Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisA monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.Trade Review"A monumental achievement—of impressive, wide-ranging scholarship and original thinking, finely analyzed and sensitively portrayed. We have here the first full-length anthropological study of Afghan refugees, making this a vital and much-needed contribution. Through her richly historicized analysis of migrant life histories, fantasies, and even dreams, Nichola Khan collapses the past and the present and explodes received cartographies of Anglo–Afghan relations."—Kaveri Qureshi, University of Edinburgh"This is a moving book. It moves between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and England. It moves with Pashtun taxi drivers connecting everyday mobilities to the larger scales of migration. It moves the reader through a skillful poesis of fragments. Based on years of fieldwork and attentive to the power of stories, Arc of the Journeyman realizes the dreams of a routed anthropology and a storied account of mobilities. A must-read for anyone interested in the lives of Afghan refugees, the uses of mobility theory, or the power of storytelling in an academic context."—Tim Cresswell, author of Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place

Read more less

Book SynopsisA monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.Trade Review"A monumental achievement—of impressive, wide-ranging scholarship and original thinking, finely analyzed and sensitively portrayed. We have here the first full-length anthropological study of Afghan refugees, making this a vital and much-needed contribution. Through her richly historicized analysis of migrant life histories, fantasies, and even dreams, Nichola Khan collapses the past and the present and explodes received cartographies of Anglo–Afghan relations."—Kaveri Qureshi, University of Edinburgh"This is a moving book. It moves between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and England. It moves with Pashtun taxi drivers connecting everyday mobilities to the larger scales of migration. It moves the reader through a skillful poesis of fragments. Based on years of fieldwork and attentive to the power of stories, Arc of the Journeyman realizes the dreams of a routed anthropology and a storied account of mobilities. A must-read for anyone interested in the lives of Afghan refugees, the uses of mobility theory, or the power of storytelling in an academic context."—Tim Cresswell, author of Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place

Read more less

Book SynopsisA powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable?Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism.Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness. Trade Review "Amid talk of Covid-19, Trump, U.S. imperialism, and racialized capitalism, it is always good to hear about the ‘other America’ built on social justice, cooperation, and creativity. Andrew Zitcer’s engaged, sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of four Philadelphia cooperatives ranges across bodies and practices, scales, and inclusion and exclusion to paint a theoretically rich study of the visions and activities of today’s cooperators that will inspire those of us who would like to build such societal wealth in our communities."—Peter North, author of Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements "Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism accomplishes the difficult task of disarticulating the act of cooperating from cooperatives themselves while asking what makes both ‘ethical, effective, and sustainable.’"—Antipode Table of ContentsContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Social Imperative of Cooperation2. Tools for the Journey3. Practices of the Body4. Practices of Work and Organization5. Practices of Community Economy6. Practices of DemocracyConclusionNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable?Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism.Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness. Trade Review "Amid talk of Covid-19, Trump, U.S. imperialism, and racialized capitalism, it is always good to hear about the ‘other America’ built on social justice, cooperation, and creativity. Andrew Zitcer’s engaged, sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of four Philadelphia cooperatives ranges across bodies and practices, scales, and inclusion and exclusion to paint a theoretically rich study of the visions and activities of today’s cooperators that will inspire those of us who would like to build such societal wealth in our communities."—Peter North, author of Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements "Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism accomplishes the difficult task of disarticulating the act of cooperating from cooperatives themselves while asking what makes both ‘ethical, effective, and sustainable.’"—Antipode Table of ContentsContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Social Imperative of Cooperation2. Tools for the Journey3. Practices of the Body4. Practices of Work and Organization5. Practices of Community Economy6. Practices of DemocracyConclusionNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisTells the story of Jamaican “scammers” who use crime to gain autonomy, opportunity, and repair There is romance in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but how does that change when those perceived rich are elderly white North Americans and the poor are young Black Jamaicans? In this innovative ethnography, Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of Omar, Junior, and Dwayne. Young and poor, they strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Their experience of grinding poverty and drastically limited opportunity leads them to conclude that scamming is the best means of gaining wealth and advancement. Otherwise, they are doomed to live in “sufferation”—an inescapable poverty that breeds misery, frustration, and vexation. In the Jamaican lottery scam run by these men, targets are told they have qualified for a large loan or award if they pay taxes or transfer fees. When the fees are paid, the award never arrives, netting the scammers tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Through interviews, historical sources, song lyrics, and court testimonies, Lewis examines how these scammers justify their deceit, discovering an ethical narrative that reformulates ideas of crime and transgression and their relationship to race, justice, and debt. Scammer’s Yard describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Their logic raises unsettling questions about a world economy that relegates postcolonial populations to deprivation even while expecting them to follow the rules of capitalism that exacerbate their dispossession. In this groundbreaking account, Lewis asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means. Trade Review"Jovan Scott Lewis’s sophisticated and nuanced account of Jamaican lotto scammers’ efforts to escape ‘sufferation’ positions their ethics of seizure within the logic of reparations. If the historical generation of wealth has been criminal—the result of imperialism, slavery, and debt—then its redistribution offers a way to reimagine the postcolonial present and its models of sovereignty. Scammer’s Yard is a must read for those interested in the value of blackness in the wake of the plantation!"—Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"Scammer’s Yard repositions a network of impoverished, aspirational Jamaicans at the frontier of post-colonial, racial capitalism. Combining sharp-eyed ethnography, rich historical detail, and brilliant analysis, Jovan Scott Lewis takes seriously scammers’ attempts to redress colonial brutality by using scams—in their contradictory glory—as a means of laying claim to reparations. An instant classic, this book is essential reading for anthropologists, political theorists, and scholars of the Black Atlantic or anyone looking for new tools to radically reimagine markets and the forms of radicalized violence and criminality they reproduce."—Noelle Stout, author of Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class "A page turner . . . the richness of the ethnography is as gratifying as Lewis’ deft blending of the empirical data and conceptual framework."—Antipode"Timely and necessary."—Ethnic and Racial Studies " This impressive work deftly weaves together and advances important theoretical constructs, which deepen readers' understanding of this research."—CHOICE"Scammer’s Yard, by Jovan Scott Lewis, is a rich ethnography of the existential question of Black repair."—Transforming Anthropology"Potentially transformative for the terrain of Black and Caribbean studies to the extent that it encourages us to strain against easy gestures to unitary futures on which discourses of reparations so readily rely."—Small Axe"An important ethnography in contesting the pathologizing of the urban poor and the villification of the scammer as a heartless, predatory criminal figure... the author makes a critical intervention to theory and praxes of libration by offering seizure as an ethical postcolonial mode for not only coping with but also challenging political-economic stagnation. "—American AnthropologistTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: To Be Poor Is a Crime1. The Planation Remains: A History of Sufferation2. Free Zones: Manipulated Development after Structural Adjustment3. Black Markets: The Color of Crime4. Repairing Blackness: Seizing Reparations through the ScamConclusion: Black Life beyond RepairAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisConnects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and streetIn this richly observed account of migrant shopkeepers in five cities in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Hall locates The Migrant’s Paradox on streets in the far-flung parts of de-industrialized peripheries, where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are deeply felt. Drawing on hundreds of in-person interviews on streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, and Manchester, Hall brings together histories of colonization with current forms of coloniality. Her six-year project spans the combined impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity governance, punitive immigration laws and the Brexit Referendum, and processes of state-sanctioned regeneration. She incorporates the spaces of shops, conference halls, and planning offices to capture how official border talk overlaps with everyday formations of work and belonging on the street.Original and ambitious, Hall’s work complicates understandings of migrants, demonstrating how migrant journeys and claims to space illuminate the relations between global displacement and urban emplacement. In articulating “a citizenship of the edge” as an adaptive and audacious mode of belonging, she shows how sovereignty and inequality are maintained and refuted. Trade Review "The Migrant’s Paradox is an exploration of the interweaving of citizenship, neoliberal capitalism and the day-to-day lives and livelihoods of migration. It examines how the street itself may become a site of subversion and resistance to wider systems of power... Definitions of who a migrant is, particularly the “migrant entrepreneur” are challenged and complicated by this book. It works well at layering the day-to-day with UK policy, and global levels of social change. Importantly, the stories of the streets and those who work there themselves are the heart of this book. This book would be very useful for those interested in areas such as the politics, geography and sociologies of global migration within cities as well as the possibilities of grassroots everyday resistance, migrant solidarities and social change. From a methodological perspective, it is a useful example of creative ethnographies within streets, and presenting multi-layered research."—Ethnic and Racial Studies "The author effectively unpacks how the city excludes, pushing edges further outward, creating an insecure life for migrants and producing their own ‘contested urban economy’. This perspective allows us to understand the UK’s colonial history as it intersects with global displacement and creates urban marginalization... Throughout The Migrant’s Paradox, the author ‘writes the street as world’ through walking, looking, listening and talking in the streets of Birmingham, Manchester, London, Bristol and Leicester. Hall invites the reader to enter into the world of migrants and residents of edge territories."—LSE Review of Books "Hall develops a compelling and original methodological framework for exploring life and space available to migrants by writing the street as world. She does this through extensive ethnographic research accompanied by beautiful architectural drawings of five different streets in deindustrialized cities in England (Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London and Manchester)... Hall’s is an eloquently written book that powerfully channels anger at Britain’s hostile environment and its degradation of humanity. Given a tumultuous period over the past six years, it offers a useful, if dismaying, reminder of the political context in Britain – three general elections, the 2008 financial crash and austerity, Brexit, COVID-19... A particular skill in the book is the clear-sighted way in which Hall draws the postcolonial urban politics of the treatment of migrants, such as where the state systematically destroyed documentation that confirmed arrival status of those from former colonies. As Hall argues convincingly, and extending the field in Sociology and Geography, these are racialised politics that mean for some citizenship is always marginal and called into question."—Sociology "Hall asks us to look ‘both from the outside in and the inside out’, to look again and pay attention to the often ordinary and banal spaces that make up cities. In reading and writing these streets—and the spaces connected to them—Hall draws out the complex layers of dispossession and wide geographies of entanglement that mark and define these edge territories."—The Architectural Review "Each page of this book resounds with incisive and clearly formulated insights, exemplifying movements across concepts, scales, histories, and geographies that exceed conventional boundaries... In so thoroughly accounting for the ways in which streets as worlds are composed, Hall is able to offer concrete possibilities of incipience, the ways in which these streets offer the basis, the glimmer of new urbanities."—Contemporary Sociology "Hall’s excellent book rewires the current and divisive logic around the UK and European migration systems. In a Glissantian sense, Hall proposes us to think of borders not as demarcations of cit-/denizens based on racial discrimination, but as a space of multiplicities marked by shared responsibilities and permissions for different ways of living and working across borders."—Anthropology of Work Review "A joy to read... Hall combines geography, ethnography, and architectural observations to bring these streets to life and uses powerful illustrations to capture their complexity from the global scale of the journeys that led the shopkeepers to a particular street, to the micro-scale of shop subdivisions that enable the emergence of flexible, low-threshold businesses."—Sociological Forum "Suzanne M. Hall is our Alvin Ailey of urbanism, and this book is an intricate and fiery choreography of the street as an intersection of edge economies, paradoxical injunctions, moving borders, collective ingenuity, and apparatuses of racial control. Street becomes world becomes street, and these inversions bear down hard on those that embody them but who nonetheless materialize fundamental openings in narrowing nationalisms, making their way toward more judicious and generative forms of belonging."—AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield "Suzanne M. Hall's much-anticipated book adopts a wholly original and refreshing perspective on otherwise well-worn topics such as migrant entrepreneurship and ‘ethnic enclave’ economies, repurposing these areas of study into fascinating sites through which to understand momentous global/postcolonial concerns around migration, borders, citizenship, racial capitalism, and the reconfiguration of labor under conditions of postindustrial neoliberal austerity. The Migrant's Paradox radically unsettles the assimilationist complacencies and parochializing conventions that ordinarily surround the customary ways in which migrant entrepreneurs have been studied or conceptualized, and Hall delivers a sensitive ethnographic portrayal in a remarkably eloquent and intelligent voice that makes it a delight to read."—Nicholas De Genova, editor of The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering "Combining thick ethnographic description and striking visual images, Suzanne M. Hall animates differential public infrastructural investments in local thoroughfares and the rich multicultures and transnational associations that spill out of them."—Yasmin Gunaratnam, Goldsmiths University, and Hannah Jones, University of Warwick "Through a multi-scalar ethnography, The Migrant’s Paradox explores streets as relational edge territories defined by their creativity and ongoing “durable precarity.” Hall reminds us that entrepreneurs working in these urban margins must absorb ongoing and sustained economic and political violence."—Huda Tayob, University of Cape Town "As opposed to the endless extolling of the business ethos of (certain) migrant diasporas—an extolling that helps stage newer iterations of the always tired, but always effective, good/bad migrant dichotomy—Hall captures the more solemn reality that scores the migrant, race and small-business interface."—Sivamohan Valluvan, University of Warwick Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Migrant’s Paradox1. The Scale of the Migrant2. Edge Territories3. Edge Economies4. Unheroic Resistance5. A Citizenship of the EdgeAppendixAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA searing critique of the “freedom” that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation Meaningless Citizenship traces the costs of America’s long-term military involvement around the world by following the forced displacement of Iraqi families, unveiling how Iraqis are doubly displaced: first by the machinery of American imperialism in their native countries and then through a more pernicious war occurring on U.S. soil—the dismantling of the welfare state.Revealing the everyday struggles and barriers that texture the lives of Iraqi families recently resettled to the United States, Sally Wesley Bonet draws from four years of deep involvement in the refugee community of Philadelphia. An education scholar, Bonet’s analysis moves beyond the prevalent tendency to collapse schooling into education. Focusing beyond the public school to other critical institutions, such as public assistance, resettlement programs, and healthcare, she shows how encounters with institutions of the state are an inherently educative process for both refugee youths and adults, teaching about the types of citizenship they are expected to enact and embody while simultaneously shaping them into laboring subjects in service of capitalism. An intimate, in-depth ethnography, Meaningless Citizenship exposes how the veneer of American values—freedom, democracy, human rights—exported to countries like Iraq, disintegrates to uncover what is really beneath: a nation-state that prioritizes the needs of capitalism above the survival and wellbeing of its citizens.Trade Review"Sally Wesley Bonet’s book is a beautiful exploration of the meanings of refuge and citizenship through institutions, relationships, and the everyday experiences of children and families in the United States. It exposes essential understandings that are needed for stronger futures, particularly the consequences of misaligned expectations and reality as well as the responsibility the United States has to refugees, especially those to whom it has caused suffering."—Sarah Dryden-Peterson, author of Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education"Drawing on three years of tender and tenacious ethnographic research with Iraqi refugee families resettled into poverty in the U.S., Meaningless Citizenship explains how American imperialism and its brutal late-stage, low-road, neoliberal capitalism deny refugees the economic and social rights of full citizenship. Sally Wesley Bonet critiques how refugee resettlement, public assistance, and educational and health care institutions stymie justice, even as she shows how they might be reformed to foster more humane and equitable outcomes."—Lesley Bartlett, coauthor of Humanizing Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth: 20 Strategies for the Classroom and Beyond

Read more less

Book SynopsisExploring professional passenger driving and the gig economy through feminist theories of labor Are taxi drivers in today’s era of the ride-hail app performing care work akin to domestic and household labor? So argue the authors of Spent behind the Wheel. Bringing together sociological and legal perspectives with feminist theoretical insights, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray examine the case study of contemporary professional passenger driving in the United States. On the one hand, they show, the rise of the gig economy has brought new attention to the industry of professional passenger driving. On the other hand, the vulnerabilities that professional drivers experience remain hidden. Drawing on interviews with drivers, labor organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as case law and other published resources, Hua and Ray argue that working for ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft shares similarities with driving for taxi companies in the impact on driver lives. Lyft and Uber sell the idea of industry disruption, but in fact they entrench long-standing modes of extracting the reproductive labor of their drivers for the benefit of consumer lives. Reproductive labor—conventionally understood as feminized labor—is extracted, but masked, behind the masculinized, racialized bodies of drivers. Professional driving is thus best understood alongside domestic and other gendered service work as reproductive labors devalued and often demonetized to benefit the national economy. Spent behind the Wheel is a must for readers interested in critical studies of technological change and the gig economy, showing how drivers’ capacities are drained for the benefit of riders, corporations, and the maintenance of the racial state. Trade Review "Spent Behind the Wheel exposes the harms of professional driving, illuminating the ways that capital accumulation sucks the vitality of reproductive laborers—those who make the world work for others but at the expense of their own health and well-being, men as well as women. With the increasing dominance of Uber and Lyft, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s intersectional feminist critique of the gig economy is both timely and potent."—Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 "Spent Behind the Wheel is an outstanding work that bridges the studies of flexible and algorithm-dominated labor organizations with studies of feminist and racial theories and topics."—H-Net Reviews "Spent Behind the Wheel is an outstanding work that bridges the studies of flexible and algorithm-dominated labor organizations with studies of feminist and racial theories and topics."—H-Net Reviews "Spent Behind the Wheel’s application of feminist theory to ride-hailing is forward-thinking and valuable."—Journal of American Planning Association "Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s critical analysis of drivers’ reproductive labour is certainly timely and highly valuable."—Le Travail Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Uber Drivers as Service Workers1. It’s Not the App: The Labor of Driving2. Financializing Driver Lives: Workers’ Compensation and Unemployment Insurance3. Driver Criminalization: Systemic Racism in the Passenger Ride Industry4. Who Gets Disability Justice? Rethinking AccommodationConclusion: Drivers in the Time of COVID-19NotesAcknowledgmentsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisExploring professional passenger driving and the gig economy through feminist theories of labor Are taxi drivers in today’s era of the ride-hail app performing care work akin to domestic and household labor? So argue the authors of Spent behind the Wheel. Bringing together sociological and legal perspectives with feminist theoretical insights, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray examine the case study of contemporary professional passenger driving in the United States. On the one hand, they show, the rise of the gig economy has brought new attention to the industry of professional passenger driving. On the other hand, the vulnerabilities that professional drivers experience remain hidden. Drawing on interviews with drivers, labor organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as case law and other published resources, Hua and Ray argue that working for ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft shares similarities with driving for taxi companies in the impact on driver lives. Lyft and Uber sell the idea of industry disruption, but in fact they entrench long-standing modes of extracting the reproductive labor of their drivers for the benefit of consumer lives. Reproductive labor—conventionally understood as feminized labor—is extracted, but masked, behind the masculinized, racialized bodies of drivers. Professional driving is thus best understood alongside domestic and other gendered service work as reproductive labors devalued and often demonetized to benefit the national economy. Spent behind the Wheel is a must for readers interested in critical studies of technological change and the gig economy, showing how drivers’ capacities are drained for the benefit of riders, corporations, and the maintenance of the racial state. Trade Review "Spent Behind the Wheel exposes the harms of professional driving, illuminating the ways that capital accumulation sucks the vitality of reproductive laborers—those who make the world work for others but at the expense of their own health and well-being, men as well as women. With the increasing dominance of Uber and Lyft, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s intersectional feminist critique of the gig economy is both timely and potent."—Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 "Spent Behind the Wheel is an outstanding work that bridges the studies of flexible and algorithm-dominated labor organizations with studies of feminist and racial theories and topics."—H-Net Reviews "Spent Behind the Wheel is an outstanding work that bridges the studies of flexible and algorithm-dominated labor organizations with studies of feminist and racial theories and topics."—H-Net Reviews "Spent Behind the Wheel’s application of feminist theory to ride-hailing is forward-thinking and valuable."—Journal of American Planning Association "Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray’s critical analysis of drivers’ reproductive labour is certainly timely and highly valuable."—Le Travail Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Uber Drivers as Service Workers1. It’s Not the App: The Labor of Driving2. Financializing Driver Lives: Workers’ Compensation and Unemployment Insurance3. Driver Criminalization: Systemic Racism in the Passenger Ride Industry4. Who Gets Disability Justice? Rethinking AccommodationConclusion: Drivers in the Time of COVID-19NotesAcknowledgmentsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAs commercial flight is changing dramatically and its future remains unclear, a look at how we got hereGrounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic considers the time leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg tours the newly opened airport terminal outside of New Orleans (MSY) in late 2019, and goes on to survey the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the novel coronavirus’s spread in 2020. The book culminates in a reflection on the future of air travel: what may unfold, and what parts of commercial flight are almost certainly relics of the past. Grounded blends journalistic reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a stinging critique of contemporary air travel.Table of ContentsContentsPrefaceSit Down, Be HumbleFlyoverThe 30,000-foot ViewThe Flying-VDwell TimeOde to Empty AirportsGroundedOnce upon a Time . . .Acknowledgments

Read more less

Book SynopsisRevealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical marketsWhat happens when cochlear implants, heralded as the first successful bionic technologies, make their way around the globe and are provided by both states and growing private markets? As Sensory Futures follows these implants from development to domestication and their unequal distribution in India, Michele Ilana Friedner explores biotechnical intervention in the realm of disability and its implications for state politics in the Global South. A signing and speaking deaf bilateral cochlear implant user, Friedner weaves personal reflections into this fine-grained ethnography of everyday negotiations, activist aspirations, and the space of the family. She places sensory anthropology in conversation with disability studies to analyze how normative sensoria are cultivated and the pursuit of listening and speaking capability is enacted. She argues that the conditions of potentiality that have emerged through cochlear implantation have, in fact, resulted in ever narrower understandings of future life possibilities. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, Friedner calls for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal ways of relating to the world. Sensory Futures explores deaf people’s desires to create habitable worlds and grapple with what their futures might look like, in India and beyond, amid a surge in both biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism. With implications for a broad range of disability experiences, this sensitive, in-depth research focuses on the specific experiences of deaf people, both children and adults, and the structural, political, and social possibilities offered by both biotechnological and social “cures.”Trade Review"Michele Friedner’s book is a gem—I can’t think of anything else like it. Scaling from the pronunciation of 's' by a deaf American child who will someday become an ethnographer to Indian state partnerships with biotech corporations, we encounter many ways to be hearing and deaf. And we see this communicative abundance whittled away by repressive transnational infrastructures as well as local rules, tests, and disability bureaucracies. To my mind, Sensory Futures is the union of medical anthropology, STS, and disability studies at its finest."—Mara Mills, cofounder and codirector, NYU Center for Disability Studies"Sensory Futures compels us to question what it means to live with disability as an ongoing process of becoming. Michele Friedner excels at describing the everyday demands of disability and normality in India. Engaging, insightful, and careful, this extraordinary book spotlights the reshaping of state power and technological promise through the everyday intimacies of multisensory life."—Harris Solomon, author of Lifelines: The Traffic of TraumaTable of ContentsNote on Transliteration and AnonymizationIntroduction: Sensory, Modal, and Relational Narrowing through Cochlear Implants1. Disability Camps and Surgical Celebrations: Indian Disability Interventions and the Creation of Complex Dependencies2. Becoming Unisensory: Creating a Child’s Social Sense through Auditory Verbal Therapy and Total Communication3. Mothers’ Work: Intersensing and Learning to Talk like a Cricket Commentator4. (Non-)Use: Maintaining Devices, Relationships, and Senses5. Becoming Normal: Potentiality Beyond PassingConclusion: Beyond the Bad S: Making Space for Sensory UnrulinessAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Five Indian Cochlear Implant TrajectoriesNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exploration of cosplay and its relationship with the realms of its global fandom, performance, and the modes of fictional existence Flourishing far beyond its Japanese roots, cosplay has become an international phenomenon with fervid fans who gather at enormous, worldwide conventions annually. Here, author Frenchy Lunning offers an intimate, sensational tour through cosplay’s past and present, as well as its global lure.Through a culmination of years of personal research on cosplay, and growing out of Lunning’s wealth of scholarship, conference presentations, and cosplayer interviews, Cosplay is a unique and necessary examination of identity, performance, play, and otaku fandom and culture in relation to contemporary theories. With discussions covering construction, masquerades, and community through performance, Lunning presents cosplay as a dynamic and ever-evolving global practice. She combines the fascinating viewpoints of cosplayers with observational, in-depth research on cosplay history and practice, and a deep dive into critical theory involving the modes of fictional existence, in order to understand its global expansion. Augmented with beautiful photographs, this is an engrossing, lively read that explores a complicated and often misunderstood history and meditates on how cosplay allows its participants to create and construct meaning and identity.Trade Review"Showcasing provocative theoretical work and data collected at conventions in the United States and Japan since the 1990s, Frenchy Lunning makes a powerful argument for understanding the potential of cosplay and its engagements with fictional modes of existence. With deep implications for the politics of imagination and open and ongoing entanglements in a more-than-human world, Cosplay is as passionate as it is timely."—Patrick W. Galbraith, author of Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan "Readers looking for a comprehensive history of cosplay now have one"—Gamers with GlassesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Cosplay Experience1. Cosplay: A Social History of Mass Culture and Identity2. The Lure of the Mask: Identity, Expression, and Embodiment3. Overcoming Abjection: From Ambiguity to Becoming4. In the Theater of the Cosplayer: Improvisations, Innovations, and Masquerade5. Fandom and the Fictional Mode of ExistenceNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exploration of cosplay and its relationship with the realms of its global fandom, performance, and the modes of fictional existence Flourishing far beyond its Japanese roots, cosplay has become an international phenomenon with fervid fans who gather at enormous, worldwide conventions annually. Here, author Frenchy Lunning offers an intimate, sensational tour through cosplay’s past and present, as well as its global lure.Through a culmination of years of personal research on cosplay, and growing out of Lunning’s wealth of scholarship, conference presentations, and cosplayer interviews, Cosplay is a unique and necessary examination of identity, performance, play, and otaku fandom and culture in relation to contemporary theories. With discussions covering construction, masquerades, and community through performance, Lunning presents cosplay as a dynamic and ever-evolving global practice. She combines the fascinating viewpoints of cosplayers with observational, in-depth research on cosplay history and practice, and a deep dive into critical theory involving the modes of fictional existence, in order to understand its global expansion. Augmented with beautiful photographs, this is an engrossing, lively read that explores a complicated and often misunderstood history and meditates on how cosplay allows its participants to create and construct meaning and identity.Trade Review"Showcasing provocative theoretical work and data collected at conventions in the United States and Japan since the 1990s, Frenchy Lunning makes a powerful argument for understanding the potential of cosplay and its engagements with fictional modes of existence. With deep implications for the politics of imagination and open and ongoing entanglements in a more-than-human world, Cosplay is as passionate as it is timely."—Patrick W. Galbraith, author of Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan "Readers looking for a comprehensive history of cosplay now have one"—Gamers with GlassesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Cosplay Experience1. Cosplay: A Social History of Mass Culture and Identity2. The Lure of the Mask: Identity, Expression, and Embodiment3. Overcoming Abjection: From Ambiguity to Becoming4. In the Theater of the Cosplayer: Improvisations, Innovations, and Masquerade5. Fandom and the Fictional Mode of ExistenceNotesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diasporaContemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden, Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.Skinner employs the conceptual themes of “remembering” and “renaissance” to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.Trade Review "A remarkable work in both its content and style, Afro-Sweden compels us to reconsider our understandings of race, place, and identity, all while highlighting the presence of a population whose cultural vitality and roots are too often overlooked."—Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right "Ryan Skinner’s research and writing are among those rare artifacts bringing the Afro-Swedish community to life, informing our own children, even ourselves, of that vital reminder, that we are here, that we have been here for quite some time, that we belong to the global African diaspora, that our lives matter."—Jason Timbuktu Diakité, from the Foreword "[Afro-Sweden] is such a truthful explanation of the dilemma African descendants have here in Sweden… It is such a valuable contribution to efforts to racial integration here in Sweden."—Madubuko Diakité, author of Not Even in Your Dreams: A Story about Children, Parents, and Dreams "In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores the diverse voices and experiences of the American and Black diaspora in Sweden. The book not only shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society but also pays testimony to the richness of Afro-Swedish life. "—LSE Review of Books "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is convincing in its presentation of how ‘Afro Swedes resist politics of erasure that normative color-blindness prescribes, by affirming a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in-the world’ (233). Therefore, the book is informative to those both familiar or not with the burgeoning field of racial studies in Sweden."—Ethnic and Racial Studies Table of ContentsForewordJason Timbuktu DiakitéA Note on OrthographyIntroduction: Race, Culture, and Diaspora in Afro-SwedenPart I. Remembering1. Invisible People2. A Colder Congo3. Walking While BlackPart II. Renaissance4. Articulating Afro-Sweden5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora6. The Art of RenaissanceEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diasporaContemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden, Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.Skinner employs the conceptual themes of “remembering” and “renaissance” to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.Trade Review "A remarkable work in both its content and style, Afro-Sweden compels us to reconsider our understandings of race, place, and identity, all while highlighting the presence of a population whose cultural vitality and roots are too often overlooked."—Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right "Ryan Skinner’s research and writing are among those rare artifacts bringing the Afro-Swedish community to life, informing our own children, even ourselves, of that vital reminder, that we are here, that we have been here for quite some time, that we belong to the global African diaspora, that our lives matter."—Jason Timbuktu Diakité, from the Foreword "[Afro-Sweden] is such a truthful explanation of the dilemma African descendants have here in Sweden… It is such a valuable contribution to efforts to racial integration here in Sweden."—Madubuko Diakité, author of Not Even in Your Dreams: A Story about Children, Parents, and Dreams "In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores the diverse voices and experiences of the American and Black diaspora in Sweden. The book not only shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society but also pays testimony to the richness of Afro-Swedish life. "—LSE Review of Books "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is convincing in its presentation of how ‘Afro Swedes resist politics of erasure that normative color-blindness prescribes, by affirming a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in-the world’ (233). Therefore, the book is informative to those both familiar or not with the burgeoning field of racial studies in Sweden."—Ethnic and Racial Studies Table of ContentsForewordJason Timbuktu DiakitéA Note on OrthographyIntroduction: Race, Culture, and Diaspora in Afro-SwedenPart I. Remembering1. Invisible People2. A Colder Congo3. Walking While BlackPart II. Renaissance4. Articulating Afro-Sweden5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora6. The Art of RenaissanceEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisInvestigating insecurity as the predominant logic of life in the present moment Challenging several key concepts of the twenty-first century, including precarity, securitization, and resilience, this collection explores the concept of insecurity as a predominant logic governing recent cultural, economic, political, and social life in the West. The essays illuminate how attempts to make human and nonhuman systems secure and resilient end up having the opposite effect, making insecurity the default state of life today.Unique in its wide disciplinary breadth and variety of topics and methodological approaches—from intellectual history and cultural critique to case studies, qualitative ethnography, and personal narrative—Insecurity is written predominantly from the viewpoint of the United States. The contributors’ analyses include the securitization of nongovernmental aid to Palestine, Bangladeshi climate refugees, and the privatization of U.S. military forces; the history of the concept of insecurity and the securitization of finance; racialized urban development in Augusta, Georgia; Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the consequences of the Marie Kondo method; and the intricate politics of sexual harassment in the U.S. academy.Contributors: Neel Ahuja, U of California, Santa Cruz; Aneesh Aneesh, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Lisa Bhungalia, Kent State U; Jennifer Doyle, U of California, Riverside; Annie McClanahan, U of California, Irvine; Andrea Miller, Florida Atlantic U; Mark Neocleous, Brunel U London; A. Naomi Paik, U of Illinois, Chicago; Maureen Ryan, U of South Carolina; Saskia Sassen, Columbia U.Table of ContentsIntroductionRichard Grusin1. Securitati Perpetuae: Death, Fear, and the History of InsecurityMark Neocleous2. Microwork, Automation, and the Insecurity of Contemporary LaborAnnie McClanahan3. Deadly Entanglements: U.S. Imperialism and Perils of Privatizing SecurityA. Naomi Paik4. Governing Suspects: Race, Preemption, and Economies of Threat in American WarfareLisa Bhungalia5. Figuring the Climate Refugee: From Insecurity to Adaptation in Representations of Bangladeshi Environmental MigrationNeel Ahuja6. Cyber-Insecurities and Racialized Threat in the Embattled Urban EcosystemAndrea Miller7. The Burnout Generation Tidies Up: On the Insecurity of AdultingMaureen Ryan8. Rogue Capabilities and Invisible Violence: A Conversation between Saskia Sassen and Aneesh AneeshSaskia Sassen and Aneesh Aneesh9. Letting GoJennifer DoyleContributorsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisInvestigating insecurity as the predominant logic of life in the present moment Challenging several key concepts of the twenty-first century, including precarity, securitization, and resilience, this collection explores the concept of insecurity as a predominant logic governing recent cultural, economic, political, and social life in the West. The essays illuminate how attempts to make human and nonhuman systems secure and resilient end up having the opposite effect, making insecurity the default state of life today.Unique in its wide disciplinary breadth and variety of topics and methodological approaches—from intellectual history and cultural critique to case studies, qualitative ethnography, and personal narrative—Insecurity is written predominantly from the viewpoint of the United States. The contributors’ analyses include the securitization of nongovernmental aid to Palestine, Bangladeshi climate refugees, and the privatization of U.S. military forces; the history of the concept of insecurity and the securitization of finance; racialized urban development in Augusta, Georgia; Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the consequences of the Marie Kondo method; and the intricate politics of sexual harassment in the U.S. academy.Contributors: Neel Ahuja, U of California, Santa Cruz; Aneesh Aneesh, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Lisa Bhungalia, Kent State U; Jennifer Doyle, U of California, Riverside; Annie McClanahan, U of California, Irvine; Andrea Miller, Florida Atlantic U; Mark Neocleous, Brunel U London; A. Naomi Paik, U of Illinois, Chicago; Maureen Ryan, U of South Carolina; Saskia Sassen, Columbia U.Table of ContentsIntroductionRichard Grusin1. Securitati Perpetuae: Death, Fear, and the History of InsecurityMark Neocleous2. Microwork, Automation, and the Insecurity of Contemporary LaborAnnie McClanahan3. Deadly Entanglements: U.S. Imperialism and Perils of Privatizing SecurityA. Naomi Paik4. Governing Suspects: Race, Preemption, and Economies of Threat in American WarfareLisa Bhungalia5. Figuring the Climate Refugee: From Insecurity to Adaptation in Representations of Bangladeshi Environmental MigrationNeel Ahuja6. Cyber-Insecurities and Racialized Threat in the Embattled Urban EcosystemAndrea Miller7. The Burnout Generation Tidies Up: On the Insecurity of AdultingMaureen Ryan8. Rogue Capabilities and Invisible Violence: A Conversation between Saskia Sassen and Aneesh AneeshSaskia Sassen and Aneesh Aneesh9. Letting GoJennifer DoyleContributorsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisDispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industryCastoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.Trade Review "Lamia Karim provides a rich account of global capitalism from the perspective of women who produce the clothes that we wear everyday, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex choices and lives of the women who work in garment factories. Accessible and insightful, Castoffs of Capital informs interdisciplinary understandings of contemporary inequality, and it will transform our understanding of workers and the socioeconomic structures that shape the world."—Leela Fernandes, author of Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State "In Castoffs of Capital, Lamia Karim presents new dimensions of garment workers’ lives, from the dynamics of capitalism to the nature of social norms that render these workers nameless and faceless."—American Anthropologist

Read more less

Book SynopsisDispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industryCastoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.Trade Review "Lamia Karim provides a rich account of global capitalism from the perspective of women who produce the clothes that we wear everyday, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex choices and lives of the women who work in garment factories. Accessible and insightful, Castoffs of Capital informs interdisciplinary understandings of contemporary inequality, and it will transform our understanding of workers and the socioeconomic structures that shape the world."—Leela Fernandes, author of Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State "In Castoffs of Capital, Lamia Karim presents new dimensions of garment workers’ lives, from the dynamics of capitalism to the nature of social norms that render these workers nameless and faceless."—American Anthropologist

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them? The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people. Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal–Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land. At the same time, they pursued actions to strengthen and bolster tribes, to foster healing, to fight the many injustices Indians face, and to restore the Indian land base.This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.Trade Review"Punch line for Native humor, punching bag for Native anger, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long been staffed by Indians. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study, Valerie Lambert details how BIA leaders and employees have transformed a colonial institution through Indigenous creativity and commitment. Native Agency: rarely has a title captured its subject with such complexity and crystalline clarity!"—Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract"In this much-needed book, Valerie Lambert provides a fine-grained examination of the role of American Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By highlighting their agency, her analysis contests notions of acquiescence or cooptation of Natives in the BIA, and her nuanced look at the complexities of Native participation challenges simplistic renderings of the workings of settler state power. Native Agency is a powerful book, certain to reshape our understandings of Native engagement with the BIA and, ultimately, with the settler state."—Shannon Speed (Chickasaw Nation), author of Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them? The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people. Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal–Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land. At the same time, they pursued actions to strengthen and bolster tribes, to foster healing, to fight the many injustices Indians face, and to restore the Indian land base.This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.Trade Review"Punch line for Native humor, punching bag for Native anger, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long been staffed by Indians. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study, Valerie Lambert details how BIA leaders and employees have transformed a colonial institution through Indigenous creativity and commitment. Native Agency: rarely has a title captured its subject with such complexity and crystalline clarity!"—Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract"In this much-needed book, Valerie Lambert provides a fine-grained examination of the role of American Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By highlighting their agency, her analysis contests notions of acquiescence or cooptation of Natives in the BIA, and her nuanced look at the complexities of Native participation challenges simplistic renderings of the workings of settler state power. Native Agency is a powerful book, certain to reshape our understandings of Native engagement with the BIA and, ultimately, with the settler state."—Shannon Speed (Chickasaw Nation), author of Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State

Read more less

Book SynopsisA powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideas What sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium and “rough metaphysician” Jane Roberts (1929–1984). Through a close interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled personalities—including one, named “Seth,” who would inspire the New Age movement—Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology, translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts’s writings contain philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers teach us about the limitations of even our most critical intellectual habits?Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice versa. In guiding the reader through Roberts’s often hallucinatory “world of concepts,” Skafish also develops a series of original interpretations of thinkers—from William James to Claude Lévi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabend—who have been vital to anthropologists and their fellow travelers.Seductively written and surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new, especially about thought.Trade Review "Lucid, insightful, and absolutely original, Rough Metaphysics vastly expands the scope and possibility of the anthropological discipline. Peter Skafish demonstrates how, despite our academic prejudices to stabilize knowledge in a contextually bounded self, we must learn new modes of thought that enable us to listen to what someone like Jane Roberts can reveal about our own multiplicity and the possibilities that this recognition might entail."—Eduardo Kohn, author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human "Highly original, beautifully written, and thoughtfully structured, Rough Metaphysics escapes the recursive loops by which socio-cultural anthropology often proceeds, allowing Peter Skafish to probe more deeply than almost anyone else into the implications of ‘taking seriously’ the ontological framework of an anthropologist’s interlocutor. In doing so, he offers a sharp criticism of anthropology’s persistent concern with categories of analysis that obviate such attention."—Marilyn Strathern, author of Relations: An Anthropological Account

Read more less

Book SynopsisA powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideas What sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium and “rough metaphysician” Jane Roberts (1929–1984). Through a close interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled personalities—including one, named “Seth,” who would inspire the New Age movement—Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology, translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts’s writings contain philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers teach us about the limitations of even our most critical intellectual habits?Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice versa. In guiding the reader through Roberts’s often hallucinatory “world of concepts,” Skafish also develops a series of original interpretations of thinkers—from William James to Claude Lévi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabend—who have been vital to anthropologists and their fellow travelers.Seductively written and surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new, especially about thought.Trade Review "Lucid, insightful, and absolutely original, Rough Metaphysics vastly expands the scope and possibility of the anthropological discipline. Peter Skafish demonstrates how, despite our academic prejudices to stabilize knowledge in a contextually bounded self, we must learn new modes of thought that enable us to listen to what someone like Jane Roberts can reveal about our own multiplicity and the possibilities that this recognition might entail."—Eduardo Kohn, author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human "Highly original, beautifully written, and thoughtfully structured, Rough Metaphysics escapes the recursive loops by which socio-cultural anthropology often proceeds, allowing Peter Skafish to probe more deeply than almost anyone else into the implications of ‘taking seriously’ the ontological framework of an anthropologist’s interlocutor. In doing so, he offers a sharp criticism of anthropology’s persistent concern with categories of analysis that obviate such attention."—Marilyn Strathern, author of Relations: An Anthropological Account

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamining anticorruption battles and transparency laws to ask: what makes for good governance, and can it limit liberal democratic politics as much as encourage it? Good governance is meant to empower citizens, increase democratic participation, and make states transparent and accountable, yet this liberal democratic imperative can also promote populist authoritarian rule. Bringing together discourses on ethical goodness with the technicalities of governance as expressed in laws and policies, Aradhana Sharma develops the concept of “technomoral politics” to navigate this fraught topic. With a focus on the work of activists, citizens, and state officials, she offers an ethnographic account of the contradictions and dangers of good-governance politics in twenty-first-century India. A Technomoral Politics follows the evolution of a group of activists in New Delhi led by Arvind Kejriwal from 2008 to 2014 as they morphed from a protransparency NGO to a mass movement against state corruption to a populist party that promised to change the political system through laws and policies. Sharma explores the technomoral framing of state opacity and corruption as well as the limits of the law in resolving these issues, probing such themes as the contradictory relationship between transparency and bureaucracy and the classed and gendered nature of democratic state institutions. By examining scalar dimensions of good-governance politics, from the hyperlocal work of activists to global trends, A Technomoral Politics illuminates the paradoxes, limits, and risks of a system that is meant to spread liberal democratic principles but that also ends up promoting antidemocratic, populist-authoritarian forms of rule. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSince the ‘migration crisis’ of 2016, long-simmering tensions between the Western members of the European Union and its ‘new’ Eastern members – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – have proven to be fertile ground for rebellion against liberal values and policies. In this startling and original book Ivan Kalmar argues that Central European illiberalism is a misguided response to the devastating effects of global neoliberalism, which arose from the area’s brutal transition to capitalism in the 1990s. Kalmar argues that dismissive attitudes towards ‘Eastern Europeans’ are a form of racism and explores the close relation between racism towards Central Europeans and racism by Central Europeans: a people white but not quite.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Race, Illiberalism, Central Europe 1. How Eastern Europeans Became Less White 2. How Central Europeans Became Eastern European 3. How Central Europeans Became Central European (Time and Time Again) 4. Central Europe: Half-Truths and Facts 5. The Last of the White Men: Central Europe’s White Innocence 6. ‘Have Eastern Europeans No Shame?’ Anti-Semitism, Racism, and Homophobia in Central Europe 7. Imitators Spurned: Why the West Needs Central Europe to Stay in its Eastern European Place 8. ‘We Will Not Be a Colony!’ 9. Slavia Prague v. Glasgow Rangers: Lessons from a Football Match Conclusion: When the Migrants Come Postscript: Confessions of a Canadian Central European

Read more less

Book SynopsisAuroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, is an internationally recognized endeavour in prefiguring an alternative society: the largest, most diverse, dynamic and enduring of intentional communities worldwide. This book is a critical and insightful analysis of the utopian practice of this unique spiritual township, by a native scholar. The author explores how Auroville’s founding spiritual and societal ideals are engaged in its communal political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices and what enables and sustains this prefiguratively utopian practice. This in-depth, autoethnographic case study is an important resource for understanding prefigurative and utopian experiments – their challenges, potentialities and significance for the advancement of human society.Table of ContentsForeword - Bem Le Hunte 1. All Life is Yoga: An Introduction Part 1: Culture 2. Auroville Is … 3. A Spiritually Prefigurative Culture: The Uniqueness of Auroville’s Utopian Practice Part 2: Polis 4. Divine Anarchy? The Development of the Auroville Polity 5. Spiritually Prefigurative Politics in Practice: An Embodied Account of an Auroville Community Decision-Making Process Part 3: Economy 6. 'No Exchange of Money'? The Development of Auroville’s Communal Economy 7. The Institutional Potential of Prefigurative Experiments: The Evolution of Collective Accounts in Auroville 8. Auroville and Beyond: The Grounded Hopes and Horizons of Spiritually Prefigurative Practice – A Conclusion Afterword - Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

Read more less

Book SynopsisSyrian refugees who gained asylum in Germany following the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 quickly entered into an ‘integration regime’ which produced a binary notion of ‘well integrated’ migrants versus refugees falling short of the narrow social and political definitions of a ‘good’ refugee. Etzel’s rich ethnographic study shows how refugees navigated this conditional inclusion. While some asylum seekers gained international protection, others were left with limited agency to demand government accountability for the ever-moving target of integration. Putting a spotlight on the inconsistencies and failings of a universal approach to integration, this is an important contribution to the wider field of migration and anthropology of the state.Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Arrival, Processing, Status 1. The Path to Asylum 2. Asylum Decisions and What Followed Thereafter Part 2: Integration 3. Young Refugee Men: Saarbrücken 4. Families: Osnabrück and Hameln Part 3: Stagnation, Independence, Dependence 5. Institutionalized Integration: Munich and Kassel 6. Pathways Forward and Pathways Uncertain Conclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.Table of ContentsContents 1. The Discipline of Anthropology 2. Culture 3. Language 4. Social Structure and Inequality in Race, Ethnicity, and Class 5. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality 6. Economics 7. Authority and Power 8. Kinship and Marriage 9. Religion and Ritual 10. Medical Anthropology 11. Theory in Cultural Anthropology 12. Anthropology in Action Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisUnique in scope and content, this methods-based text draws on the process of creating a digital archive of commemorative tattoos to examine the production and mobilization of knowledge across communities, disciplines, and space. Deborah Davidson’s multidisciplinary collection addresses the cultural history of tattooing and the social meanings and implications of commemorative tattoos—tattoos that hold significant value for their bearer.A practical resource for those undertaking archival research or collecting and sharing information across disciplines, this text acts as a template for building connections between academic and non-academic communities. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, The Tattoo Project offers critical insights and tools for courses focused on research methodologies and digital humanities, and provides innovative content for those studying the body, visual culture, and commemoration.Features highlights several case studies and personal narratives to contextualize theoretical and methodological approaches includes photographs of archival participants features accompanying poetry by award-winning poet Priscila Uppal The Tattoo Project digital archive provides additional supplementary materials including photos, videos, and narratives Trade Review“The Tattoo Project imaginatively blurs the lines between academic research and embodied narratives, scholarly knowledge and lived experiences. Methodologically ambitious, The Tattoo Project shows the multi-layered meanings behind commemorative tattoos, giving voice and space to the people who embody them. It also challenges us to re-think collaboration and community through the creation of an open digital archive that extends into the public sphere, and how the tattooed body is an inimitable archive in and of itself.” - Mary Kosut, School of Natural and Social Sciences, Purchase College, SUNY“As a unique form of human expression, tattooing transmits a vast body of information about who we are, where we come from, our desires and fears, and who we aspire to be. It offers one of the most powerful biographical, artistic, and intellectual statements on cultural diversity, visual communication, and commemorative agency. The authors of The Tattoo Project bring these profound perceptions to life, generating a timely interdisciplinary study that provides critical new understandings of body-marking and its role in self-making.” - Lars Krutak, Tattoo Anthropologist, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian InstitutionTable of Contents Chapter 1: Introducing The Tattoo Project, Deborah Davidson Section I. History, Culture, And Approach: An Overview Chapter 2: Memories on the Skin: A Brief Cultural History of Tattooing, Margo DeMello Chapter 3: Commemorative Tattoos as Visual-Material Media, Sara Martel Chapter 4: Between the Inside and the Outside: Commemorative Tattoos and the Externalization of Loss or Trauma, Andreas Kitzmann Chapter 5: Creative Methodologies, Gayle Letherby and Deborah Davidson Chapter 6: Tattooing as Auto/Biographical Method and Practice, Gayle Letherby and Deborah Davidson Chapter 7: Visual Research Methods: Memorial Tattoos as Memory-Realization, Deborah Davidson and Angelina Duhig Chapter 8: Inscribing Memory as a Social Process: The Tattoo Artist-Client Relationship, Arthur McLuhan, with Wayne Galbraith Section II. Written In The Flesh Poem. Not a Cliché, Priscila Uppal Photos Section III. Case Studies And Personal Narratives Chapter 9: ""Physical Words"": Scars, Tattoos, and Embodied Mourning, Kay Inckle Chapter 10: Enshrined in Flesh: Tattoos and Contemporary Women's Spirituality, Gina Snooks Chapter 11: Memorial Tattoos as Connection, Andrea Warnick and Lysa Toye Chapter 12: ""Ingulule Ayidli Ngamabala"": A Reflection on the Spotted Soloist, Siphiwe Ignatius Dube Chapter 13: I Am, Stephanie Pangowish Chapter 14: Tattoo Memoir, Dave Mazierski Chapter 15: Why I Get Tattoos: A Personal Perspective on Tattoos and Commemoration, Craig Roxborough Section IV. The Tattoo Project: A Community Under Construction Chapter 16: What Is an Archive? Creators, Functions, and Value in Archival Practice, Lisa Darms Chapter 17: Public Sociology and Digital Culture, Ariane Hanemaayer and Christopher J. Schneider Chapter 18: Technology Design to Support Commemorative Tattoo Practice, Melanie Baljko Chapter 19: The Coming Together of a Community of Practice: Commemorative Tattoos as Visual Culture for Community Engagement and Identity Formation, Anabel Quan-Haase Chapter 20: Knowledge Mobilization: Engaging Beyond the Academy Walls, Krista Jensen Reflection, Deborah Davidson Author Biographies

Read more less

Book SynopsisDuring the past twenty years, Latin American cinema has experienced an enormous upsurge, prompting film critics and scholars to hail the onset of a new era. What this signals, more than thriving financial or production infrastructures, is a renovated cinematic vision connected more closely to everyday experience and social and cultural concerns. The films analyzed in this new collection reflect and examine contemporary lives in their diversity and singularity, through their focus on identity politics, sexuality, the body, the family, and/or community.Drawing especially on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ""inoperative community"" and Enrique Dussel's critique of ""modernity"", the essays here weave together a progression that stresses the breakdown of the nation-state in Latin America and the search for new communal settings. The nation-state's breakdown is linked to modernity's homogenizing project and its concomitant hierarchies that, in seeking to impose order and progress, have alienated those who do not conform to conventional norms. In response, Nancy offers the concept of ""inoperative community"", which questions current forms of ""operative"" communities that do not allow for individuation and implies instead the recognition of plurality and singularity and replacement of hierarchies by horizontal and transversal connections.Essays in the first part of the volume, ""Crisis of the Nation-State and Desire for Community"", question the nation-state and its related institutions from different perspectives and theories, while the second part, ""Sexuality, Rape and Representation"", focuses on configurations of plurality and singularity in terms of sexuality and gender. The third part of the book, ""Visions of the Transnational"", moves toward the recognition of a global sense of interconnectedness that transcends local and national borders.Featuring more diversified methodological perspectives and covering a wider scope of cinematic traditions than most recent anthologies on Latin American cinema, these eleven essays represent a rich new contribution to film studies as well as cultural and gender studies.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did marriageable men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval, and, when they did, how did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romantic ideals and etiquette were colliding with the modern realities faced by ordinary people?Searching for answers, Dan Azoulay has turned to a variety of primary sources, in particular letters to the correspondence columns, of two leading periodicals of the era, Montreal's Family Herald and Weekly Star, and Winnipeg's Western Home Monthly. Examining over 20,000 such letters, Azoulay has produced the first full-length study of Canadian romance in the years 1900 to 1930, a period that witnessed dramatic changes, including massive immigration, rapid urbanization and industrialization, western settlement, a world war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of young Canadians, and a virtual revolution in morals and manners. Hearts and Minds explores four key aspects of romance for these years: what average Canadians sought in a marriage partner; the specific rules they were expected to follow and in most cases did follow in their romantic quest; the many hardships they endured along the way; and how the defining event of that era, the Great War, affected such things. To explore these issues, Azoulay distils and analyzes evidence not only from letters of correspondents, featuring often poignant excerpts that bring the era to life for us, but also from contemporary general etiquette manuals, scholarly studies of courtship in this period, and, for the war years, a selection of soldiers' letters, memoirs, and diaries. The result is an unforgettable and groundbreaking portrait of ordinary people grappling with romantic ideals and reality, trials and uncertainty, triumph and heartbreak, in a rapidly changing world.Trade ReviewA very lively and creatively researched examination of Canadian romance. Greg Thomas, Manitoba HistoryA fascinating look into Canadians' love lives in the era when arranged marriages had mostly been discarded as relics of the patriarchal past, romantic courtship between two individuals was the breeding ground for marriage, making romance a serious business. Elizabeth Abbott, Literary Review of CanadaHearts and Minds is an interesting and provocative book on a subject that has been inadequately explored. Lori Chambers, Histoire social/Social HistoryTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Why Romance? 1. The Woman of His Dreams 2. The Man of Her Dreams 3. The Dos and Don'ts of Romance 4. Courtship Hardship 5. Love and War Epilogue: The New Order Glossary Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTextual Exposures examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography's powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created.The writings analyzed enter a dialogic relation with visual technologies such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television. The study examines how these technologies, historically and aesthetically linked to the photographic medium, inform the works of some of the most important writers in Latin America.Methodologically, the close readings of the texts centre on the figure of ekphrasis (defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation). The book is concerned with the thematic, symbolic, structural and cultural imprints photography leaves in narrative texts. The author relies on an immanent approach, reading the selected texts according to their own specificities and making the relevant thematic and structural connections between them drawing from a variety of sources in the fields of literary criticism and theory and history of photography.Trade Review"...this book's thoughtful explorations of literary ekphrasis preserve, as in a snapshot, a memory of the relatively brief epoch in which photography - or, better, the delay inherent in the development and revelation of photographic film - still had the power to surprise and shock." - Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia, Bulletin of Spanish Visual StudiesRusseks focus enables productive re-readings of well-known texts This books thoughtful explorations of literary ekphrasis preserve, as in a snapshot, the memory of the relatively brief epoch in which photography-or, better, the delay inherent in the development and revelation of photographic film-still had the power to surprise and shock. - Jon Beasley-Murray, Bulletin of Spanish Visual StudiesFinding Directions West is an excellent addition to The West Seriesâ| Prior volumes have included essays, biographies, memories, and insights into Western Canadian life and experienceâ| This volume offers important insights into Western Canadian History. - Laurie Milne, Canadian Journal of Native Studies

Read more less

Book Synopsis Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance examines the deeper meanings and resonances of artistic dance in contemporary culture. The book comprises four sections: methods and methodologies, autoethnography, pedagogies and creative processes, and choreographies as cultural and spiritual representations. The contributors bring an insiders insight to their accounts of the nature and function of these artistic practices, giving voice to dancers, dance teachers, creators, programmers, spectators, students, and scholars. International and intergenerational, this collection of groundbreaking scholarly research points to a new direction for both dance studies and dance anthropology. Traditionally the exclusive domain of aesthetic philosophers, the art of dance is here reframed as cultural practice, and its significance is revealed through a chorus of voices from practitioners and insider ethnographers. Trade Review"Fields in Motion brings together twenty-four scholars interested in approaching dance from an ethnographic perspective. It is therefore a useful 'follow up' to Theresa Buckland's edited collection 'Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography' (1999). What makes the book special is that the contributors all focus largely on theatre dance, rather than on other genres more embedded within circumscribed communities, generally the domain of anthropologists specializing in dance. Although Joann Kealiinohomoku showed us the way in the late 1960s and 1970s by demonstrating that all dances are culturally rooted, art dance still remains, for many, beyond ethnographic enquiry since it is often perceived as 'outside culture.' The collection provides rich and diverse approaches to ethnography (polyphonic, multi-sited, auto-, experiential, intimate and so on), to field/dance sites (from small towns in Canada and the USA, to Paris, Helsinki and Toronto; from Taiwan, to Brazil, to New Zealand), and to the subjects of research (from amateurs to professionals; from largely female to male only). The authors take us on exciting journeys and the reader enters the worlds of dancers, spectators and researchers in a variety of social and cultural contexts, sometimes with great intimacy, at other times with more detachment, but always with heightened sensitivity. Reading 'Fields in Motion' allows for discovery of the many ways in which dancing bodies may be socially and culturally mediated so that our understanding of theatre dance gains greater nuances." -- Andrée Grau, Roehampton University"The authors in 'Fields in Motion' emerge from this unique anthology as engaging dance scholars from various parts of the world. Their words are framed by research on art dance 'at home.' They share with us, their readers, as they reflect on the views and behaviors of their dancer subjects, whom they researched through an ethnographic lens. Our own horizons expand as we meet these authors, and as we begin to perceive the spreading global dedication to ethnographic research for art dance 'at home.'" -- Joann W. Kealiinohomoku, Northern Arizona UniversityTable of ContentsTable of Contents for Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance, edited by Dena DavidaForeword Naomi Jackson (Canada/USA)AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Anthropology at Home in the Art Worlds of Dance Dena Davida (Canada)SECTION 1: Inventing Strategies, Models, and Methods1. Shifting Positions: From the Dancers' Posture to the Researchers' Posture Anne Cazemajou (France)2. A Template for Art World Dance Ethnography: The Luna ""Nouvelle Danser"" Event Dena Davida (Canada)3. Interview Strategies for Concert Dance World Settings Jennifer Fisher (Canada/USA)4. The ""Why Dance?"" Projects: Choreographing the Text and Dancing the Data Michèle Moss (Canada)5. What is the Pointe?: The Pointe Shoe as Symbol in Dance Ethnography Kristin Harris Walsh (Canada)SECTION 2: Embodying Autoethnographies6. Writing, Dancing, Embodied Knowing: Autoethnographic Research Karen Barbour (New Zealand)7. The Body as a Living Archive of Dance/Movement: Autobiographical Reflections Janet Goodridge (England)8. Self-Portrait of an Insider Researching Contemporary Dance and Culture in Vitória, Brazil Eluza Maria Santos (Brazil/USA)9. Reflections on Making the Dance Documentary Regular Events of Beauty: Negotiating Culture in the Work of Choreographer Richard Tremblay Priya Thomas (Canada)10. Angelwindow: ""I dance my body double"" Inka Juslin (Finland)SECTION 3: Examining Creative Processes and Pedagogies11. The Montréal Danse Choreographic Research and Development Workshop: Dancer-Researchers Examine Choreographer-Dancer Relational Dynamics during the Creative Process Pamela Newell and Sylvie Fortin (Canada)12. How the Posture of Researcher-Practitioner Serves an Understanding of Choreographic Activity Joëlle Vellet (France)13. A Teacher ""Self-Research"" Project: Sensing Differences in the Teaching and Learning of Contemporary Dance Technique in New Zealand Warwick Long (Canada/New Zealand), Ralph Buck (New Zealand), and Sylvie Fortin (Canada)14. Dance Education and Emotions: Articulating Unspoken Values in the Everyday Life of a Dance School Teija Löytönen (Finland)15. Black Tights and Dance Belts: Constructing a Masculine Identity in a World of Pink Tutus in Corner Brook, Newfoundland Candice Pike (Canada)16. The Construction of the Body in Wilfride Piollet's Classical Dance Classes Nadège Tardieu and Georgiana Gore (France)SECTION 4: Revealing Choreographies as Cultural and Spiritual Practices17. Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe: Trance as a Cultural Commodity Bridget E. Cauthery (Canada)18. Anthropophagic Bodies in Flea Market: A Study of Sheila Ribeiro's Choreography Mônica Dantas (Brazil)19. The Bridge From Past to Present in Lin Hwai-min's Nine Songs (1993): Literary texts and dance images Yin-ying Huang (Taiwan)20. Revealed By Fire: Lata Pada's Narrative of Transformation Susan McNaughton (Canada)21. Spectres of the Dark: The Dance-Making Manifesto of Latina/Chicana Choreographies Juanita Suarez (USA)22. Not of Themselves: Contemporary Practices in American Protestant dance Emily Wright (USA)Epilogue: Theory That Acts Like Dancing: The Autoethnographic Strut Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn (Canada)List of ContributorsCopyright AcknowledgementsIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature is a collection of essays honouring Richard (Dick) Slobodin, one of the great anthropologists of the Canadian North. A short biography is followed by essays describing his formative thinking about human nature and human identities, his humanizing force in his example of living a moral, intellectual life, his discernment of people's ability to make informed choices and actions, his freedom from ideological fashions, his writings about the Mackenzie District Métis, his determination to take peoples experience seriously, not metaphorically, and his thinking about social organization and kinship. An unpublished paper about a 1930s caribou hunt in which he participated finishes the collection, giving Dick the last word.

Read more less

Book Synopsis Bridging Two Peoples tells the story of Dr. Peter E. Jones, who in 1866 became one of the first status Indians to obtain a medical doctor degree from a Canadian university. He returned to his southern Ontario reserve and was elected chief and band doctor. As secretary to the Grand Indian Council of Ontario he became a bridge between peoples, conveying the chiefs' concerns to his political mentor Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, most importantly during consultations on the Indian Act. The third son of a Mississauga-Ojibwe missionary and his English wife, Peter E. Jones overcame paralytic polio to lead his people forward. He supported the granting of voting rights to Indians and edited Canada's first Native newspaper to encourage them to vote. Appointed a Federal Indian Agent, a post usually reserved for non-Natives, Jones promoted education and introduced modern public health measures on his reserve. But there was little he could do to stem the ravages of tuberculosis that cemetery records show claimed upwards of 40 per cent of the band. The Jones family included Native and non-Native members who treated each other equally. Jones's Mississauga grandmother is now honoured for helping survey the province of Ontario. His mother published books and his wife was an early feminist. The appendix describes how Aboriginal grandmothers used herbal medicines and crafted surgical appliances from birchbark. Trade Review``The author succeeds in illuminating the life of this ambitious, earnest, sympathetic and ultimately tragic figure, and in many ways this work is an important addition to First Nations history and a welcome companion to Scared Feathers , Dr. Donald Smith's biography of Peter Edmund's father.'' -- Laurie Leclair -- Ontario History, Vol. CV, no. 1, Spring 2013``Dr. Peter Edmond Jones is the most interesting Canadian you never heard of. His accomplishments were many, yet he died in poverty. He left a mark in science, and public affairs, yet stumbled in drunkenness and despair. The son of a Mississauga chief and English mother, Jones was the first Status Indian to graduate from a Canadian medical school, at Queen's University in 1866; his thesis was "The Indian Medicine Man." Jones was the first to publish an aboriginal newspaper in Canada, The Indian , in 1886. He was a chess master; an archeological advisor to the Smithsonian Institute; a political organizer for John A. Macdonald; a federal Indian agent. "Jones appears to have been a romantic who felt his early success would carry him onwards," writes biographer Allan Sherwin. Of course, this could only end badly. To read Bridging Two Peoples is to sense the creep of petty humiliations and raw bigotry that crushed this Victorian romantic in the end.'' -- Holly Doan -- Blacklock's Reporter, Number 004, November 19, 2012``Allan Sherwin brings a personal perspective to this very readable biography of Canada's first-known Indigenous physician, Chief Peter Jones.... Sherwin's study is soundly based in the personal records of early Indigenous physicians, chiefs, and women healers, including the family papers carefully preserved by his English grandmother. The informative appendix describes how Aboriginal women used herbal medicines and crafted surgical instruments from birchbark. There is a comprehensive bibliography and an index.'' -- Ontario Historical Society Bulletin, #185, October 2012Table of Contents Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909, by Allan Sherwin List of Maps, Tables and Illustrations Foreword Donald B. Smith Preface Acknowledgements Chronology of Dr. Peter Edmund Jones's Life 1. Peter Edmund Jones's Origins 2. Medical Education 3. Country Doctor 4. Pride in His Heritage 5. Active Critic of the Indian Act 6. Aboriginal Rights Advocate 7. Canada's First Aboriginal Publisher 8. Federal Indian Agent 9. The Later Years Appendix: Effective Herbal Therapies of Aboriginal Women Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisOf Mind and Matter analyzes identity formation in the multicultural border region of Sleswig. It highlights the changeability of national sentiments and explores what has motivated local inhabitants to define themselves as Germans or Danes. The analysis focuses especially on the respective national minorities, among whom the transitional and flexible aspects of Sleswig identity surface most clearly. The study investigates national sentiments in a border region from a theoretical and comparative perspective. It relies on diverse forms of historical evidence, including quantitative sources such as language statistics and election results, but also more subjective sources such as personal life stories and interviews. The study pays equal attention to German and Danish source material. ""Of Mind and Matter"" adds important new angles to the literature on national identity in border areas and fills a conspicuous gap in English-language historiography, which completely lacks modern analyses of Sleswig history.

Read more less

Book SynopsisShared signing communities consist of a relatively high number of hereditarily deaf people living together with hearing people in relative isolation, one being the Akan village in Ghana called Adamorobe. Annelies Kusters traveled to Adamorobe to conduct an ethnographic study of both the deaf and hearing populations in the village. She reveals how deaf people in Adamorobe did not live in a social paradise but that they created their own "Deaf Space" by seeking each other out to form a society of their own.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Deaf to the Marrow, public anthropologist Audrey C. Cooper examines the social production and transformation of ideas about language, bodies, and state-structured educational institutions in southern Viet Nam. Focusing on the reform period (1986 to the present), Cooper describes the ways that signed-language practices, ideologies, policies, and programming shape and are shaped by Deaf people's social engagement in and around Ho Chi Minh City. Drawing on research data and work with Vietnamese Deaf colleagues covering an eight-year span, Cooper develops ethnographic and language-centered accounts of Deaf social organizing. These accounts illuminate the ways that Deaf citizens are assuming self-determining roles, or active citizenship, in decisions of local, national, and international importance. By placing Deaf social action in the historical context of state development and modernization projects, Cooper shows how educational structuring reflects dominant, spoken-language-centered views of Vietnamese Deaf people and signed languages. She also addresses the impact of international aid agendas on education, especially those related to disability. Deaf to the Marrow examines perspectives largely ignored in Deaf education, Deaf studies, signed-language linguistics, and anthropological literatures, thereby contributing to scholarship on language and sociopolitical formation broadly and the study of Deaf people's citizenship practices specifically.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSince 1972 the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loosely organized and anarchistic nomadic community, has been holding large gatherings in remote forests to pray for world peace and create a model of a functioning utopian society. Michael I. Niman’s People of the Rainbow, originally published in 1997, was the first comprehensive study of this countercultural group and its eclectic philosophy of environmentalism, feminism, peace activism, group sharing, libertarianism, and consensus government. It is a book yet to be superseded. This second edition of Niman’s compelling and insightful work brings the Rainbow story up to date with a new introduction and two extensive new epilogues. While the big annual Rainbow “Gatherings” have drawn fewer numbers in recent years, Niman notes, the Rainbow ethos has in many ways migrated to the mainstream, as Rainbow notions about alternative medicine and environmental sustainability, for example, have gathered wider acceptance and influenced the national dialogue. Meanwhile, Rainbow movements in other regions, from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Australia, are thriving. In addition to addressing changes within the Rainbow Family and its complex relationship to “Babylon” (what Rainbows call mainstream culture), the book’s new material explores the growing harassment Rainbows now face from U.S. law enforcement agencies— especially those associated with the National Forest Service. As Niman contends, this particular saga of a U.S. bureaucracy at war with its own citizens is a subplot in the larger—and disturbing—story of how the relationship between Americans and their government has changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In its nuanced portrait of an intriguing subculture, its successes, and its limitations, People of the Rainbow remains a significant contribution to the study of utopian communities in the United States and their ongoing legacy. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies in the Communication Department at Buffalo State College in New York. For additional resources related to this new edition, see http://buffalostate.edu/peopleoftherainbow.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn examination of how historical thinking has changed in recent years, through a comparison between Eastern and Western epochs. Until recently almost all histories of historiography have focused on national developments or at best introduced a comparative note from a limited Western perspective. Only in the last few years have there been serious attempts to transcend these borders. The present volume examines turning points in historical thought in a variety of cultures. The essays in the first half of the book deal with fundamental reorientations in historical thinking in the pre-modern period since Antiquity, specifically in ancient Greece and China and in medieval Christian Europe, the Islamic world and again China. The essays all proceed from the premise that historical thought in none of these cultures was static but underwent profound changes over time. The essays in the second part deal with historical writing beginning with the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century. National history researched and composed around a master narrative constituted a major turning point in this period. Although the new paradigm emerged in the West, it was broadly accepted by historians throughout the world.in the twentieth century. Individual chaptersdeal with conceptions of scientific history in the West, a comparison of national histories in Japan, France, and the United States, and the invention of Chinese, African and Indian national histories; finally the critiques of the modern paradigm in postmodernist and postcolonial theory and a consideration of the shortcomings of these critiques. Georg Iggers is Professor Emeritus of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo; Q. Edward Wang is Associate Professor of History at Rowan University.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn analysis of the ties between culture and every aspect of African life, using Africa's past to explain present situations. This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization.The book argues that it is against the backdrop of foreign influences that Africa has defined for itself notions of identity and development. African cultures have been evolving in response to change, and in other ways solidly rooted in a shared past. The book successfully deconstructs the last one hundred and fifty years of cultures that have been disrupted, replaced, and resurrected. The Power of African Cultures challenges many preconceived notions, such as male dominance and female submission, the supposed unity of ethnic groups, and contemporary Western stereotypes of Africans. It also shows the dynamism of African cultures to adapt to foreign imposition: even as colonial rule forced the adoption of foreign institutions and cultures, African cultures appropriated these elements. Traditions were reworked, symbols redefined, and the past situated in contemporary problems in order to accommodate the modern era. Toyin Falola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Exemplary Scholarship in AfricanStudies, and the 2008 Quintessence Award by the Africa Writers Endowment. He holds an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University and he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where heis also the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. His books include Nationalism and African Intellectuals and Violence in Nigeria, both from the University of Rochester Press.Trade ReviewFalola . . . approaches the subject of African history and cultural transformation with enthusiasm and conviction. . . . [F]amiliar themes [are] presented here with a twist that touches the nerve of Africanist scholarship in a manner that conveys the intellectual ferment arising from African universities and transferred through scholarly migration to universities in North America. . . . Professor Falola is truly a most distinguished Africanist historian, with a reflective and critical voice that builds on the fine tradition of Nigerian scholarship of Ajayi, Afigbo, Alagoa and others. AFRICAN HISTORY, 2006 * . *Without question, Professor Falola is the most prolific African historian writing today, and one of the most influential scholars in African studies. . . . One of Falola's achievements as a scholar is his recognition of the scholarship of colleagues at African universities, whose research has been important in the evolution of the discipline, at the same time that most of these scholars suffer from inadequate library resources, erratic publication venues and limited access to the Internet. He privileges the voices and analysis of Africans, which serves as an important correction to the substantial contributions of scholars from Europe and North America. * JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY, 2006 *Table of ContentsMaking Sense of the Western Encounter Cultural Identity and Development Political Economy and the Culture of Underdevelopment The Culture of Politics Ethnic Nationalism Islam, Religious Identity, and Politics Traditional Religions in Modern Africa English or Englishes? The Politics of Language and the Language of Politics Gender and Culture in Old and New Africa Africa, the Homeland: Diaspora Cultures

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble uses musical performance and storytelling to manage, structure, model, and legitimize power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda. Tuning the Kingdom draws on oral and written accounts, archival research, and musical analysis to examine how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble of the Kingdom of Buganda (arguably the kingdom's oldest and longest-surviving performance ensemble) has historically managed, structured, modeled, and legitimized power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda. Damascus Kafumbe argues that the ensemble sustains a complex sociopolitical hierarchy, interweaving and maintaining a delicate balance between kin and clan ties and royal prerogatives through musical performance and storytelling that integrates human and nonhuman stories. He describes this phenomenonas "tuning the kingdom," and he compares it to the process of tensioning or stretching Kiganda drums, which are always moving in and out of tune. Even as Kawuugulu continues to adapt to the rapidly changing world around it, Tuning the Kingdom documents how Kawuugulu has historically articulated and embodied principles of the three inextricably related domains that serve as the backbone of Kiganda politics: kinship, clanship, and kingship. Winner of the 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize of the African and African Diasporic Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Honorable Mention for the 2019 Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies Association Damascus Kafumbe is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College.Trade ReviewKafumbe's monograph stands as a rich case study for Africanist scholars of ethnomusicology . . . [and] shows how East African social institutions of ancient provenance . . . play important roles in contemporary social and political organization in postcolonial and contemporary East Africa. -- Christina Quigley * AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY *[O]ffers a valuable insider perspective of not only the tradition of Kawuugulu, but of the other performative aspects of the kingdom of Buganda writ large. The author succeeds in showing how Kawuugulu drumming, dancing, and storytelling are inextricably linked to one another as well as to social and political life in Buganda as they embody, express, model, and structure the everyday actions and relationships of its people. * JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH *There is no other book I know that does the work of this one. It is beautiful, rich in ethnographic materials, and an important intervention in the contemporary study of African music-making and meanings. -- Carol Muller, University of PennsylvaniaA monumental contribution to the undocumented history and performative expression of the Baganda's kinship, clanship, and kingship institutions, Tuning the Kingdom unveils a narrative of the Kiganda monarchy as it is archived in the performance practice and storytelling of Kawuugulu music and dance. The author's maternal ties to the clan in charge of the ensemble offer him access to privileged knowledge that would be inaccessible to any other scholar. This book exemplifies how ethnomusicology can help form a springboard upon which to retrieve hidden knowledge of a culture. -- Sylvia A. Nannyonga-Tamusuza, author of Baakisimba: Gender in the Music and Dance of the Baganda People of UgandaThis is an important book. The Kawuugulu royal drums of the Buganda kingdom of Uganda carry great significance not only within the kingdom, but also for the fields of ethnomusicology and African studies. Any African court tradition that has survived into the twenty-first century merits this kind of scholarly documentation and investigation. This royal drum tradition is especially significant, given its age (at least several centuries), its role in Baganda society, and the fact that it survived political suppression from 1966-93. The author has done an immaculate job in documenting and analyzing the history and importance of the tradition within Baganda social life. -- Eric Charry, Wesleyan UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction The Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Music and Dance Ensemble Kawuugulu and Intra-Clan Politics Kawuugulu and Royal Politics Kawuugulu and Inter-Clan Politics Conclusion: A Performative Constitution

Read more less