radical rethinking of nationalism." -- Tirthankar Roy * H-Asia *"Kaur's work is a lyrical tale of pitching India to the world as an 'attractive destination for investment capital.'... She shines in every page of Brand New Nation, and every page is a treat of elegant writing, sharp insights, and nuanced analysis." -- Tarique Niazi * Global Policy *"Brand New Nationis atour de forcethat sheds light on how post-colonial India has changed and is changing rapidly. Kaur's book opens our eyes to those changes." -- Karthik Nachiappan * The Wire *

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Book SynopsisElectricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.Trade Review"With incredible ethnographic skill and formidable theoretical insight,The Current Economy shows how things that we presume to be singular, such as electric grids, can be multiplied, recast as sources of profits, resisted as intrusions into middle class lives, and much more. This is essential reading for all interested in discovering how the dominant economic imagination is much more than market orthodoxy." —Andrea Ballestero, Rice University"Electricity is ordinary. Electricity is extraordinary. In this extraordinary ethnography, Canay Özden-Schilling re-introduces us to this mundane form of energy through its recent marketization process. At the cutting edge of anthropological approaches to capitalism and infrastructure, this is a masterful account of a commodity that kicks back." —Hannah Appel, University of California, Los Angeles"Özden-Schilling provides a fresh take on the ways in which technological and economic expertise shape and change contemporary capitalist markets while purposefully refraining from 'taking neo-liberalism as an allencompassing context' (p. 112)."—Darren Sierhuis, Urbanities"[The Current Economy] is a great book with much to engage with in it. For anthropologists interested in expertise, energy, and the making of markets, it makes a timely contribution to these topics and is essential reading. Accessibly written, it will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, and seasoned researchers alike."—Sean Field, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"Özden-Schilling's ethnography of US electricity markets is a compelling example of issue-oriented anthropology, as she navigates different sites to convey the state of market-making in wholesale electricity. ... Coming out in the wake of 2021 Texas electricity infrastructure failure, which demonstrated the importance of designing resilient and embedded electricity markets,The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economicsis a good resource for anyone who is interested market-building practices in general and electricity markets in particular."—Hikment Nazli Azergun, Journal for the Anthropology of North AmericaTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Current Economy 1. Regulating 2. Representing 3. Optimizing 4. Protesting Epilogue: Techno-Economics

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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 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 SynopsisSocial justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice. Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, "traditional" forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media–facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google's search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the "new victimology" that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account.Trade Review"What is the connection between emerging information technologies and the rise of global human rights? Ronald Niezen addresses this question with imagination and acuity, exploring the extent to which their interplay portends a future of greater political domination, emancipatory potential, or a complex mix of both. A critical issue, and book, worthy of very close attention." -- John and Jean Comaroff * Harvard University *"No longer confined to the courts and clinical reports, the discourse of human rights is now claimed by activists marching in the streets, spray-painted on urban walls, and invoked to enroll participants and engage allies through social media. Ronald Niezen's groundbreaking and insightful book tracks the emergence of these new mediascapes and compellingly explains why they matter." -- Stuart Kirsch * author of Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text *"#HumanRights shines much-needed light on the use of digital information to illuminate human rights violations around the world. Ronald Niezen spotlights how human rights advocates' embrace of innovative methodologies is shifting the field of practice—to corroborate survivors' stories, verify contested facts, and ultimately contribute to the realization of justice." -- Alexa Koenig * UC Berkeley School of Law *"An insightful human rights analysis, intellectually rigorous and culturally nimble." -- Kirkus Reviews

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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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Book SynopsisThe assertion that even institutions often viewed as abhorrent should be dispassionately understood motivates Arkotong Longkumer's pathbreaking ethnography of the Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations comprising the Hindu right. The Greater India Experiment counters the urge to explain away their ideas and actions as inconsequential by demonstrating their efforts to influence local politics and culture in Northeast India. Longkumer constructs a comprehensive understanding of Hindutva, an idea central to the establishment of a Hindu nation-state, by focusing on the Sangh Parivar's engagement with indigenous peoples in a region that has long resisted the "idea of India." Contextualizing their activities as a Hindutva "experiment" within the broader Indian political and cultural landscape, he ultimately paints a unique picture of the country today.Trade Review"This vivid ethnography of Hindu nationalist militants in Northeast India brings to life an encounter of contrary convictions. It explores how enthusiasts for the idea of a singular Indic identity feel forced to adapt their tactics in a region where this identity is soundly challenged. Subtle and surprising, this extraordinary study is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Hindu nationalist politics."—Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam"Arkotong Longkumer presents readers an original, impressive study on the religious foundations and anxieties of Indian nationalism. This is powerful work that intimately engages with issues of sovereignty, democracy, secularism, and culture in postcolonial India."—Sanjay Barbora, Tata Institute of Social Sciences"This is the first book accounting for the rise of Hindutva in India's Northeast. Longkumer's deeply ethnographical approach allows him to painstakingly analyze the modus operandi of the Hindu nationalist activists at the grassroots level in a part of India where ethnic tensions are mounting dangerously."—Christophe Jaffrelot, CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS and King's College London"Longkumer must be commended for writing a pioneering book on the protean forms of Hindutva today. His most striking contribution might be to remind us that even the most unsavoury forms of political imaginaries can become palatable over time through careful and creative forms of persuasion."—Uday Chandra, Pacific Affairs"Arkotong Longkumer'sThe Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeastis a well-reasoned warning on the rise of Hindutva in the northeast of India. Drawing from his PhD work, his continuing engagement with foot soldiers of the Sangh, and his keen observations, the book provides a rich ethnographic account of the twists and turns of the dominant forces tied to the Indian nation-state, in particular Hindutva. In doing so, he engages with the larger project ofAkhand Bharat, the notional [sic] entity that extends over several countries all the way from Afghanistanto southeast Asia."—Richard Kamei, The India Forum"This book is an essential read for scholars of Northeast India, Hindu nationalism, indigeneity, and beyond... Deeply grounded in a relational mode of analysis while engaging a range of humanistic social sciences, Longkumer vividly renders the territorial imaginaries and anxieties driving the most recent iteration of postcolonial expansionism in the region while also shining a light on an alternate landscape of desire and possibility."—Mabel Denzin Gergan, Politics, Religion, & Ideology"Whether it is of drawing spatial and temporal continuities with 'Bharatvarsh' via a retelling of myth and history, or of manufacturing a shared basis for being and becoming 'indigenous', or of identifying and exorcising elements that are deemed 'foreign' so that the 'indigene' may be claimed for Hindutva, or of appropriating and iconising personalities to fit within the 'nationalist' as well as the 'anti-foreign' narrative, [The Greater India Experiment] provides a rich description of how the Sangh Parivar carefully and creatively inserts itself into the crevices of life in the Northeast."—John Thomas, Biblio"[The Greater India Experiment] is significant in its multi-dimensional refletion of and on the complex socio-political and religious landscape of the Northeast... This book is a fine example of the mediating role that a rigorous ethnography can play in seriously engaging with conflicting political and religious worldviews."—Ishita Mahajan, Contemporary South Asia"The role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in redefining the cultures, education, and religious identities as well as histories of India, especially by aligning certain narratives and figures like Rani Gaidinliu to the Hindutva narrative, is not yet fully understood, especially in the predominantly tribal and Christian North East India.TheGreater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeastby Arkotong Longkumer is therefore a timely and welcome publication."—Tanka Bahadur Subba, Economic & Political Weekly"For anyone interested in how the BJP came to dominate all-India politics, this work is essential reading. For cultural anthropologists, it is a study in objectivity. Much more than a political and cultural study, however, Longkumer's book is a deep dive into an unfinished project. We do not know how it will turn out, and the writer makes no attempt to forecast the future. Still, he does give us all the information we need to keep track of the BJP's ongoing attempt to win the soul of India's Northeast."—Janet M. Powers, ReligionTable of Contents2. The Northeast and Time's Relentless Melt 3. Hindutva Worldings: Whose Way of Life? 4. Prophecy and the Hindu State 5. Christian Hindu and Nationalizing Hindutva 6. Rani Gaidinliu: A Semiotic Challenge to the Nation-State 7. Citizenship, Elections, and the Bharatiya Janata Party 8. Hindutva Becoming and the Greater India Experiment

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Book SynopsisTechnology is rapidly changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to take off in the United States but is displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In Reimagining Money, Sibel Kusimba describes the rise of M-Pesa, and offers a rich portrait of how this technology changes the economic and social landscape, allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money in user-built networks. These networks, Kusimba argues, will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment. She describes how urban and transnational migrants maintain a presence in rural areas through money gifts; how families use crowdfunding software to assemble donations for emergency medical care; and how new financial groups invest in real estate and fund weddings. The author presents fascinating accounts that challenge accepted wisdom by examining the notion of money as wealth-in-people—an idea long-cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and now brought to bear on the digital age with homegrown financial technologies such as digital money transfer, digital microloans, and crowdfunding. The book concludes by proposing a new theory of money that can be applied to designing better financial technologies in the future.Trade Review"Mobile money articulates Kenyans to multiple forms and forces of value in global and local economies. In this provocative, nuanced ethnography, Sibel Kusimba asks the question: can money be designed for the 'wealth-in-people' that sustains lives and livelihoods in an ever-more precarious world?"—William Maurer, University of California, Irvine"Kusimba provides a rich, thought-provoking narrative that vividly captures the lived experiences and contexts of the Kenyan people. Reimagining Money has huge potential in guiding studies in other fields, especially community development. This is truly a masterpiece."—Milcah Mulu-Mutuku, Egerton University"A remarkable, deeply researched book. Kusimba gifts readers with a vivid account of the world of money and technology, beautifully revealing how the everyday use, and sometimes non-use, of M-Pesa weaves monetary exchanges inside webs of relationships."—Nina Bandelj, University of California, Irvine"Reimagining Money offers a rich source of knowledge and insight on a topic that surely will gain in significance in the years ahead."—Jürgen Schraten, Finance and Society"The primary purpose of money, as Kusimba beautifully illustrates through her detailed ethnography, is to create 'wealth-in-people.' Money is but a means to build and accrue valuable relationships with others which enhance one's status and authority. The key 'resources' in life, the most valuable ones, are not minerals, technologies, or even profits; they are human relationships that be called upon and mobilized to facilitate a range of social projects and forms of assistance."—Jenny Huberman, Reviews in Anthropology"Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution is an impressive monograph. Kusimba, who hails from the United States of America (USA), migrates between her place of employment in the USA and East Africa, where she does field research and relational work. This configuration of the work–home dynamic produced useful ethnographic encounters 'in the field' with research respondents and family alike.... As such, her relations with her Kenyan kin drew her into this revolution as participant, not mere bystander."—Detlev Krige, Anthropology Southern AfricaTable of Contents1. A Central Banker Talks Money 2. Airtime Money 3. Money Leapfroggers 4. Whose Money Is This? 5. Money and Wealth-in-People 6. Hearthholds of Mobile Money 7. Distributive Labors 8. Strategic Ignorance 9. Reimagining Debt: The Rat and the Purse 10. Reimagining Giving: A Design Project 11. Designs for Wealth-in-People

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Book SynopsisHow to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.Trade Review"Caterina Scaramelli is a deeply informed guide to the wetlands, whose very ecological richness and complexity make them an ideal lens for understanding what humans have done with and to the environment. How to Make a Wetland is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, nuance, and lucidity."—James C. Scott, Yale University"How to Make a Wetland is a nuanced analysis of the competing moral ecologies that go into the making and maintaining of Turkey's wetlands. Caterina Scaramelli's lucid ethnography is a crucial addition to studies of lived environments and environmental infrastructure—a refreshing new take on anthropocentric development processes in Turkey and beyond."—Elif Babül, Mount Holyoke College"How to Make a Wetland offers a model for attending to the making of value in environmental politics. Swamp drainers, iridescent birds, a contested fishing lagoon, and water buffalo biopolitics are just some of the highlights in Caterina Scaramelli's vivid study of Turkey's deltas."—Tim Choy, University of California, Davis"[How to Make a Wetland] makes an irrefutable case why ethnographers of Turkey can no longer treat the natural environment as a mere backdrop to human culture. Horses, flamingoes, buffaloes, egrets, and swamphens populate its pages as stakeholders in wetland management plans. Whether knee-deep in mud, on a dinghy boat, or in a university office, Scaramelli shows how environmental conservation in modern Turkey has evolved in dialogue with those colorful creatures and the boggy ground under their feet."—Faisal Husain, Critical Inquiry"Through insightful analysis of the processes and effects of environmental transformations, this fascinating and original ethnography shows how the work of creating wetlands is central to moral ecological claims made by the author's diverse interlocutors (famers, bureaucrats, scientists, activists, developers, etc.) in two delta regions of Turkey.Stylistically, the book is almost lyrical, as the ebbs and flows of water (and the stickiness of mud) are used as a metaphor for the larger project making this a most engaging read."—Committee for the Albert Hourani Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association"How to Make a Wetland is a fine-grained and rich ethnography of a politically and materially muddled terrain, and Scaramelli provides several compelling ideas to enrich understandings of varied people in their variable environment."—Gabriel Urlich Lennon, Anthropology Book ForumTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. The Wetlands of Turkey 2. Sediments 3. Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure 4. Caring for the Delta 5. Emergent Wetland Animals Conclusion: Conclusion

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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 SynopsisThe assertion that even institutions often viewed as abhorrent should be dispassionately understood motivates Arkotong Longkumer's pathbreaking ethnography of the Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations comprising the Hindu right. The Greater India Experiment counters the urge to explain away their ideas and actions as inconsequential by demonstrating their efforts to influence local politics and culture in Northeast India. Longkumer constructs a comprehensive understanding of Hindutva, an idea central to the establishment of a Hindu nation-state, by focusing on the Sangh Parivar's engagement with indigenous peoples in a region that has long resisted the "idea of India." Contextualizing their activities as a Hindutva "experiment" within the broader Indian political and cultural landscape, he ultimately paints a unique picture of the country today.Trade Review"This vivid ethnography of Hindu nationalist militants in Northeast India brings to life an encounter of contrary convictions. It explores how enthusiasts for the idea of a singular Indic identity feel forced to adapt their tactics in a region where this identity is soundly challenged. Subtle and surprising, this extraordinary study is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Hindu nationalist politics."—Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam"Arkotong Longkumer presents readers an original, impressive study on the religious foundations and anxieties of Indian nationalism. This is powerful work that intimately engages with issues of sovereignty, democracy, secularism, and culture in postcolonial India."—Sanjay Barbora, Tata Institute of Social Sciences"This is the first book accounting for the rise of Hindutva in India's Northeast. Longkumer's deeply ethnographical approach allows him to painstakingly analyze the modus operandi of the Hindu nationalist activists at the grassroots level in a part of India where ethnic tensions are mounting dangerously."—Christophe Jaffrelot, CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS and King's College London"Longkumer must be commended for writing a pioneering book on the protean forms of Hindutva today. His most striking contribution might be to remind us that even the most unsavoury forms of political imaginaries can become palatable over time through careful and creative forms of persuasion."—Uday Chandra, Pacific Affairs"Arkotong Longkumer'sThe Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeastis a well-reasoned warning on the rise of Hindutva in the northeast of India. Drawing from his PhD work, his continuing engagement with foot soldiers of the Sangh, and his keen observations, the book provides a rich ethnographic account of the twists and turns of the dominant forces tied to the Indian nation-state, in particular Hindutva. In doing so, he engages with the larger project ofAkhand Bharat, the notional [sic] entity that extends over several countries all the way from Afghanistanto southeast Asia."—Richard Kamei, The India Forum"This book is an essential read for scholars of Northeast India, Hindu nationalism, indigeneity, and beyond... Deeply grounded in a relational mode of analysis while engaging a range of humanistic social sciences, Longkumer vividly renders the territorial imaginaries and anxieties driving the most recent iteration of postcolonial expansionism in the region while also shining a light on an alternate landscape of desire and possibility."—Mabel Denzin Gergan, Politics, Religion, & Ideology"Whether it is of drawing spatial and temporal continuities with 'Bharatvarsh' via a retelling of myth and history, or of manufacturing a shared basis for being and becoming 'indigenous', or of identifying and exorcising elements that are deemed 'foreign' so that the 'indigene' may be claimed for Hindutva, or of appropriating and iconising personalities to fit within the 'nationalist' as well as the 'anti-foreign' narrative, [The Greater India Experiment] provides a rich description of how the Sangh Parivar carefully and creatively inserts itself into the crevices of life in the Northeast."—John Thomas, Biblio"[The Greater India Experiment] is significant in its multi-dimensional refletion of and on the complex socio-political and religious landscape of the Northeast... This book is a fine example of the mediating role that a rigorous ethnography can play in seriously engaging with conflicting political and religious worldviews."—Ishita Mahajan, Contemporary South Asia"The role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in redefining the cultures, education, and religious identities as well as histories of India, especially by aligning certain narratives and figures like Rani Gaidinliu to the Hindutva narrative, is not yet fully understood, especially in the predominantly tribal and Christian North East India.TheGreater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeastby Arkotong Longkumer is therefore a timely and welcome publication."—Tanka Bahadur Subba, Economic & Political Weekly"For anyone interested in how the BJP came to dominate all-India politics, this work is essential reading. For cultural anthropologists, it is a study in objectivity. Much more than a political and cultural study, however, Longkumer's book is a deep dive into an unfinished project. We do not know how it will turn out, and the writer makes no attempt to forecast the future. Still, he does give us all the information we need to keep track of the BJP's ongoing attempt to win the soul of India's Northeast."—Janet M. Powers, ReligionTable of Contents2. The Northeast and Time's Relentless Melt 3. Hindutva Worldings: Whose Way of Life? 4. Prophecy and the Hindu State 5. Christian Hindu and Nationalizing Hindutva 6. Rani Gaidinliu: A Semiotic Challenge to the Nation-State 7. Citizenship, Elections, and the Bharatiya Janata Party 8. Hindutva Becoming and the Greater India Experiment

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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 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become "viral" through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a "best practice," one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.Trade Review"Through innovative research in Ethiopia and beyond, Marit Tolo Østebø exposes the hidden dimensions of how policy models gain traction and with what consequences. Village Gone Viral follows the global circuits of a 'model' African village and the impact on its place of origin to offer original insights, well-written and relevant to wide audiences." -- Victoria Bernal * University of California, Irvine *"With this lively and engaging book, Marit Tolo Østebø not only provides a convincing and compelling account from a 'model village' in contemporary Ethiopia. She also enriches the anthropology of development with new theoretical tools and updates it with concepts appropriate for the Internet age. Highly recommended." -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen * University of Oslo *"Marit Tolo Østebø's engaged, excellently researched, and accessible Village Gone Viral stands out for its detailed examination of how circulating policy models are translated into everyday village life. Wherever in the world readers are, they will quickly feel familiar with what goes on in the seemingly remote village of Awra Amba." -- Richard Rottenburg * Wits University *"This thoughtful study is a distinctive addition to the theoretically complex literature on the anthropology of policy...Village Gone Viralgains depth and relevancy by acknowledging the importance of recognizing actions of inequality, exclusion, and injustice as evidence of flaws in an ideal social model, which can detrimentally impact any international application. Recommended." -- R. B. Ridinger * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a vignette that illustrates the traveling nature of policy models. This is followed by an outline of the book's overall argument and objectives and a brief synopsis of how models, in various forms, increasingly are used as policy instruments and in efforts aimed at generating social and behavioral change. I then introduce viral assemblage, a theoretical and analytical concept that can help us make sense of how ideas and models travel in an increasingly transnational and digital world. Finally, I move to a methodological section where, in addition to situating myself in the field, I discuss how the concept of viral assemblage can also help us make sense of the methods, processes, and products that we, as anthropologists, engage in and create. 1The Village chapter abstractIn Chapter 1, I first outline key characteristics of the Awra Amba community and its history, as commonly conveyed and globally known. I then transition to an ethnographic vignette that draws on one of my first visits to the community. In addition to introducing some of the ambivalences, paradoxes, and silences that spurred me to explore beyond and behind the official narrative, this account illustrates some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas I have faced while researching Awra Amba. The chapter ends with a discussion of these ambiguities. 2Ethiopia—The Real Wakanda? chapter abstractIn Chapter 2, I situate Awra Amba in a broader historical and political context. As I detail how development and gender-related policies have evolved in and been implemented in Ethiopia, I pay particular attention to the prominent role that models, in various forms, have played in shaping the political ideologies and policies of the various Ethiopian regimes. The current government has positioned itself as an independent developmental state, setting conditions for donor involvement. Nevertheless, I show how Ethiopia's development policies have been, and continue to be, influenced by global currents and policies. This is clearly reflected in the way that gender and women's rights issues are framed in the Ethiopian context. 3The Emergence of a Traveling Model chapter abstractBy situating Awra Amba within the broader model village paradigm and in relation to a nearby expert-initiated model village, Chapter 3 deconstructs the different parts that constitute the Awra Amba model and the various ways models come into being. I draw on Clifford Geertz's distinction between models for and models of and Richard Rottenburg's concept of traveling models to show how multiple models emerge in the Awra Amba case. I suggest that the power of the traveling model—its capacity to go viral—is conditioned on the existence of a representative model, which is produced and performed at a specific place or location and reflects the ideologies and emotional sentiments of its interacting audience, who picks it up and facilitates its circulation. In other words, the model for and a corresponding model of enable and produce the traveling model. 4Alayhim—A Potential Disruption chapter abstractWith a particular focus on Awra Amba's contested history, Chapter 4 further explores the dynamics of model making. I argue that model making within the global policy world, similar to that in fields such as science and economics, can best be understood as a process of idealization—of ordering a complex assemblage. This is a process in which actors who benefit from the model and its status as an ideal type accentuate certain desirable elements of a perceived reality, while erasing or silencing elements that create unwanted complexity. In the Awra Amba case, the disruptive elements are most clearly captured in its partly hidden past—in the community's historical and ideological links to a Sufi community known as Alayhim. I end the chapter with an analysis of why Alayhim, just like a virus, represents a threatening and potentially disruptive element. 5Modes of Transmission chapter abstractIn Chapter 5, I discuss the vehicles and infrastructure—the multiple pathways and the networks of actors and vectors—that have facilitated the spread of the Awra Amba model as a transnational model for gender equality and sustainable development. To use an epidemiological term, we can think of this as the traveling model's modes of transmission. While the Awra Amba case illustrates that the exchange of ideas between conventional policy actors during policy tours, workshops, and seminars remains important in terms of facilitating a model's virality, it also points to the importance of looking beyond conventional policy actors and infrastructure. The constant emergence of new actors, partnerships, and technologies in our increasingly globalized and digitalized world has radically changed the ways policy ideas and models come into being and then travel. 6Going Viral chapter abstractWhy do some models go viral, while others do not? What is it that has compelled the various vectors and carriers in the Awra Amba assemblage to pick up and spread the community's stories and values? These are the questions I explore in Chapter 6, where I expand current academic conversations on policy mobility and traveling models, examining stories told by people who have been "infected" by Awra Amba and as a result are transmitting and circulating the model. These stories reveal that affect and desire play a key role in fueling a model's virality. This is an aspect that the existing literature on policy mobility and traveling models has overlooked. 7Conditional Virality chapter abstractWith an empirical focus on Lyfta and the company's flagship product, The Awra Amba Experience, Chapter 7 sheds light on how emotions and empathy both fuel and limit Awra Amba's virality. Driven by a passion to foster global citizenship and empathy and to counter the negative and stereotypical images that dominate mainstream media, Lyfta's producers very consciously draw on the logics of affect in the creation and marketing of their product. Yet, the stories they have produced rely on and reify the stereotypes they intend to challenge. While it is often assumed that empathy is key to greater social justice, the commercialization of The Awra Amba Experience, along with the "othering" that underpins Lyfta's documentaries, produce exclusionary practices. This shows that empathy not only is insufficient for understanding power structures but it can also sustain and create them. 8Being a Model chapter abstractHow "authentic" are the official Awra Amba narratives? Is Awra Amba a place where gender equality is real? Chapter 8 sheds light on the effects that being chosen or identified as a model have on the model itself. I show how becoming a model has led to increased recognition, benefits, and preferential treatment for the community, contributing to infrastructural and economic improvements. Yet, it is also clear that the model status comes at a price: obligations, responsibilities, and pressures to engage in representational and performative strategies aimed at maintaining, controlling, and stabilizing the Awra Amba narrative. The community's status as a model limits the possibility of questioning and challenging inequalities and injustices, shaping a community that only partly reflects the idealized model for a just, gender-equal, and peaceful society depicted in common representations of Awra Amba. Conclusion: Infected chapter abstractThe Conclusion opens with an ethnographic, self-reflective vignette that describes how I myself, eventually, became "infected" with the Awra Amba virus. By linking my fascination with Lyfta's products—particularly The Awra Amba Experience—to a pedagogical model I use in the classroom, I show how this infection was conditioned on and linked to my own identity and desires as an educator. Finally, I return to the meta-normative concerns that animate my work, drawing out the lessons to be learned from this case study and the relevance of viral assemblage for a context-sensitive, critical anthropology of traveling models.

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Book SynopsisIn 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become "viral" through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a "best practice," one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.Trade Review"Through innovative research in Ethiopia and beyond, Marit Tolo Østebø exposes the hidden dimensions of how policy models gain traction and with what consequences. Village Gone Viral follows the global circuits of a 'model' African village and the impact on its place of origin to offer original insights, well-written and relevant to wide audiences." -- Victoria Bernal * University of California, Irvine *"With this lively and engaging book, Marit Tolo Østebø not only provides a convincing and compelling account from a 'model village' in contemporary Ethiopia. She also enriches the anthropology of development with new theoretical tools and updates it with concepts appropriate for the Internet age. Highly recommended." -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen * University of Oslo *"Marit Tolo Østebø's engaged, excellently researched, and accessible Village Gone Viral stands out for its detailed examination of how circulating policy models are translated into everyday village life. Wherever in the world readers are, they will quickly feel familiar with what goes on in the seemingly remote village of Awra Amba." -- Richard Rottenburg * Wits University *"This thoughtful study is a distinctive addition to the theoretically complex literature on the anthropology of policy...Village Gone Viralgains depth and relevancy by acknowledging the importance of recognizing actions of inequality, exclusion, and injustice as evidence of flaws in an ideal social model, which can detrimentally impact any international application. Recommended." -- R. B. Ridinger * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a vignette that illustrates the traveling nature of policy models. This is followed by an outline of the book's overall argument and objectives and a brief synopsis of how models, in various forms, increasingly are used as policy instruments and in efforts aimed at generating social and behavioral change. I then introduce viral assemblage, a theoretical and analytical concept that can help us make sense of how ideas and models travel in an increasingly transnational and digital world. Finally, I move to a methodological section where, in addition to situating myself in the field, I discuss how the concept of viral assemblage can also help us make sense of the methods, processes, and products that we, as anthropologists, engage in and create. 1The Village chapter abstractIn Chapter 1, I first outline key characteristics of the Awra Amba community and its history, as commonly conveyed and globally known. I then transition to an ethnographic vignette that draws on one of my first visits to the community. In addition to introducing some of the ambivalences, paradoxes, and silences that spurred me to explore beyond and behind the official narrative, this account illustrates some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas I have faced while researching Awra Amba. The chapter ends with a discussion of these ambiguities. 2Ethiopia—The Real Wakanda? chapter abstractIn Chapter 2, I situate Awra Amba in a broader historical and political context. As I detail how development and gender-related policies have evolved in and been implemented in Ethiopia, I pay particular attention to the prominent role that models, in various forms, have played in shaping the political ideologies and policies of the various Ethiopian regimes. The current government has positioned itself as an independent developmental state, setting conditions for donor involvement. Nevertheless, I show how Ethiopia's development policies have been, and continue to be, influenced by global currents and policies. This is clearly reflected in the way that gender and women's rights issues are framed in the Ethiopian context. 3The Emergence of a Traveling Model chapter abstractBy situating Awra Amba within the broader model village paradigm and in relation to a nearby expert-initiated model village, Chapter 3 deconstructs the different parts that constitute the Awra Amba model and the various ways models come into being. I draw on Clifford Geertz's distinction between models for and models of and Richard Rottenburg's concept of traveling models to show how multiple models emerge in the Awra Amba case. I suggest that the power of the traveling model—its capacity to go viral—is conditioned on the existence of a representative model, which is produced and performed at a specific place or location and reflects the ideologies and emotional sentiments of its interacting audience, who picks it up and facilitates its circulation. In other words, the model for and a corresponding model of enable and produce the traveling model. 4Alayhim—A Potential Disruption chapter abstractWith a particular focus on Awra Amba's contested history, Chapter 4 further explores the dynamics of model making. I argue that model making within the global policy world, similar to that in fields such as science and economics, can best be understood as a process of idealization—of ordering a complex assemblage. This is a process in which actors who benefit from the model and its status as an ideal type accentuate certain desirable elements of a perceived reality, while erasing or silencing elements that create unwanted complexity. In the Awra Amba case, the disruptive elements are most clearly captured in its partly hidden past—in the community's historical and ideological links to a Sufi community known as Alayhim. I end the chapter with an analysis of why Alayhim, just like a virus, represents a threatening and potentially disruptive element. 5Modes of Transmission chapter abstractIn Chapter 5, I discuss the vehicles and infrastructure—the multiple pathways and the networks of actors and vectors—that have facilitated the spread of the Awra Amba model as a transnational model for gender equality and sustainable development. To use an epidemiological term, we can think of this as the traveling model's modes of transmission. While the Awra Amba case illustrates that the exchange of ideas between conventional policy actors during policy tours, workshops, and seminars remains important in terms of facilitating a model's virality, it also points to the importance of looking beyond conventional policy actors and infrastructure. The constant emergence of new actors, partnerships, and technologies in our increasingly globalized and digitalized world has radically changed the ways policy ideas and models come into being and then travel. 6Going Viral chapter abstractWhy do some models go viral, while others do not? What is it that has compelled the various vectors and carriers in the Awra Amba assemblage to pick up and spread the community's stories and values? These are the questions I explore in Chapter 6, where I expand current academic conversations on policy mobility and traveling models, examining stories told by people who have been "infected" by Awra Amba and as a result are transmitting and circulating the model. These stories reveal that affect and desire play a key role in fueling a model's virality. This is an aspect that the existing literature on policy mobility and traveling models has overlooked. 7Conditional Virality chapter abstractWith an empirical focus on Lyfta and the company's flagship product, The Awra Amba Experience, Chapter 7 sheds light on how emotions and empathy both fuel and limit Awra Amba's virality. Driven by a passion to foster global citizenship and empathy and to counter the negative and stereotypical images that dominate mainstream media, Lyfta's producers very consciously draw on the logics of affect in the creation and marketing of their product. Yet, the stories they have produced rely on and reify the stereotypes they intend to challenge. While it is often assumed that empathy is key to greater social justice, the commercialization of The Awra Amba Experience, along with the "othering" that underpins Lyfta's documentaries, produce exclusionary practices. This shows that empathy not only is insufficient for understanding power structures but it can also sustain and create them. 8Being a Model chapter abstractHow "authentic" are the official Awra Amba narratives? Is Awra Amba a place where gender equality is real? Chapter 8 sheds light on the effects that being chosen or identified as a model have on the model itself. I show how becoming a model has led to increased recognition, benefits, and preferential treatment for the community, contributing to infrastructural and economic improvements. Yet, it is also clear that the model status comes at a price: obligations, responsibilities, and pressures to engage in representational and performative strategies aimed at maintaining, controlling, and stabilizing the Awra Amba narrative. The community's status as a model limits the possibility of questioning and challenging inequalities and injustices, shaping a community that only partly reflects the idealized model for a just, gender-equal, and peaceful society depicted in common representations of Awra Amba. Conclusion: Infected chapter abstractThe Conclusion opens with an ethnographic, self-reflective vignette that describes how I myself, eventually, became "infected" with the Awra Amba virus. By linking my fascination with Lyfta's products—particularly The Awra Amba Experience—to a pedagogical model I use in the classroom, I show how this infection was conditioned on and linked to my own identity and desires as an educator. Finally, I return to the meta-normative concerns that animate my work, drawing out the lessons to be learned from this case study and the relevance of viral assemblage for a context-sensitive, critical anthropology of traveling models.

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Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"

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Book SynopsisMexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.Trade Review"This engrossing ethnography shows legal abortion in Mexico City to be a much-needed expansion of healthcare—and a site where norms of 'good' and 'responsible' womanhood are perpetuated rather than challenged. By sharing patients, staff, and activist experiences of this conundrum with nuance and care, Singer enables readers to think in new ways about what reproductive justice might truly mean."—Emily Wentzell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of Iowa"Elyse Ona Singer's beautiful, riveting account takes us inside Mexico's reckoning with reproductive rights. Her moving, honest stories from Mexico City abortion clinics show staff and patients acting with humility, humanity, and a healthy dose of ethical ambivalence. Lawful Sins is a brilliant, timely ethnography, offering insights into the tangled relations between Church and state as each strives to control reproductive lives and bodies."—Lynn M. Morgan, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College"In lucid and lively prose, Elyse Ona Singer tells a surprising story about abortion in Mexico. Yes, in Mexico City abortion is now legal. But the women who seek it refuse to live as autonomous rights bearers. Instead, they reckon with abortion only in relation to others: their families and God. Crucial reading for anyone engaged in debates about contemporary personhood, autonomy and reproductive governance."—Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan"Elyse Ona Singer provides an antidote to rigid U.S. abortion discourse by inviting the reader to delve into Mexico's abortion climate—characterized as it is by its endless shades of gray and nuance. ... despite being an 'outsider' in her research, Singer paints a vivid and moving account that indicates a deep respect for and desire to understand both Mexico and its people."—Andréa Becker, Gender & Society"An incredibly timely book,Lawful Sinsis an important intervention in hemispheric and indeed global debates about women and reproduction. Highly recommended."—B. A. Lucero, CHOICE"At such a turbulent time for abortion access in the Americas, Singer's book offers a chance for reflection and deeper understanding of the many issues at stake....Lawful Sins invites the reader to think beyond rights and engage instead with justice-oriented frameworks."—Lucía Guerra Reyes, American Ethnologist"A central contribution of Singer's book is the clear window it provides into the everyday goings-on inside Mexico City's ILE clinics. The reader gets a vivid sense of clinicians' and patients' experiences at clinics, as well as the infrastructural problems that make abortion difficult to provide and to access, including resource shortages, long wait times, limited appointments, and challenging commutes."—Natalie L. Kimball, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Past Is Never Dead ... : Reproductive Governance in Modern Mexico 2. The Right to Sin: Abortion Rights in the Shadow of the Church 3. Being (a) Patient: The Making of Public Abortion 4. Abortion as Social Labor: Protection and Responsibility in Public Abortion Care 5. At the Limit of Rights: Abortion in the Extralegal Sphere Conclusion

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Book SynopsisHow to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.Trade Review"Caterina Scaramelli is a deeply informed guide to the wetlands, whose very ecological richness and complexity make them an ideal lens for understanding what humans have done with and to the environment. How to Make a Wetland is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, nuance, and lucidity."—James C. Scott, Yale University"How to Make a Wetland is a nuanced analysis of the competing moral ecologies that go into the making and maintaining of Turkey's wetlands. Caterina Scaramelli's lucid ethnography is a crucial addition to studies of lived environments and environmental infrastructure—a refreshing new take on anthropocentric development processes in Turkey and beyond."—Elif Babül, Mount Holyoke College"How to Make a Wetland offers a model for attending to the making of value in environmental politics. Swamp drainers, iridescent birds, a contested fishing lagoon, and water buffalo biopolitics are just some of the highlights in Caterina Scaramelli's vivid study of Turkey's deltas."—Tim Choy, University of California, Davis"[How to Make a Wetland] makes an irrefutable case why ethnographers of Turkey can no longer treat the natural environment as a mere backdrop to human culture. Horses, flamingoes, buffaloes, egrets, and swamphens populate its pages as stakeholders in wetland management plans. Whether knee-deep in mud, on a dinghy boat, or in a university office, Scaramelli shows how environmental conservation in modern Turkey has evolved in dialogue with those colorful creatures and the boggy ground under their feet."—Faisal Husain, Critical Inquiry"Through insightful analysis of the processes and effects of environmental transformations, this fascinating and original ethnography shows how the work of creating wetlands is central to moral ecological claims made by the author's diverse interlocutors (famers, bureaucrats, scientists, activists, developers, etc.) in two delta regions of Turkey.Stylistically, the book is almost lyrical, as the ebbs and flows of water (and the stickiness of mud) are used as a metaphor for the larger project making this a most engaging read."—Committee for the Albert Hourani Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association"How to Make a Wetland is a fine-grained and rich ethnography of a politically and materially muddled terrain, and Scaramelli provides several compelling ideas to enrich understandings of varied people in their variable environment."—Gabriel Urlich Lennon, Anthropology Book ForumTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. The Wetlands of Turkey 2. Sediments 3. Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure 4. Caring for the Delta 5. Emergent Wetland Animals Conclusion: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisElectricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.Trade Review"With incredible ethnographic skill and formidable theoretical insight,The Current Economy shows how things that we presume to be singular, such as electric grids, can be multiplied, recast as sources of profits, resisted as intrusions into middle class lives, and much more. This is essential reading for all interested in discovering how the dominant economic imagination is much more than market orthodoxy." —Andrea Ballestero, Rice University"Electricity is ordinary. Electricity is extraordinary. In this extraordinary ethnography, Canay Özden-Schilling re-introduces us to this mundane form of energy through its recent marketization process. At the cutting edge of anthropological approaches to capitalism and infrastructure, this is a masterful account of a commodity that kicks back." —Hannah Appel, University of California, Los Angeles"Özden-Schilling provides a fresh take on the ways in which technological and economic expertise shape and change contemporary capitalist markets while purposefully refraining from 'taking neo-liberalism as an allencompassing context' (p. 112)."—Darren Sierhuis, Urbanities"[The Current Economy] is a great book with much to engage with in it. For anthropologists interested in expertise, energy, and the making of markets, it makes a timely contribution to these topics and is essential reading. Accessibly written, it will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, and seasoned researchers alike."—Sean Field, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"Özden-Schilling's ethnography of US electricity markets is a compelling example of issue-oriented anthropology, as she navigates different sites to convey the state of market-making in wholesale electricity. ... Coming out in the wake of 2021 Texas electricity infrastructure failure, which demonstrated the importance of designing resilient and embedded electricity markets,The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economicsis a good resource for anyone who is interested market-building practices in general and electricity markets in particular."—Hikment Nazli Azergun, Journal for the Anthropology of North AmericaTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Current Economy 1. Regulating 2. Representing 3. Optimizing 4. Protesting Epilogue: Techno-Economics

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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 SynopsisThroughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.Trade Review"A brilliant demonstration of how speech genres can shape history, Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern traces the emergence of political oratory in South India, calling new publics into being and driving the rise of the Tamil modern. Bernard Bate's new book is a foundational, richly documented contribution to the study of comparative modernities, South Asian history, and political anthropology, securing his legacy as a worthy heir to Weber and Durkheim in the elucidation of modern social and political formations."—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington"This book—assembled by a remarkable group of his colleagues—is a tribute to Bate's monumental effort to place Tamil oratory in its civilizational, genealogical, and comparative context. Bate's argument about Protestant sermonizing as the key to the birth of the modern political subject in Tamil country is a major breakthrough in the study of the linkage of modern politics to poetics and religious oratory."—Arjun Appadurai, New York University"Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern succeeds as the work of an academic community that is motivated by the desire to see that their friend and colleague's research receives the academic reception they believe is its due. It also stands as a monument to the scholarship of an original and gifted anthropologist... It is now for other scholars to take up the trail that Bate has blazed."—L. Michael Ratnapalan, Situations

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Book SynopsisWhat should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.Trade Review"A major ethnographic study, Supercorporate offers a rare glimpse into the social world within a corporation where far more than economic production takes place. Readers will be struck by the book's far-reaching implications for comprehending the conflicts between hierarchy and democracy."—Greg Urban, University of Pennsylvania"Prentice's revelatory book unveils the HR practices of a Korean conglomerate as it shifts from overwork and forced conviviality to carrying out meritocratic ideals. This organization in transition reflects its society at large. A must-read for both researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative endeavors across or within corporations."—Katherine Chen, The City College of New York, CUNY"Prentice has written an interesting and useful account of both changes in the corporate work environment in neoliberal South Korea and the continuities in its corporate organizational forms. Hierarchies are not necessarily simply flattened out: they have been morphin in ways shaped by both the profit motive and social expectations."—Vladimir Tikhonov, Asian Studies Review"Supercorporate delivers on its promises. The book clarifies the nuances involved in incentivizing employees through balancing opportunities for distinction and participation amid hierarchical infrastructures. It is in those office programs where 'post-hierarchy' South Korea could be found. Supercorporate thus offers a timely ethnography of South Korean office life and its multifaceted hierarchies."—Olga Fedorenko, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. A New Tower 2. Infrastructures of Distinction 3. Old Spirits of Capitalism 4. Surveying Sangdo 5. Interrupting Democracy 6. Virtual Escapes Conclusion: Hidden Distinctions Methodological Appendix

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Book SynopsisUber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis vs. Uber examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how.Trade Review"This beautifully written account of the dramatic arrival of Uber in Buenos Aires poses fundamental questions about public life and politics in the technologized spaces of contemporary capitalism. Juan M. del Nido's vivid ethnography shows how the rhetorical resources of late capitalism can produce a world that appears beyond politics, as fairness and efficiency become problems to be addressed by the deployment of algorithms rather than debate and contestation." —Penny Harvey, University of Manchester"This timely and important book opens up a refreshing analytical lens on questions of class and the nature of the political that are truly at stake in contemporary Argentina. Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically evocative, it will be invaluable to any reader interested in the politics of new economic formations in the region and beyond." —Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"We all know Uber exists only on the back of the taxi industry's long historical efforts to acclimatize the middle class to entering cars driven by strangers.JuanM. delNidoshows us in his imaginative ethnography that this is only the tip of the iceberg in understanding the changes Uber brings.He persuasively demonstrates how crucial it is to understand the legal and practical rubrics shaping the working lives of taxi cab drivers—that Uber hopes to disrupt—as well as the middle-class economic logics that Uber appeals to." —Ilana Gershon, Indiana University"This is an impressive contribution to analyses of the origins and consequences of late-capitalist rhetoric, everyday ethics, and how societal affects and discourses attach themselves to new technology."—Bronwyn Frey, Anthropology Book Forum"del Nido's contributions in this book go far beyond the conflict between these two industries, and postpolitical reasoning is widely applicable in thinking about how new innovations are legitimized. Moreover, del Nido skillfully demonstrates the importance of studying something as intricate and complex as reasoning itself, and doing so ethnographically, by tracing how nonexperts make sense of economic and political processes. As new technological innovations continue to penetrate our society, it is vital we understand how they are legitimized, especially if we want to have the grammar to challenge them in any meaningful way."—Annika Pinch, H-Sci-Med-Tech"del Nido's argument about how middle-class economic logics neutralize, if not foreclose, disagreement in particular ways is a theoretically sophisticated and convincing one developed in dialogue with classical and current work in moral economy. The book offers a timely discussion about rhetorical power and infrastructure in late capitalism that will be of interest to students and scholars in and beyond anthropology and provides a fresh and astute analysis of the language of neoliberalism."—Kristin V. Monroe, Anthropological Quarterly"Taxis vs. Uber offers rich reading for anyone interested in the changing dynamics of (post)political discourse, making it distinct among studies of the gig economy.... Its critical insights about the pervasiveness and influence of gladiatorial truths resonate well beyond Uber and Buenos Aires. It brings a welcome anthropological sensibility to the study of major platform companies and their impact.... Taxis vs. Uber's compelling analysis highlights the importance of scrutinizing how certain rationalities and rhetorical devices aid in legitimizing technological developments and bypassing political debate."—Kathryn Henne, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"Theoretically refreshing and ethnographically rich, Taxis vs. Uber brilliantly demonstrates how a 'postpolitical reasoning' can emerge and how this reasoning can have dire consequences for our capacity to engage in debate and decide our futures. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in learning more about the fate of the few thousand taxi drivers driving around Buenos Aires and by all those who care about the current state of democracy, everywhere."—Jean-Philippe Warren, Economic Anthropology"Both precise in terms of economic knowledge as well as rigorous in his use of anthropological canon,... this is an insightful anthropology of neoclassical economic thinking as it unfolds during a process of market disruption... [making] the familiar landscape of platforms appear strange. Taxis vs Uber constitutes a grounded contribution to understanding how and why the phenomenon of platforms spreading around the world eventually makes sense..., reading Uber's success as an epistemological battle fought with logical tools, rhetorical devices and affective weapons. Taxis vs. Uber offers an excellent analysis of the social imaginaries of late capitalism."—Maribel Casas-Cortés, European Journal of SociologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Storm Blowing from Paradise 1. The Terms of Engagement 2. The Intractable Question 3. A Most Perfect Kind of Hustling 4. On Gladiatorial Truths 5. The Stranger That Stays as Such 6. A Copernican Phantasmagoria 7. The Political on Trial 8. The Scarlet P Conclusion

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Book SynopsisOn any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability. Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.Trade Review"Original, lucidly written, and theoretically rigorous, this rich ethnography tells us how to find the state in a quite unexpected place: the bakery. An outstanding book."—John Chalcraft, London School of Economics, author of Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East"The exciting States of Subsistence not only challenges how we think about state power in Jordan, but offers a nuanced reading of the literature on state power and an original theoretical approach. José Ciro Martínez provides a roadmap for examining quotidian practices of state power in democracies and non-democracies alike."—Jillian Schwedler, author of Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent"Beautifully written, rich in ethnographic detail, States of Subsistence examines the constitution of the state at a novel site: the bakery. Drawing on remarkable access to the inner workings of both bakeries and government bureaucracy, José Ciro Martínez offers a nuanced account of how subsidized bread figures in people's everyday lives and encounters with the state."—Jessica Barnes, author of Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt"Jose Ciro Martinez's brilliant new book,States of Subsistence, largely sets aside those dominant questions of bread riots, food security, regime survival and economic reforms to craft a uniquely important and absolutely fascinating look into the political meaning of the lived experience of subsidized bread in Jordan."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"In this fascinating book, [Martínez] reveals the extent to which the bread subsidy is intimately woven into the economic, social, and political life of the kingdom."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"Centering the perspectives of Jordanians with intimate knowledge of bread and baking, Martínez demonstrates the analytical payoff of taking cultures of consumption and culinary knowledge seriously."—Anny Gaul, Current History"Martínez sees the consumption and production of bread as a microcosm for how Jordanians coexist with authoritarian power. There is no other book about the politics of subsidizing bread in Jordan, certainly none that bestows such a memorable conclusion."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information Project"I have long waited for this kind of book, an embodied political economy of a staple food such as bread, and how it literally—rather than just symbolically—sustains a nation. Martinez's evocative ethnography of bread and political stability in Jordan is a prime example of how minute attention to everyday food practices can yield deep analytical insights into the workings of a state."—Katharina Graf, Gastronomica"This splendid ethnographic study addresses one of political science's most glaring lacunae. Few things weigh more heavily than food upon both citizens and governments alike. Yet few other concepts are as understudied as this one, particularly by political scientists working on the Middle East.... To make sense of this uncertain future, observers of Jordan should consider how politics and food became wedded to one another in the first place. States of Subsistence is a magnificent place to start."—Sean Yom, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. A New Style of Administration 2. Sensing the State 3. Statecraft 4. Echoes, Absences, and Reach 5. Tactics at the Bakery 6. Leavened Apprehensions Conclusion

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Book SynopsisHow do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating connection between state administration and public sentiment. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called "Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity. Trade Review"Administering Affect leaves no ethnographic stone unturned. It is artfully organized and compellingly written. Its scholarship is meticulous and masterfully synthetic. Its conceptual contributions are original and wide-ranging. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the impulsions and compulsions of the contemporary dynamics of soft power."—James Faubion, Rice University"This is a bracing read: original, evocative, beautifully organized, and deeply persuasive. It's a rare piece of work, clearly situated in disciplinary debates and practices while offering far wider and equally substantive contributions."—David Leheny, Waseda University"With this long-awaited monograph, White proves himself a major contributor to research on media culture, affect, and governmental policy. With startling access and insights, White examines the deeply personal work of male bureaucrats—less as efficient automatons and more as highly fallible humans—crafting national anxieties with the paintbrush of girl-cute in Japan."—Christine Yano, University of Hawai'i at Manoa"White gives a unique, ethnographic case study of the efforts by the Japanese government to promote 'Pop-Culture Japan' as a means of reducing the anxieties caused by increased international competitiveness and regional tensions in East Asia. Based on extraordinary access to those in the Japanese government responsible for planning and implementing this program, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Japan Foundation, the book features detailed analysis of and insights into the 'Cool Japan' branding campaigns, the young female 'Ambassadors of Cute,' and the promotion of anime, all designed by mostly male Japanese bureaucrats to foster appreciation of Japanese culture and reduce political anxieties....Recommended."—M. D. Ericson, CHOICE"White's work underscores that in furthering our understandings of Japanese society as a whole, we cannot be beholden to dominant narratives and groups. We must recognize the diversity of experience and practice that state narratives often elide and obfuscate."—John Ostermiller, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.Trade Review"Crossing a Line tells a story of connection and fragmentation, of joy and grief, and of Palestine and its impossible geographies. With a penetrating ethnographic eye and elegant prose, Amahl Bishara gives us an account of Palestinian political expression across barriers that should be widely read."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University"This riveting and remarkable book transforms our understanding of the fragility and perseverance of Palestinian collectivities separated by the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. Amahl Bishara's eloquent ethnography examines political and expressive relationships between communities affected differentially by 1948 and by 1967, and in the diaspora."—Lisa Lowe, Yale University"In this deeply engaged ethnography, Amahl Bishara traces the varying modes and expressions of embodied protest among Palestinians fragmented across Israel's colonial geography. Offering a sensitive reading of Palestinian peoplehood and political difference, Crossing a Line brings social movement theory into critical engagement with settler colonial and native studies." —Rema Hammami, Birzeit University"This critical examination of Palestinian life in Israel and under occupation is accessible to a wide audience and deeply revealing of the relationship between place, people, and politics. Recommended."—P. Rowe, CHOICE"The very structure of occupation promotes atomization, which severely undermines the Palestinian cause. Bridging the divide among Palestinians, as Bishara and many others seek to do, is a necessary step in the way to a freer Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Crossing a Line serves as a reminder for those committed to anti-imperialism to look beyond the corporate window-dressing version of sovereignty, to unearth alternative and emergent projects for liberation that are more firmly rooted in lived experience."—Leila Kawar, Against the Current"Bishara's ethnographic research, stretching over nearly two decades, has produced a meticulous study of Israel's continuing domination and steady appropriation through multiple forms of fragmentation, immobilisation, ghettoisation and violence.... Crossing a Line is an extraordinarily multi-layered and nuanced book in which she probes the particulars of the Palestinian experience and relates them to broader contexts of colonisation, dispossession, racism and violence within the USA and elsewhere."—Nancy Murray, Race and Class"Bishara's ultimate gift to the reader is a comprehensive story of Palestinian life. To the Palestinian reader, it grows faith in our cause and fortitude. To others, it is an invitation to witness...: not in the hope of an immediate departures, but to stay with us long enough to learn how to traverse the colonial situation—the thing that makes reality unlivable—and find life again in the company of the joys and pains of others."—Eman Ghanayem, Public BooksTable of ContentsPrologue Introduction Passage 1: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Haifa Beach 1. The Shifting Ground of Palestine Passage 2: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Northern Galilee 2. Protesting the War on Gaza Together, Apart Passage 3: Passage: Bethlehem to Lubiya 3. The Momentum of Commemoration Passage 4: Passage: Jaffa to Aida Refugee Camp 4. A Juxtaposition of Palestinian Places Passage 5: Passage: Jerusalem to Nablus 5. Territory and Mourning on Social Media Passage 6: Passage: Bethlehem to Jerusalem 6. Bonds of Care: Prison and the Green Line Passage 7: Driving North Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.Trade Review"This engrossing ethnography shows legal abortion in Mexico City to be a much-needed expansion of healthcare—and a site where norms of 'good' and 'responsible' womanhood are perpetuated rather than challenged. By sharing patients, staff, and activist experiences of this conundrum with nuance and care, Singer enables readers to think in new ways about what reproductive justice might truly mean."—Emily Wentzell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of Iowa"Elyse Ona Singer's beautiful, riveting account takes us inside Mexico's reckoning with reproductive rights. Her moving, honest stories from Mexico City abortion clinics show staff and patients acting with humility, humanity, and a healthy dose of ethical ambivalence. Lawful Sins is a brilliant, timely ethnography, offering insights into the tangled relations between Church and state as each strives to control reproductive lives and bodies."—Lynn M. Morgan, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College"In lucid and lively prose, Elyse Ona Singer tells a surprising story about abortion in Mexico. Yes, in Mexico City abortion is now legal. But the women who seek it refuse to live as autonomous rights bearers. Instead, they reckon with abortion only in relation to others: their families and God. Crucial reading for anyone engaged in debates about contemporary personhood, autonomy and reproductive governance."—Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan"Elyse Ona Singer provides an antidote to rigid U.S. abortion discourse by inviting the reader to delve into Mexico's abortion climate—characterized as it is by its endless shades of gray and nuance. ... despite being an 'outsider' in her research, Singer paints a vivid and moving account that indicates a deep respect for and desire to understand both Mexico and its people."—Andréa Becker, Gender & Society"An incredibly timely book,Lawful Sinsis an important intervention in hemispheric and indeed global debates about women and reproduction. Highly recommended."—B. A. Lucero, CHOICE"At such a turbulent time for abortion access in the Americas, Singer's book offers a chance for reflection and deeper understanding of the many issues at stake....Lawful Sins invites the reader to think beyond rights and engage instead with justice-oriented frameworks."—Lucía Guerra Reyes, American Ethnologist"A central contribution of Singer's book is the clear window it provides into the everyday goings-on inside Mexico City's ILE clinics. The reader gets a vivid sense of clinicians' and patients' experiences at clinics, as well as the infrastructural problems that make abortion difficult to provide and to access, including resource shortages, long wait times, limited appointments, and challenging commutes."—Natalie L. Kimball, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Past Is Never Dead ... : Reproductive Governance in Modern Mexico 2. The Right to Sin: Abortion Rights in the Shadow of the Church 3. Being (a) Patient: The Making of Public Abortion 4. Abortion as Social Labor: Protection and Responsibility in Public Abortion Care 5. At the Limit of Rights: Abortion in the Extralegal Sphere Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWhat should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.Trade Review"A major ethnographic study, Supercorporate offers a rare glimpse into the social world within a corporation where far more than economic production takes place. Readers will be struck by the book's far-reaching implications for comprehending the conflicts between hierarchy and democracy."—Greg Urban, University of Pennsylvania"Prentice's revelatory book unveils the HR practices of a Korean conglomerate as it shifts from overwork and forced conviviality to carrying out meritocratic ideals. This organization in transition reflects its society at large. A must-read for both researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative endeavors across or within corporations."—Katherine Chen, The City College of New York, CUNY"Prentice has written an interesting and useful account of both changes in the corporate work environment in neoliberal South Korea and the continuities in its corporate organizational forms. Hierarchies are not necessarily simply flattened out: they have been morphin in ways shaped by both the profit motive and social expectations."—Vladimir Tikhonov, Asian Studies Review"Supercorporate delivers on its promises. The book clarifies the nuances involved in incentivizing employees through balancing opportunities for distinction and participation amid hierarchical infrastructures. It is in those office programs where 'post-hierarchy' South Korea could be found. Supercorporate thus offers a timely ethnography of South Korean office life and its multifaceted hierarchies."—Olga Fedorenko, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. A New Tower 2. Infrastructures of Distinction 3. Old Spirits of Capitalism 4. Surveying Sangdo 5. Interrupting Democracy 6. Virtual Escapes Conclusion: Hidden Distinctions Methodological Appendix

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Book SynopsisPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.Trade Review"Crossing a Line tells a story of connection and fragmentation, of joy and grief, and of Palestine and its impossible geographies. With a penetrating ethnographic eye and elegant prose, Amahl Bishara gives us an account of Palestinian political expression across barriers that should be widely read."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University"This riveting and remarkable book transforms our understanding of the fragility and perseverance of Palestinian collectivities separated by the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. Amahl Bishara's eloquent ethnography examines political and expressive relationships between communities affected differentially by 1948 and by 1967, and in the diaspora."—Lisa Lowe, Yale University"In this deeply engaged ethnography, Amahl Bishara traces the varying modes and expressions of embodied protest among Palestinians fragmented across Israel's colonial geography. Offering a sensitive reading of Palestinian peoplehood and political difference, Crossing a Line brings social movement theory into critical engagement with settler colonial and native studies." —Rema Hammami, Birzeit University"This critical examination of Palestinian life in Israel and under occupation is accessible to a wide audience and deeply revealing of the relationship between place, people, and politics. Recommended."—P. Rowe, CHOICE"The very structure of occupation promotes atomization, which severely undermines the Palestinian cause. Bridging the divide among Palestinians, as Bishara and many others seek to do, is a necessary step in the way to a freer Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Crossing a Line serves as a reminder for those committed to anti-imperialism to look beyond the corporate window-dressing version of sovereignty, to unearth alternative and emergent projects for liberation that are more firmly rooted in lived experience."—Leila Kawar, Against the Current"Bishara's ethnographic research, stretching over nearly two decades, has produced a meticulous study of Israel's continuing domination and steady appropriation through multiple forms of fragmentation, immobilisation, ghettoisation and violence.... Crossing a Line is an extraordinarily multi-layered and nuanced book in which she probes the particulars of the Palestinian experience and relates them to broader contexts of colonisation, dispossession, racism and violence within the USA and elsewhere."—Nancy Murray, Race and Class"Bishara's ultimate gift to the reader is a comprehensive story of Palestinian life. To the Palestinian reader, it grows faith in our cause and fortitude. To others, it is an invitation to witness...: not in the hope of an immediate departures, but to stay with us long enough to learn how to traverse the colonial situation—the thing that makes reality unlivable—and find life again in the company of the joys and pains of others."—Eman Ghanayem, Public BooksTable of ContentsPrologue Introduction Passage 1: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Haifa Beach 1. The Shifting Ground of Palestine Passage 2: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Northern Galilee 2. Protesting the War on Gaza Together, Apart Passage 3: Passage: Bethlehem to Lubiya 3. The Momentum of Commemoration Passage 4: Passage: Jaffa to Aida Refugee Camp 4. A Juxtaposition of Palestinian Places Passage 5: Passage: Jerusalem to Nablus 5. Territory and Mourning on Social Media Passage 6: Passage: Bethlehem to Jerusalem 6. Bonds of Care: Prison and the Green Line Passage 7: Driving North Conclusion

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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 SynopsisHow do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating connection between state administration and public sentiment. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called "Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity. Trade Review"Administering Affect leaves no ethnographic stone unturned. It is artfully organized and compellingly written. Its scholarship is meticulous and masterfully synthetic. Its conceptual contributions are original and wide-ranging. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the impulsions and compulsions of the contemporary dynamics of soft power."—James Faubion, Rice University"This is a bracing read: original, evocative, beautifully organized, and deeply persuasive. It's a rare piece of work, clearly situated in disciplinary debates and practices while offering far wider and equally substantive contributions."—David Leheny, Waseda University"With this long-awaited monograph, White proves himself a major contributor to research on media culture, affect, and governmental policy. With startling access and insights, White examines the deeply personal work of male bureaucrats—less as efficient automatons and more as highly fallible humans—crafting national anxieties with the paintbrush of girl-cute in Japan."—Christine Yano, University of Hawai'i at Manoa"White gives a unique, ethnographic case study of the efforts by the Japanese government to promote 'Pop-Culture Japan' as a means of reducing the anxieties caused by increased international competitiveness and regional tensions in East Asia. Based on extraordinary access to those in the Japanese government responsible for planning and implementing this program, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Japan Foundation, the book features detailed analysis of and insights into the 'Cool Japan' branding campaigns, the young female 'Ambassadors of Cute,' and the promotion of anime, all designed by mostly male Japanese bureaucrats to foster appreciation of Japanese culture and reduce political anxieties....Recommended."—M. D. Ericson, CHOICE"White's work underscores that in furthering our understandings of Japanese society as a whole, we cannot be beholden to dominant narratives and groups. We must recognize the diversity of experience and practice that state narratives often elide and obfuscate."—John Ostermiller, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisThe future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism. By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.Trade Review"In this careful and rich ethnography, Christopher Loperena offers an incisive study of the courageous activism by Garifuna land defenders aiming to enact alternative futures based on notions of mutuality, not appropriation."—Juliet Hooker, Brown University"The Ends of Paradise brilliantly analyzes the racial logics of on-going settler capitalist extractivism while showing the beauty and strength of the Garifuna struggle. Christopher Loperena provides a grounded look at the contemporary dilemmas facing Black and Indigenous peoples throughout much of the world."—Shannon Speed, UCLA"An illuminating analysis of Garifuna activism. Crucial for understanding how extraction, race, and activism are unfolding around the world, The Ends of Paradise is a must read."—Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon"Loperena provides a microhistory of individuals and organizations, sometimes in competition, navigating the pressures of land access and control, economic development, and cultural identity.... Recommended."—J. M. Rosenthal, CHOICE"The Ends of Paradise is a powerful history of the present, one that captures and participates in the struggle of a Black Indigenous people to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy in the face of development projects that are marketed as sustainable ecotourism."—Kevin Coleman, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Imagining Black Indigenous Futures chapter abstractThe introduction establishes how Black and Indigenous struggles for territorial autonomy in Honduras interact with larger social and economic forces, including the global resurgence of resource extraction that is slowly eroding the customary rights of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Although the government of Honduras has presented tourism as a sustainable alternative to extractive industries, this chapter argues that tourism is an extractivist enterprise premised on environmental dispossession and racial violence against rural communities of color. It also shows how Garifuna—a Black Indigenous people of African, Arawak, and Carib descent—fight back against the extractivist mandate of the Honduran state and multinational capital on the Caribbean Coast. 1The Extractivist Logics of Progress chapter abstractChapter 1 traces the historical genealogy of extractivism in Honduras. From the banana enclaves of the early twentieth century to sumptuous coastal tourism resorts and the contemporary bid to establish semiautonomous charter cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country, the state has tried to enact various visions of progress. All these visions, though, are intimately tethered to extractivism, particularly racial extractivism. 2The Garifuna Coast: The Inclusionary Politics of Expulsion chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes how the tourism economy facilitates racialized extraction. The advent of multicultural rights unfolded alongside state programs designed to transform Garifuna people into subjects of development. But the inclusion of Black and Indigenous communities seems inseparable from the commodification of those communities; the government's policies all seem to render Garifuna lands and culture as tourism products. These policies are presented as a win-win for everyone, equally beneficial to Garifuna and working-class non-Indigenous Hondurans who remain stymied by poverty and the legacy of "underdevelopment." The only clear winner is not either one of these groups, but rather the mestizo elite. Garifuna resistance to government policies exposes the inner workings of supposedly inclusionary politics and how those efforts ultimately advance not inclusion, but racial and spatial expulsion. 3Tensions of Autonomous Blackness chapter abstractChapter 3 examines how statist development objectives seep into the lives of Garifuna in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Neoliberal economic paradigms emerged in tandem with morally saturated development discourses that tout poverty reduction, inclusion, and sustainability, and also imagine Garifuna as stakeholders with the capacity to benefit from and contribute productively to Honduras's tourism economy. Policies that promote participation in the tourism economy are entangled with contests over land and belonging. Conflicts over the fate of the community figure prominently in daily life, as community members—for and against government-sponsored development—reckon with the dispossession that inevitably come with development and debate how to negotiate with and when to protest against these forces. Garifuna land defense strategies are articulated through the practice of Black autonomy: an ethico-political proposal that refuses dominant narratives of progress and instead asserts a notion of autonomy as collective action and social good. 4Rescue the Land, Defend the Future chapter abstractChapter 4 theorizes the spatial and temporal dimensions of Garifuna political subjectivity through an analysis of the movement to recuperate or "rescue" communal lands from privatization. The chapter examines how Garifuna women lead the lucha (struggle) in defense of their territory with their bodies, and how that defense is bound up with gendered narratives of ancestrality and the praxis of territorial mothering. To live ancestrally is a way of being in relation with the land, which is crucial to Garifuna autonomy and a key feature of the struggle to contest the destination-making strategies of multinational capital on the Caribbean coast. 5The Limits of Indigeneity: Pueblo Garifuna v. Honduras chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the public hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Garifuna Community Triunfo de la Cruz and Its Members v. Honduras. During court proceedings, Honduras's deputy attorney general argued that Garifuna should not be considered an "original people" (indigenous to Honduras) and thus Garifuna claims to national territory were not legitimate. State officials not only undermined the possibility of Black Indigeneity but also exalted the rights of officially recognized Indigenous peoples to defend mestizo property rights in the zone. This politics of (mis)recognition tethers Indigenous subjectivity to the mestizo nation-building project and ideologies of whitening. It reinforces the perception that Black people are foreigners in Honduras. The court's judgment in favor of the community established an important legal precedent for the recognition of Black territorial rights but also served to buttress state sovereignty over natural resources deemed to be of "public use." Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion to this book begins with the violent murder of the Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. At the time of her death, Cáceres was leading a daring community uprising against the development of a large hydroelectric project slated to be built on the Gualcarque River in the Lenca community of Río Blanco. Her death marked the beginning of a new wave of repression against Indigenous and Black activists that reached its apex on July 18, 2020, with the kidnapping of four community leaders in Triunfo de la Cruz. This worrisome pattern demonstrates deep-seated racial animus toward Black and Indigenous peoples and the rights they fought so hard to obtain during the preceding decades. In spite of the devastating and racist violence they face, Black and Indigenous peoples continue to mobilize in defense of life. chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisDespite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support. Based on long-term ethnographic field research among multiple Sufi communities in different urban areas of Afghanistan, the book examines navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders over the past four decades to weather periods of instability and persecution, showing how they adapted to changing conditions in novel ways that crafted Sufism as a force in the civil sphere. This book offers a rare on-the-ground view into how Sufi leaders react to moments of transition within a highly insecure environment, and how humanity shines through the darkness during times of turmoil.Trade Review"An engaging, compelling, and beautifully-written ethnography that traverses the heterogeneous Sufi sociosphere of contemporary Afghanistan. Schmeding documents, in arresting detail and acute sensitivity, the dexterity of Sufi adepts in creating and maintaining civil communities amidst violence and ruptures. At once profound, riveting, and timely, the book is a vital contribution to the study of religion and civil society."—Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University"Sufi Civilities opens the door to a marvelous world of faith that lies hidden in plain sight. Schmeding's path breaking ethnographic account of diverse Sufi communities in contemporary Afghanistan is both new and exciting. Over the past half century they have outlasted every radical political regime that failed to appreciate just how deeply Sufism is embedded in Afghanistan's Islamic culture."—Thomas Barfield, Boston University"Afghan Sufis have been hidden from view by attention to mujahidin, Taliban, and al-Qaida. Through astute anthropological observation, Annika Schmeding shows how Sufis became important players in the contests for religious authority that emerged from the cultural whirligig of a NATO-supported Islamic Republic. This is a major contribution to the study of modern Afghanistan."—Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles

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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 SynopsisIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.Trade Review"A thoroughly researched and highly innovative scholarship at the frontier of new political developments and Anthropocenic challenges. This book will push you to think about those dimensions usually clouded by refracting syllables. The Brahminical nationalist assumptions of dairy as strength and hominid centrism of the globe have received a thorough challenge by Narayanan. Much awaited credit is honored to fellow nonhuman animals who have participated in nation-building by sweat, blood, milk, skin, flesh, and soul for the believers. A successful project that manages to deliver the message with aplomb and sincerity. Narayanan has delivered a timely call to action."—Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters"Yamini Narayanan' Mother Cow, Mother India addresses the unsettling questions we have needed, but failed, to ask about connections among race, gender, religion, caste, and species, never losing sight of all the individuals involved. Her devastating critique of the Indian invocation of cow as "mother" exposes how, in the interests of nationalism and capitalism, the idea of mother, like the cow herself, is being continually exploited. Every gift a scholar needs to bring to such demanding and incisive work—compassion, courage, persistence, exhaustive research, and political acumen—Narayanan brings to this amazing and compelling book."—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"Mother Cow, Mother India is a highly sophisticated and empathetically engaged analysis of the cows, buffaloes, and their calves at the heart of India's cow protection politics. Narayanan skillfully elicits in the reader a deep sensitivity to the animals' whose lives, experiences, and deaths are caught up in the dairy and beef industries within a fraught landscape of human politics and violence. This work is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is truly the first of its kind – a great gift to the worlds of both animal studies and South Asia studies, not to mention the global animal advocacy movement."—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"Yamini Narayanan's exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy animal-agriculture system and how it is advanced and supported by Hindutva bovine politics is commendable."—Sagari R. Ramdas, The Wire"These analyses underscore the centrality of caste and communal politics to meat-eating practices in India, even while seeking to argue that there are other historical, political and socioeconomic factors involved."—Kaashif Hajee, The CaravanTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Dairy Politics and India's Milk Nationalisms 2. Breeding Bovine Caste 3. Milking 4. Gaushalas: Making India "Pure" Again 5. "Save Cow, Save India" 6. Trafficking 7. Slaughter 8. Envisioning Post-Dairy Futures

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Book SynopsisThe United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.Trade Review"Elastic Empire is an utterly brilliant piece of research. Lisa Bhungalia fluently and beautifully uses theoretical elaborations of plasticity and malleability of empire to show the interconnections between the aid industry and settler colonial and imperial violence."—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies"Into the well-studied terrain of contemporary Palestine and Israel, Lisa Bhungalia has produced a book of stunning originality. Through wide-ranging and incisive analysis, she explains how ever more highly securitized models of foreign aid adversely affect Palestinians. Aid, she argues, is war by other means."—Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture"Elastic Empire offers a riveting portrait of the quiet administration of violence. Lisa Bhungalia maps US shadow wars carried out through the daily work of aid and state terror in Palestine. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the intimacies of US empire and the topological tentacles of counterterrorism law."—Alison Mountz, author of The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement ArchipelagoTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. War Through Law 2. Elastic Sovereignty 3. Work of the List 4. Afterlives and Reverberations 5. Asphyxiatory Violence Conclusion

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Book SynopsisOn November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.Trade Review"This book expertly and eloquently offers a close examination of how human and more-than-human relations are regenerated in the context of war and its aftermath. Lederach recovers and makes visible how campesino peacebuilding emerges from a distinct ecological imagination, and their efforts to achieve in praxis reparation and reconciliation."—María Clemencia Ramírez, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia"Lederach's scholarship is impeccable, deftly fusing Colombian and international scholarship on peacemaking, her own ethnographic insights, and the voices of montemariano peasants, who are not mere interlocutors, but co-thinkers and mentors. This beautifully written book is a powerful example of what collaborative ethnography can be."—Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University"This is a deeply human and humane book that builds a case for 'slow peace', or peace based on developing relationships over time in a particular place. Angela Lederach has crafted an excellent book that is full of sensitively observed details of how communities get on with life after conflict. The book ties together the themes of the environment, power, temporality and place. It is highly recommended."—Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University"This beautifully written book is a must read for academic and nonacademic readers interested in peace building processes at the grassroots level. Essential."—A. Arraras, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: To Defend Life: An Introduction One: From and For the Territory: The Campesino Struggle for Peace Two: The Earth Suffered, Too: The Death of the Avocado Forest and Multispecies Three: The Times of Slow Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Six: Voice and Votes: Building Territorial Peace Seven: Vigías of Hope: Slow Peace and the Ethics of Attention Coda: Coda

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Book SynopsisAt the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.Trade Review"Esra Özyürek has written a path-breaking and much needed book on the multifaceted, constitutive ways by which Turkish- and Arab-background migrants shaped German Holocaust memory and how it shaped their identity in return. Based on ethnographic research, this is a fundamental contribution that rewrites our understanding of the development of Holocaust memory in Germany"—Alon Confino, author of A World Without Jews"German Holocaust memory culture is often held up as a model for other nations to imitate. But, as Esra Özyürek shows in this provocative and ethnographically rich book, the story is much more complicated. Subcontractors of Guilt is a fascinating study of belonging and exclusion in post-Holocaust Germany and a must-read for all who are interested in contemporary Europe."—Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization"Subcontractors of Guilt is an essential intervention into contemporary German debates around migration, Muslim minorities, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust memory. By centering the perspectives of young German Muslims, Özyürek's insightful study offers an important corrective to narratives that too often fail to do so."—Fatima El-Tayeb, Yale University"This powerful, well-informed book would make a fine addition to any academic library. Recommended."—S. Anderson, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: German Holocaust Memory and the Redemptive Path toward Democracy 1. Rebelling against the Father, Democratizing the Family 2. Export-Import Theory of Muslim Antisemitism in Germany 3. Wrong Emotions / Wrong Empathy for the Holocaust 4. Subcontracting Guilt, Policing Victimhood 5. Visiting Auschwitz as Pilgrimage and as Shock Therapy Conclusion: Can Muslims Flip the Script of the German Memory Theater?

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Book SynopsisFor decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma's much-lauded decade-long "transition" from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism. How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of "rights" to guarantee their incursions against injustice? In this book, Elliott Prasse-Freeman documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called "democratic transition" from 2011-2021, but also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, Rights Refused shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.Trade Review"A combination analytical breadth, sparkling playfulness, ethnographic granularity, and deep sympathy for the heroic resistance of the Burmese democratic movement. Take a deep breath and dive in at the deep end; you'll be glad you did."—James C. Scott, Yale University"In this thoughtful exploration of the brutal political realities of present-day Myanmar, Elliott Prasse-Freeman unpacks the various understandings of human rights that both direct and bedevil attempts to instigate democratic reform. Noting that external observers have repeatedly misread Burmese conceptions of the very concept of rights, he offers an incisive corrective to such cultural tone-deafness with his nuanced analysis of Burmese activism and its often surprisingly diverse goals. His argument is a valuable lesson for all those who blithely assume that all meanings and values are inherently universal and thereby run the risk, in Prasse-Freeman's telling phrase, of "mocking the miserable.""—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University"Rights Refused is a theoretically ambitious and ethnographically rich study of social activism, refusal and resistance in Myanmar. Prasse-Freeman lucidly captures how activists in specific local contexts reconfigure human rights discourses to challenge oppressive state power, and his insightful analysis reshapes our understanding of rights are operating in the contemporary world."—Shannon Speed, University of California, Los Angeles"Rights Refused transcends the confines of a mere book; it serves as a vital expedition, inviting readers to engage in a profound journey of empathy and introspection. Prasse-Freeman's humanisation of the activists and individuals at the heart of the struggle invites readers to step into their shoes and comprehend the immense challenges they face."—Thanapat Chatinakrob, London School of Economics Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Variegated Violence 2. Living Refusal 3. Plow Protests 4. Cartoons, Curses, and the Corpus 5. Taking Rights, Seriously 6. Rights in Desperation Conclusion: Rights Erosion and Refusal beyond Burma

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Book SynopsisOver the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present. Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.Trade Review"This book helps us understand the centrality of caste as a category and the processes of pollution/purity linked as they are to the labyrinths through which waste work is organized in Lahore. It is a path-breaking contribution to the fields of urban studies, informal labor practices and the production of social marginality in Pakistan. It will undoubtedly be a model for future research."—Kamran Asdar Ali, University of Texas, Austin"Life Beyond Waste is a deeply sensitive ethnography of Lahore's waste workers and traders, offering luminous insights on the entanglements of people, matter, and institutions that constitute the city's "waste infrastructure." The book is also distinctive for its historical analysis of how agrarian class and caste inequalities are reproduced in urban Pakistan. A model for urban anthropology and waste studies!"—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota"Butt shows waste infrastructure is about more than where pollution goes and who decides. Combining richly-detailed ethnography with in-depth history on the continuity between colonial governance and recent statecraft, he uncovers the diverse forms of labor that are necessary to reproduce urban life and inequality, whether in Pakistan or in wasted worlds beyond."—Joshua Reno, Binghamton University"How is hate channeled through waste work carried out by Christians as non-Muslims? How do powerlessness and anger touch the lives of those who work with waste materials? Butt's interventions on these critical questions bring to life a story of caste, waste work, and urban life that are not only in a state of flux and transformation but also a site of contestation and struggle."—Nausheen H. Anwar, The Developing EconomiesTable of ContentsPreface 1. Introduction 2. An Order for Urban Life 3. The Appearance of Things 4. Surplus and Its Excess 5. The Unevenness of Intimacy 6. The Possibility of Reproduction 7. Coda

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Book SynopsisLaboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado. Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado—a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. With collaborators and community partners, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, this book shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance. Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, this book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.Trade Review"Laboring for Justice is public anthropology at its best! Galemba not only explores labor abuses through an engaged commitment to social justice and research, she also writes as a team player set on helping migrants deal with wage theft. Her community-based approach blurs the lines between activism, teaching, and anthropology and offers methodologically rich contributions to issues affecting migrant communities throughout the country."—Juan Thomas Ordóñez, author of Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA"Professor Galemba's book does a better job than any other of telling the real human story of wage theft, how it affects people and families, in particular immigrants and people of color, how it strains our bureaucracy, how it undermines our marketplace. Wage theft is more than just a statistic. This book tells the story."—David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice"The product of a decade-long commitment to politically engaged research, Laboring for Justice makes visible the complex systems of power that constrain the lives and livelihoods of undocumented laborers across the United States. Galemba and colleagues' deeply reflexive consideration of their methodology of convivir is a gift to all committed to the decolonization of ethnographic research and writing."—Angela Stuesse, author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South"Laboring for Justice is a powerful anthropological exploration of systemic inequality and the entrenched structural forces surrounding day laborers in Colorado.... Taken together, both the substantive and the methodological contributions of this work make it a seminal piece of research in the field. Highly recommended."—M. Gatta, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction: Stolen Wages on Stolen Land 1. Stealing Immigrant Work 2. Boomtown: Construction and Immigration in the Mile High City 3. "Dreaming for Friday": How Employers Steal Wages 4. "A Day Worked is a Day Paid": Preventing and Confronting Wage Theft 5. Failure to Pursue: The Legal Maze 6. God's Justice: Resignation and Reckoning 7. Authorship: Abbey Vogel, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Amy Czulada, Tamara Kuennen, Alexsis Sanchez, and Rebecca Galemba: The DAT: Justice and Direct Action 8. Conclusion: "Sí, se puede": Learning to Convivir Amidst Broader Indignities

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Book SynopsisFollowing the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, tsunamis engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located on Japan's Pacific Coast, leading to the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen since the Chernobyl crisis of 1986. Prior to this disaster, Japan had the third largest commercial nuclear program in the world, surpassed only by those in the United States and France—nuclear power significantly contributed to Japan's economic prosperity, and nearly 30% of Japan's electricity was generated by reactors dotted across the archipelago, from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu. This long period of institutional stasis was, however, punctuated by the crisis of March 11, which became a critical juncture for Japanese nuclear policymaking. As Akihiro Ogawa argues, the primary agent for this change is what he calls "antinuclear citizens"— a conscientious Japanese public who envision a sustainable life in a nuclear-free society. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research conducted across Japan—including antinuclear rallies, meetings with bureaucrats, and at renewable energy production sites—Ogawa presents an historical record of ordinary people's actions as they sought to survive and navigate a new reality post-Fukushima. Ultimately, Ogawa argues that effective sustainability efforts require collaborations that are grounded in civil society and challenge hegemonic ideology, efforts that reimagine societies and landscapes—especially those dominated by industrial capitalism—to help build a productive symbiosis between industry and sustainability.Trade Review"What does Japanese civil society really think about Japan's nuclear energy policy after 3/11? There are many suggestions to be learned from this Antinuclear Citizens' approach to Japan's nuclear energy policy and ambiguous civil society. This action narrative analysis by a leading scholar of Japanese civil society should be read by many scholars of Japan studies."—Yuichi Sekiya, University of Tokyo"Describing himself as an 'action-oriented social anthropologist', Akihiro Ogawa draws on the experience of what he calls 'anti-nuclear citizens' to show how civil society organisations provide new and effective forms of accountability, innovation and public governance in post-Fukushima Japan. In doing so, he casts an interesting light not only on contemporary Japanese society but also on how anthropologists can interact with their subject matter that may shock some of those who believe that non-involvement is the only way for ethnographers to retain an objective lens."—Roger Goodman, University of OxfordTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Japan's Nuclear Policy and Antinuclear Activism 2. Young Precariat at the Forefront 3. The Right to Evacuation 4. Community Power 5. Unethical Politics 6. State of Exception Epilogue: Fostering the Chernobyl Law in Japan Notes for Anthropology of Policy

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Book SynopsisAny tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a heady cocktail, something described by Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, as "blood and lightning." Faced with the client's anticipation of pain and excitement, the tattooer must carefully perform calm authority to obscure a world of preparation and vigilance. "Blood and lightning, my dude"—the mysterious and intoxicating effect of tattooing done right. Dustin Kiskaddon draws on his own apprenticeship with Matt and takes us behind the scenes into the complex world of professional tattooers. We join people who must routinely manage a messy and carnal type of work. Blood and Lightning brings us through the tattoo shop, where the smell of sterilizing agents, the hum of machines, and the sound of music spill out onto the back patio. It is here that Matt, along with his comrades, reviews the day's wins, bemoans its losses, and prepares for the future. Having tattooed more than five hundred people, Kiskaddon is able to freshly articulate the physical, mental, emotional, and moral life of tattooers. His captivating account explores the challenges they face on the job, including the crushing fear of making mistakes on someone else's body, the role of masculinity in evolving tattoo worlds, appropriate and inappropriate intimacy, and the task of navigating conversations about color and race. Ultimately, the stories in this book teach us about the roles our bodies play in the social world. Both mediums and objects of art, our bodies are purveyors of sociocultural significance, sites of capitalist negotiation, and vivid encapsulations of the human condition. Kiskaddon guides us through a strangely familiar world, inviting each of us to become a tattooer along the way. Trade Review"Blood and Lightning is a stellar and vivid depiction of an industry that has long been mythologized in popular culture. Kiskaddon's memoir offers a candid perspective on both the business and creative sides of tattooing. As it dives into a cultural rite of passage, Kiskaddon's work also excels as a character study."—Booklist"In Blood and Lightning, we don't just enter the silent and physical spaces within the world of tattooing, instead the spaces are lived, examined, and connected to our humanity. Kiskaddon shows how tattoos, like history and storytelling itself, can evolve depending on the body or the world they occupy."—Devin Katayama, Senior Produce for NPR's Throughline"Written in an easygoing style, Kiskaddon's narrative ends up as much a workplace memoir as an anthropological study, where the work being documented is both tattooing and ethnography itself, with frequent references to taking field notes and finding ways to get interviews (paying for a tattoo turns out to be the best way to get a tattoo artist to talk for two hours). It's a charming and thoughtful slice of life."—Publishers Weekly"Blood and Lightning is an illuminating peek behind the doors of a tattoo shop, digging into the realities, ethics, and philosophy of altering the bodies of strangers."—Ashley Holstrom, Foreword Reviews"Kiskaddon's sensuous ethnography takes us behind the scenes in the mecca of tattooing—Oakland, California. His richly detailed prose sings as he describes his apprenticeship: learning the right touch, both needle-to-skin and with other members of this 'cool' shop. More than any other ethnography I've read, this one breathes on the page: we inhale the sharp snap of isopropyl alcohol and the tang of sweat, while early Black Flag pumps out the speakers, thumping over the hum of machines, phone calls, and pain-filled exhalations of the clients. "—Jennifer C. Lena, author of Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts"In this book, Kiskaddon covers ground that few researchers have been willing to traverse. Moreover, he is a scholar/tattooist, a combination rarely seen in the serious literature about tattooing."—David C. Lane, author of The Other End of the Needle"Very thoughtful and knowledgeable; pulled me in right from the start."—Stephanie Tamez, Tattoo Artist and co-owner ofThis Time Tmrwprivate studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NYC"Blood and Lightning is a landmark study of the craft of tattooing that is consistently compelling and rewarding."—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

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