Social and cultural anthropology Books
University of Minnesota Press Hikikomori
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsContentsTranslator’s Introduction: How to Diagnose an Invisible EpidemicJeffrey AnglesHikikomoriPreface to the English EditionIntroductionPart I. What Is Happening?1. What Is Social Withdrawal?2. The Symptoms and Development of Social Withdrawal3. Psychological Ailments Accompanying Withdrawal4. Is Social Withdrawal a Disease?5. Hikikomori SystemsPart II. How to Deal with Social Withdrawal6. Overcoming the Desire to Reason, Preach, and Argue7. Important Information for the Family8. The General Progress of Treatment9. In Daily Life10. The Sadness behind Violence in the Household11. Treatment and Returning to Society12. The Social Pathology of WithdrawalConclusion: Steps for the FutureTranslator’s NotesBibliographyIndex
£15.19
The University of Alabama Press Amulets Effigies Fetishes and Charms Native
Book SynopsisAmulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms rounds out Edward J. Lenik's comprehensive and expert study of the rock art of northeastern Native Americans. This volume provides a basis for interpreting the symbolism of more than eighty portable stone artifacts found in the region.
£36.51
The University of Alabama Press The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast Archaeology of the American South New Directions and Perspectives
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£39.91
Duke University Press Territories of Difference
Book SynopsisIn Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such asTrade Review“[A] wonderful, demanding, and courageous book. . . . It offers a theoretically informed perspective on social movements in the global South, anchored in questions specific to these actors and in dialogue with them. With his book, Escobar contributes an innovative method to the study of social movements.” - Pierre Hamel, American Journal of Sociology“This book, magisterial in its command of an impressive range of theory and literature, is a provocative and cutting-edge guide to thinking about place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks. . . . [I]n the sheer power, depth, and complexity of the analysis and in the author’s ethical engagement and belief in the possibility of ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise,’ the book is a superb achievement.” - Peter Wade, Hispanic American Historical Review“Territories of Difference will become a classic . . . . [I]t is a mesmerizingly ambitious and provocative inquiry into social, cultural, biological, and economic life in the 21st century. It is also a highly original approach to the study of contemporary forms of domination and resistance that challenges Eurocentric conceptions of capitalist globalization and calls for alternatives to modernity.” - Ulrich Oslender, American Ethnologist“A wonderful, massive tour de force by one of today’s leading anthropologists. Arturo Escobar links his ethnography to a series of larger pressing debates about globalization and development, biology and nature, and social movements and network theory. The result is a book of astonishing virtuosity, range, and insight. It is nothing less than a model for the dense, interdisciplinary, polyglot theoretical analysis needed to understand experience anywhere in the world today.”—Orin Starn, author of Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian and co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics“Books, like wines, take time to mature and develop their full strength. Then they are a delight, and not just for specialists. Arturo Escobar’s eloquent, engaged, and extremely well informed narrative of the Afro-Colombian movements in their struggles to defend their territories and ways of life is, to my mind, the best book on social movements to have appeared in years. It combines, in a unique way, the minutely traced complexity of the struggles and their evolving contexts with much broader issues that appeal to and impact all of us, such as biodiversity, alternatives to development, sustainability of life on earth, and social and cognitive justice. We, academics, students, activists of social movements, cannot but be powerfully interpellated by this landmark book, and can only honor it by reading it attentively, as one savors a good wine.”—Boaventura de Sousa Santos, editor of Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies“Books, like wines, take time to mature and develop their full strength. Then they are a delight, and not just for specialists. Arturo Escobar’s eloquent, engaged, and extremely well informed narrative of the Afro-Colombian movements in their struggles to defend their territories and ways of life is, to my mind, the best book on social movements to have appeared in years. It combines, in a unique way, the minutely traced complexity of the struggles and their evolving contexts with much broader issues that appeal to and impact all of us, such as biodiversity, alternatives to development, sustainability of life on earth, and social and cognitive justice. We, academics, students, activists of social movements, cannot but be powerfully interpellated by this landmark book, and can only honor it by reading it attentively, as one savors a good wine.”—Boaventura de Sousa Santos, editor of Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies“The product of a lifetime of work on the pitfalls of development, Arturo Escobar’s new book is an engaging and engaged effort to bring together knowledge from Western academia and from Afro-Colombian activists. Through his own blend of discursive theory, he makes academia listen, in the words of one of his local interlocutors, to the ‘drumming’ of a place subjected to capital but resistant to it, brightly illuminating at once the geopolitics of knowledge and of modern empires.”—Fernando Coronil, author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela“This book invites us all into alternative projects of world-making. Never losing sight of the forces pushing back at us or the colonizing power of Western thinking, Arturo Escobar marshals an extraordinary array of intellectual resources and social networks to galvanize hopeful action. He grounds his honest yet truly inspiring vision in the place-based knowledge and global activism of his longstanding collaborators, the and resilient and resourceful Afro-Colombian activists of the Pacific region.”—J. K. Gibson-Graham, authors of A Postcapitalist Politics and The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy“Arturo Escobar brings his signature commitments—a focus on the materiality of place, nature, and environmental politics, and a recognition of difference and the inescapable histories of coloniality—to an analysis of regional ecological and cultural struggles in Colombia. It is a singularly original contribution, both empirically and theoretically, which forces us to confront the real complexities of capitalism, identities, and political struggle. This book should be required reading for everyone interested in contemporary forms of globalization and economies, as well as the social movements organized against them.”—Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill “Territories of Difference will become a classic . . . . [I]t is a mesmerizingly ambitious and provocative inquiry into social, cultural, biological, and economic life in the 21st century. It is also a highly original approach to the study of contemporary forms of domination and resistance that challenges Eurocentric conceptions of capitalist globalization and calls for alternatives to modernity.” -- Ulrich Oslender * American Ethnologist *“[A] wonderful, demanding, and courageous book. . . . It offers a theoretically informed perspective on social movements in the global South, anchored in questions specific to these actors and in dialogue with them. With his book, Escobar contributes an innovative method to the study of social movements.” -- Pierre Hamel * American Journal of Sociology *“This book, magisterial in its command of an impressive range of theory and literature, is a provocative and cutting-edge guide to thinking about place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks. . . . [I]n the sheer power, depth, and complexity of the analysis and in the author’s ethical engagement and belief in the possibility of ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise,’ the book is a superb achievement.” -- Peter Wade * Hispanic American Historical Review *Table of ContentsAbout the Series vii Preface ix Acknolwedgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Place 27 2. Capital 69 3. Nature 111 4. Development 156 5. Identity 200 6. Networks 254 Conclusion 299 Notes 313 References Cited 381 Index 417
£999.99
Duke University Press The Soul of Anime
Book SynopsisDrawing on ethnographic research including interviews with artists at some of Tokyo's leading animation studios, Ian Condry focuses attention on the collective social energy that has made anime a global cultural phenomenon.Trade Review(Starred Review) “This book is highly recommended for all lovers of Japanese history, Japanese culture, anime, manga, and animation.” -- Sally Bryant * Library Journal *“It’s a pleasure to have Condry guide us through the complex and ultimately rewarding world of anime.” * Animation *“An anthropologist by training, Condry bases his arguments in part on fieldwork consisting of interviews with studio personnel and direct observation of working practices. One may question (as the author himself does) how representative these anecdotes are, but they stimulate numerous intriguing interpretations. . . . Condry writes thoughtfully and occasionally displays wry wit. His book contains much of value to scholars of Japanese popular culture.” -- Alexander Jacoby * TLS *“Condry is no armchair theorist – there can be few Westerners who’ve explored the industry as energetically as he has. . . . For readers who do like amassing anecdotes, The Soul of Anime offers oodles of them, often gained first-hand by the intrepid author, ploughing through the anime multiverse.” -- Andrew Osmond * Manga UK *“Get this if you’re interested in the depth of anime, the pioneers and renowned figures within the anime movement (yes, of course including Miyazaki), and significant anime milestones. . . . For the serious anime lover who wants to move from fan to expert . . . this is a must.” -- Gini Koch * It's Comic Book Day blog *"For students and teachers who wish to gain a full understanding of the inner workings of the world of anime and to do serious research of their own in this area, a careful reading of ... Condry's ... book is definitely a must." -- Michael McCaskey * Journal of Japanese Studies *“Superb critical, historical, and ethnographic study of the anime phenomenon; a model of cross-media analysis.” * Science Fiction Studies *“Part of the appeal of the book is the many popular assumptions about anime it disavows and the new information it provides. … In addition, his work underscores the fact that the production process has really only begun with an animation’s release: fans’ ‘consumption’ of animation is inherently productive as they draw existing characters into storylines of their own invention, compete to produce the best subtitles of their favorite shows, and do innumerable other creative things with animated worlds and characters that ultimately determine not only their success but also their global reach.” -- Elise Edwards * American Ethnologist *Table of ContentsNote on Translations and Names ix Introduction. Who Makes Anime? 1 1. Collaborative Networks, Personal Futures 35 2. Characters and Worlds as Creative Platforms 54 3. Early Directions in Postwar Anime 85 4. When Anime Robots Became Real 112 5. Making a Cutting-Edge Anime Studio: The Value of the Gutter 135 6. Dark Energy: What Overseas Fans Reveal about the Copyright Wars 161 7. Love Revolution: Otaku Fans in Japan 185 Conclusion. Future Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Cultural Action 204 Acknowledgments 218 Notes 221 References 227 Index 237
£18.89
University of Hawai'i Press Making Our Own Destiny
Book SynopsisBased on ethnographic research and interviews with more than a hundred single women in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, Making Our Own Destiny is the first study to comprehensively compare the views and experiences of single women living in these three great cities.
£55.50
University of Toronto Press Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries
Book SynopsisMyths are commonly associated with illusions or with deceptive, dangerous discourse, and are often perceived as largely the domain of premodern societies. But even in our post-industrial, technologically driven world, myths Western or Eastern, ancient or modern, religious or scientific are in fact powerful, pervasive forces. In Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries, Gérard Bouchard conceptualizes myths as vessels of sacred values that transcend the division between primitive and modern. Myths represent key elements of collective imaginaries, past and present. In all societies there are values and beliefs that hold sway over most of the population. Whether they come from religion, political institutions, or other sources, they enjoy exalted status and go largely unchallenged. These myths have the power to bring societies together as well as pull them apart. Yet the study of myth has been largely neglected by sociologists and other social scientists. Bouchard navigaTrade Review"…Social Myths is an intriguing and potentially valuable analysis of cultural development." -- Scott Duchesne * Canadian Literature 236 2018 *"By the early 1990s, Gérard Bouchard had become one of the few prolific authors who always deserved close reading. The wonderful translation of his latest book will further increase his reputation for rigorous thinking, wide-ranging reading, and engaging writing." -- Chad Gaffield, University of Ottawa * The Canadian Historical Review, vol 99 4, December 2018 *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1 - Myths and Collective Imaginaries Chapter 2 - What is a social myth? Chapter 3 - The Mythification Process Chapter 4 - The Conditions for the Effectiveness of Myth Chapter 5 - Social Myths: A Pyramidal Structure General Conclusion Bibliography Notes
£42.30
University of Texas Press Unraveling Time
Book SynopsisA compelling chronicle of economic, political, and social development in Cuenca.Trade ReviewUnraveling Time shows the anthropologist working on her craft. Through long-term, sensitive ethnography, Ann Miles captures the passing of time and the texture of change. She reveals her Cuencan partners as men and women grappling with economic shocks, a city transformed by migration, and the drama of sustaining transnational family ties. With her careful observations, Miles shows how they find meaning in all that has happened over the decades. It's a wonderful work of ethnographic reflection. -- Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, University of North Carolina, coauthor of Fast, Easy, and In Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global EconomyA thoroughly engrossing examination of gender, migration, and the evolving sociopolitical landscape of Cuenca, Ecuador, over the last three decades. With the attention, deep insight, and kinship with her interlocutors that can come only from long-term ethnographic engagement, Ann Miles introduces us to the complicated lives of the women and men she has followed for years. Through the sensitively told stories of these Cuencanos, we come to understand both the important (and conflicting) ways that transnationalism has shaped an entire country and the approaches through which one anthropologist has tried to make intellectual and emotional sense of a lifetime of ethnographic accruals. A superb book and must a read for scholars of transnationalism, Latin American migration, and gender in South America. -- Jason De León, UCLA, author of The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant TrailThis book joins a growing number of ethnographies by authors who reflect on their field work and research, grappling with the dynamic nature of temporal-spatial interactions that proceed apace as ethnographers and their interlocutors continue making their own histories and cultures far beyond the life of the anthropologist. * Journal of Anthropological Research *Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1. The Ethnography of Accrual: 1988–2020 Dateline 1990: Remembering and Forgetting Chapter 2. Making a Cosmopolitan City Dateline 1988–1989: The Virgin of Cajas Chapter 3. Single Women in the City Dateline 1988–2020: Alejandra Chapter 4. Ni de Aqui, Ni de Allá Dateline 1988–2020: Blanca Chapter 5. The Gringo Invasion Dateline 2015–2019: Soon the Tourists Will Have the Place to Themselves Chapter 6. Thinking about Endings Notes References Index
£22.79
Duke University Press The Fetish Revisited
Book SynopsisSince the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishisticTrade Review"J. L. Matory provides a critical and provocative account of how the concept of the fetish has been appropriated and used as a key concept in the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The work is especially strong in demonstrating the fantastical appropriations of the idea of the fetish, plucked from the complex and rich contexts of meaning and agency in transatlantic black religion. . . . . A fascinating, readable, and wandering book. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- G. E. Marcus * Choice *"Matory’s The Fetish Revisited is a masterful work, stunning in its erudition, ambitious argument, and prodigious ethnographic detail." -- Laura S. Grillo * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *"The Fetish Revisited is an important book and a pleasure to read." -- Steven Engler * Studies in Religion *"... [Matory] offers important insights into the Afro-Atlantic origins and makings of fetishes and into the unequal relations they comprise. One of the great merits of this book is that it takes Afro-Atlantic things, practices, and voices as theory and not merely as something to be described and analyzed." -- Benedikt Pontzen * Anthropos *"Matory's The Fetish Revisited is a well-researched and provocative work that combines academic research with a deep intellectual reflection in a work mainly directed to the disciples of Freud and Marx, but amazingly insightful into the fields of religious studies, anthropology, ethnology and meta-theory." -- Cyril-Mary Pius Olatunji and Fracis Kayode Fabidun * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *Table of ContentsA Note on Orthography ix Preface xi Introduction 1 Part I. The Factory, the Coat, the Piano, and the "Negro Slave": On the Afro-Atlantic Sources of Marx's Fetish 41 1. The Afro-Atlantic Context of Historical Materialism 45 2. The "Negro-Slave" in Marx's Labor Theory of Value 60 3. Marx's Fetishization of People and Things 78 Conclusion to Part I 91 Part II. The Acropolis, the Couch, the Fur Hat, and the "Savage": On Freud's Ambivalent Fetish 97 4. The Fetishes That Assimilated Jewish Men Make 103 5. The Fetish as an Architecture of Solidarity and Conflict 117 6. The Castrator and the Castrated in the Fetishes of Psychoanalysis 145 Conclusion to Part II 165 Part III. Pots, Packets, Beads, and Foreigners: The Making and the Meaning of the Real-Life "Fetish" 171 7. The Contrary Ontologies of Two Revolutions 175 8. Commodities and Gods 191 9. The Madeness of Gods and Other People 249 Conclusion to Part III 285 Conclusion. Eshu's Hat, or An Afro-Atlantic Theory of Theory 289 Acknowledgments 325 Notes 331 References 339 Index 349
£22.79
Duke University Press Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation
Book SynopsisIn 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialismTrade Review“In this ambitious, methodologically innovative, remarkable book, Deborah A. Thomas offers a startlingly original engagement with the affective circuits supporting life in Jamaican neighborhoods that are ongoing sites of state-based violence, covert geopolitical intrigue, and narcopolitics. Through all this, Thomas argues for the power of a redemptive politics and offers a guide to how life after the plantation informs the present.” -- Joseph Masco, author of * The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror *“With an exemplary humanity and grace interwoven with a critical and reparative hopefulness, Deborah A. Thomas's Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation meditates on the fateful violences of postcolonial sovereignty. Across the arc of the book's specific preoccupations, Thomas pursues a receptive sensibility to dimensions of cultural, political, and moral life very often obscured by the conventions of disciplinary investigation, and in so doing she offers us not only a revisionary story of the Jamaican past in the present but a model of restorative thinking.” -- David Scott, Columbia University“This is a powerful and persuasive remapping of the contours of black lifeworlds and sovereignty under colonial and national rule and in the face of brutal state violence. Deborah A. Thomas is innovative and creative in her insistence that only alternative archives will reveal the importance of black refusal and significance of affect, and she is passionate in her arguments for ethical practices of witnessing. A remarkable book that should be read by everyone who thinks black life matters.” -- Hazel V. Carby, Yale University"Witnessing Jamaica with an affective register provides an essential standpoint from which to recognize African diasporic people’s lived reality, and compels us to reimagine—affectively—the possibilities for social repair. Recommended. Researchers and faculty." -- R. Chopra * Choice *"Political Life’s imaginatively choreographed structure . . . complicates understanding of the Jamaican state and state violence. It deepens appreciation of the coformation of citizenship and the state, and the state’s imbrication in both transnational and local sociocultural and political processes." -- Charles V. Carnegie * New West Indian Guide *"As an illuminating genealogy of the Jamaican present, it is a must-read for students of Anglophone Caribbean societies, and a model for dealing with both the old and the new as they shape the early twenty-first century. But Political Life is much more than a Caribbeanist’s trove of treasures. As a sharp engagement with recent and classic scholarship, woven through with a thoughtful meditation on ethnographic method, it will form a lasting resource and a generative touchstone for any anthropologist interested in affect, modern citizenship, political theory, postcolonialism, race, or state violence." -- Edward Sammons * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface xi Introduction. Humanness in the Wake of the Plantation 1 1. Doubt 22 Interlude I. Interrogating Imperialism 67 2. Expectancy 88 Interlude II. Naming Names 133 3. Paranoia 151 Coda. The End of the World as We Know It 207 Acknowledgments 223 Notes 229 References 269 Index 293
£999.99
Duke University Press Building Socialism
Book SynopsisFollowing a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh's mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh's new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam's first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.Trade Review“A triumph of interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship! Following a compelling new case of international ‘high-socialist’ architecture, Christina Schwenkel bridges the histories of and scholarship on Eastern European and Asian socialisms. The oft-maligned but poorly understood city of Vinh proves to be an unexpected center of international solidarity and a riveting example of human resilience. Its story offers a significant perspective on Vietnamese history, socialist internationalism, postwar reconstruction, post-socialism, neoliberal redevelopment, and urban history.” -- Erik Harms, author of * Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon *“In this extraordinary book, the anthropological and architectural histories of the city of Vinh emerge between the hour zero when B-52s fly over Vinh and the ebbing of obsolescence. Christina Schwenkel addresses urban space and design in an enlightening and unsettling manner, evoking and explaining the ‘building of socialism’ as both a Vietnamese and an East German phenomenon in its postcolonial and postmodern contexts.” -- Rudolf Mrázek, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Michigan“Schwenkel explores the main built legacy of this alliance [between Vietnam and East Germany], the Quang Trung housing estate in Vinh.... The story she has to tell, and the research she has undertaken in several years living on the estate...[is] informative, surprising, and often very moving.” -- Owen Hatherley * Jacobin Magazine *“A model of transnational urban research, Building Socialism uncovers the history of Vinh’s role as a global planning hub, while also attending to the afterlife of socialist modernism for those residing in the city today." -- Katherine Zubovich * The Metropole *"Building Socialism is . . . an indispensable addition to our understanding of urban Asia." -- Abidin Kusno * Journal of Asian Studies *"The book offers a novel and broader understanding of the urban development projects in postwar Vietnam with its social and political trajectories aided by an impressive collection of archival material. . . . Altogether, Christina Schwenkel’s work is a refreshing and groundbreaking addition not only to the study of the global history of the GDR but, first and foremost, to the study of Vietnam’s building of socialism." -- Katrin Bahr * German Studies Review *"Exemplary scholarship. . . . The book's theoretical reflections challenge some calcified notions in current scholarship and intelligentsia, and show the incredibly similar housing experiences and cultural-imperialist tendencies of both capitalism and socialism." -- Esra Ackan * Berlin Journal *"Building Socialism is a remarkably illuminating transnational and interdisciplinary study of socialist nation building, examined through the lenses of internationalism, urban planning and architecture, and an ethnography of a mass housing estate. . . . The author very much succeeds in presenting a cohesive, theoretically rich work of in-depth investigation." -- Hazel Hahn * H-Urban *"Building Socialism is a captivating, imaginative, and significant contribution in anthropology, Vietnamese history, urban history, and history of urban planning. It is suitable for assigning in both graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses." -- Hazel Hahn * H-Urban, H-Net Reviews *"This engaging book ties together the legacies of the Vietnam War, East German urbanism, and contemporary neoliberal development to produce a narrative that is greater than the sum of its parts, shedding much-needed light on the complexity of modernism’s social and material durabilities." -- Samantha Maurer Fox * Anthropological Review *"Though somewhat theoretical, this book is ultimately accessible to a broad readership. It will be of most interest to scholars and students of urban planning, urban anthropology, and urban studies. Highly recommended. Lower division undergraduates through faculty; professionals" -- M. E. Pfeifer * Choice *"The book’s strength is that it expands our understanding of the multiplicity of urbanisms. . . . Building Socialism is an achievement that warrants the attention of every scholar interested in the urbanism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, well beyond Vietnam." -- Takanari Fujita * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *Table of ContentsList of Figures, Plates, and Tables vii Abbreviations xi A Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Part I. Ruination 1. Annihilation 25 Interlude. Urban Fragments 1 43 2. Evacuation 45 Interlude. Urban Fragments 76 3. Solidarity 78 Part 2. Reconstruction 4. Spirited Internationalism 105 Interlude. Urban Fragments 3 129 5. Rational Planning 131 Interlude. Urban Fragments 4 159 6. Utopian Housing 161 Part 3. Obsolescence 7. Indiscipline 211 8. Decay 232 9. Renovation 260 10. Revaluation 293 Conclusion. On the Future of Utopias Past 316 Notes 323 References 357 Index
£35.10
Duke University Press Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healingTrade Review“This groundbreaking book provides insight into how religious communities use expressive practices to unify and find healing. It offers an epistemological shift, recognizing the relevance of corporeality in galvanizing communities while allowing for individualist expressions of relationships to the otherwordly. This volume will make a strong impact in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, performance studies, and African diaspora studies.” -- Anita Gonzalez, author of * Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality *“This volume makes a unique and important contribution to the study of African diasporic religions giving priority---in our analysis—not to the theological nor necessarily the social but to the embodied and performative nature of religious practice. In this groundbreaking set of essays we learn the ways in which embodied practices inform ideas like empowerment, resistance and survival.” -- Marla F. Frederick, author of * Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global *“The focus of this theoretically engaged and ethnographically rich book . . . is a body-centered perspective on continental and diasporic African religions, offering valuable insights into the body as a medium of communication that generates knowledge, and the role of the body in producing intersubjectivity and relationality.” -- Susan Rasmussen * Journal of Anthropological Research *"This eloquent anthology takes the study of the Black body in renewed directions, weaving analytics of healing, bodily movement, materiality, energy, and collective knowledge and practices. This volume advances the field of anthropology with a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of African diaspora religion, culture, and society. . . . The book is also ideal for teaching undergraduates and graduate students. Undoubtedly, it ought to be of great interest to scholars of religion, particularly African and African diasporic religions, and other interdisciplinary areas within anthropology and beyond such as women, gender and sexuality studies, African and African diaspora studies, ethics, and performance studies." -- Nessette Falu * American Ethnologist *Table of ContentsForeword / Jacob K. Olupona vii Editors' Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Embodiment and Relationality in Religions of Africa and Its Diasporas / Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili 1 Part I. Spiritual Memories and Ancestors 1. Spirited Choreographies: Embodied Memories and Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Mama Tchamba Rituals / Elyan Jeanine Hill 23 2. Alchemy of the Fuqara: Spiritual Care, Memory, and the Black Muslim Body / Youssef Carter 49 3. Spiritual Ethnicity: Our Collective Ancestors in Ifá Devotion across the Americas / N. Fadeke Castor 70 Part II. Community, Religious Habitus, and the Senses 4. Faith Full: Sensuous Habitus, Everyday Affect, and Divergent Diaspora in the UCKG / Rachel Cantave 99 5. Covered Bodies, Moral Education, and the Embodiment of Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria / Elisha P. Renne 122 6. Embodied Worship in a Haitian Protestant Church in the Bahamas: Religious Habitus among Bahamians of Haitian Descent / Bertin M. Louis Jr. 152 Part III. Interrogating Sacredness in Performance 7. The Quest of Spiritual Purpose in a Secular Dance Community: Bélé's Rebirth in Contemporary Martinique / Camee Maddox-Wingfield 175 8. Embodying Black Islam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Afro-Diasporic Muslim Hip-Hop in Britain / Jeanette S. Jouili 197 9. Secular Affective Politics in a National Dance about AIDS in Mozambique / Aaron Montoya 222 Part IV. Religious Discipline and the Gendered and Sexual Body 10. Wrestling with Homosexuality: Kinesthesia as Resistance in Ghanaian Pentecostalism / Nathanael J. Homewood 253 11. Exceptional Healing: Gender, Materiality, Embodiment, and Prophetism in the Lower Congo / Yolanda Covington-Ward 273 12. Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southeastern African Funerals / Casey Golomski 297 Contributors 317 Index 321
£21.59
Duke University Press Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World
Book SynopsisKareem Rabie examines how Palestine's desire to fully integrate its economy into global markets through large-scale investment projects represented a shift away from political state building with the hope that a thriving economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state.Trade Review“Palestine Is Throwing a Party is a brilliant, carefully researched, and thoughtful book. Kareem Rabie uses the lens of urban planning and development to show us how global processes of unequal capital accumulation, racialized labor and property regimes within Israel/Palestine, and the managerial rule of Palestinian technocrats and capitalists collaborating with Israel all persistently reproduce the violent systems of settler-colonial expropriation in Israel/Palestine since 1948.” -- Laleh Khalili, author of * Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula *“Drawing on his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Palestine, along with a considerable amount of original, innovative, and detailed fieldwork, Kareem Rabie presents thought-provoking insights on the question of urbanism in Palestine. This extremely interesting study makes an important contribution.” -- Adam Hanieh, author of * Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East *"[A] detailed, often dense but intellectually penetrating look at how that conference heralded a significant change in both economic and political strategy." -- Ian Black * Tel Aviv Review of Books *"The capitalist concept of Palestine, despite its exclusion, is part of the normalised state-building process, which in turn normalises dealings with Israel. Rabie's book is a pragmatic approach that does not necessarily condone the alteration of Palestinian territory, but takes a dispassionate look at the facts." -- Ramona Wadi * Middle East Monitor *"By applying the analytic of settler colonialism without essentializing indigenous identity, and by theorizing the effects of global capitalism on Palestinian class formation, Palestine is Throwing a Party shows the way forward. Though there is nothing optimistic about its portrayal of relations between Palestinians and Israelis as a dark, distorting mirror, its reminder that the two groups are forever shaping one another against a backdrop of steep global inequalities will be crucial for any politics of democratic decolonization." -- Matan Kaminer * +972 Magazine *"Palestine Is Throwing a Party exemplifies the best of what ethnography can do: theoretically nuanced analysis derived from the specificities of social life rather than imposed on them. One of the many strengths of this ethnography is the way Rabie eschews easy invocations of a universal version of capitalism, instead making 'universalism' into an ethnographic object: first, by examining how capitalist investors in the West Bank invoke it to make their profit-seeking projects appear desirable, cosmopolitan, and inevitable, even as these projects are contingent and uncertain; and second, to illuminate how the liberalism of the Israeli legal system works to enhance Israel’s domination." -- Lisa Rofel * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Palestine is Throwing a Party can contribute to a wide range of literatures. . . . It should prove crucial reading to all those interested in the future of Palestine . . . as well as political economy approaches more broadly." -- Dana El Kurd * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Brilliant . . . . Rabie’s book forces scholars to more deeply reflect upon and analyze contemporary forms of settler colonialism and the partial, constrained sovereignties under which indigenous peoples all over the world currently live and struggle." -- Les W. Field * Journal of Anthropological Research *"Rabie carefully disentangles the claims and political-economic goals of stability and freedom. This complicates the picture but is essential because it helps us understand what is going on in Palestine today and contributes to a discussion on the contours of a political future not confined to the nation-state form. In doing so, Rabie offers ways to think otherwise and imagine emancipatory futures." -- Timothy Seidel * American Anthropologist *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. The Site 37 2. Developers and Designers 54 3. Image, Process, and Precedent 67 4. Public Urban Planning 81 5. Housing Shortage and National Priority 93 6. Public-Private Partnership 105 7. Buyers and Villagers 131 8. Critique, Capital, and the Landscape 149 9. Settlers and the Land 163 10. The Law, Mirroring, and the State 183 Conclusion 199 Acknowledgments 213 Notes 217 References 235 Index 255
£19.79
Duke University Press A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People
Book SynopsisIn A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People, David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB''s urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger. Beginning in urban dumpsters, Giles traces the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless thrown out—an act that manufactures food scarcity—to the social order of “world-class” cities, the pathways of discarded food as it circulates through the FNB kitchen, and the anticapitalist political movements the kitchen represents. Describing the muTrade Review“Chronicling the work of the urban justice organization Food Not Bombs, David Boarder Giles analyzes urgent and overlapping social, economic, and political concerns common in today's global cities. Giles engages with a range of scholarly disciplines and theoretical arguments eloquently and elegantly, while offering ethnographic details that are both vivid and convincing.” -- Robin Nagle, author of * Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City *“In A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People, David Boarder Giles documents the rhizomatic magic by which the anarchist direct action group Food Not Bombs converts urban food waste into meals for the hungry and hope for a better world. Along the way he intertwines his own lived experience and a sophisticated critique of the contemporary capitalist city to create a beautiful book that is itself a recipe for a slow-simmering revolution.” -- Jeff Ferrell, author of * Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge *“[A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People] is appropriate for upper division undergraduate and graduate classes on social movements. . . . It is a must read for social activists looking to address equity issues in a neo-liberal, capitalist world. Kudos to Giles for providing such an excellent blueprint for ways in which the detritus of capitalism can be used to address the ills of the system." -- Michael L. Hirsch * International Social Science Review *“Themes of abject waste, abject communities, and the subversive potential of counterpublics form the structure of [A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People] and aptly carry the reader from the quotidian bin into new political possibilities.” -- Benjamin Wyatt * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *"A Mass Conspiracy is an academic book with the aesthetics of an anarchist zine, replete with side-bar soup recipes, reproductions of FNB flyers, and vivid photographs of discarded food and abandoned people. This, combined with Giles’ lively prose, helps the reader through a dense theoretical argument. It also brings us back to what really matters: who and what is being thrown out of the towering heights of global cities, and what insights and possibilities we can recover from the wreckage." -- Alex V. Barnard * Mobilization *Table of ContentsPreface/Acknowledgments vii Prologue: Any Given Sunday in Seattle xi Introduction: Of Waste, Cities, and Conspiracies 1 Part I. Abject Capital Scene i: It's Thanksgiving in Seattle 27 1. The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value 31 Scene ii: Reckoning Value at the Market 55 2. Market-Publics and Scavenged Counterpublics 58 Part II: World-Class Cities, World-Class Waste Scene iii: If You Build It, They Will Come 91 3. Place-making and Waste-making in the Global City 97 Scene iv: Like a Picnic, Only Bigger, and with Strangers 117 4. Eating in Public: Shadow Economies and Forbidden Gifts 123 Part III: Slow Insurrection Scene v: "Rabble" on the Global Street 157 5. A Recipe for Mass Conspiracy 166 Scene vi: When I First Got to the Kitchen 198 6. Embodying Otherwise: Toward a New Politics of Surplus 202 Encore: A New Zeitgeist 233 Conclusion: Open Letters to Lost Homes (Political Implications) 235 Notes 255 Bibliography 271 Index 293
£21.59
Duke University Press Theres a Disco Ball Between Us
Book SynopsisIn There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls Black gay habits of mind. In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.Trade Review“A genre-transcending meditation on one of the most undertheorized periods in Black queer history, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us is a timely and necessary account of what the period leading up to, during, and after the long shadow of the 1980s means for the current moment in Black queer world-making. At once poetic and playful, it pushes the boundaries of traditional scholarship, providing a methodology for analyzing Black queer culture. To use the vernacular of the ballroom children, folks are going to gag at its deft reads, melodic writing, and creative rendering of Black queer history.” -- E. Patrick Johnson, author of * Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women *“In this innovative and generously envisioned book, Jafari S. Allen presents an unprecedented consideration of Black queerness as he weaves together a loving tapestry of Black feminist and Black queer theorists that spans half a century of critical work. Suffused with the ‘Blackfullness’ of queer love, loss, and world-making, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us is a lyrical, incisive, history-making, and paradigm-shifting work.” -- Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, author of * Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders *"A book to re-read in order to reach new depths, to see the reflections from the disco ball from yet another angle. . . . I strongly recommend this book to scholars and student within academia, across disciplines, to artists, writers, and activists outside of academia – to anyone seeking to explore and become more intimate with Black gay (and queer) habits of mind." -- Rebecka Rehnström * Anthropology Book Forum *"There’s a Disco Ball Between Us anthologizes desire as a glittering communal practice of Black/gay habit: as a moment of recognition between kith if not kin, as acknowledgement even if in quarrel, shifting lives in and out of time, dancing freedom." -- Sharanya * Full Stop *"This text does not shy away from the intellectual tradition of Black feminist affect in which it exists. Instead, Allen invites the reader into an experience that can work, if they choose to work it. Allen’s register is sharp, to the bone, and it shines. At times, I wondered if I was grown enough to know these things, or well read enough to show up to this conversation and hang. . . . For Allen, Black gay life is a refraction of fantasy and action. His critical ethnography builds upon a Black feminist drive to create embodied narratives. . . . His prose and rigorous engagement with the long 1980s invite the reader into conversation with a litany of elder co-conspirators." -- Charlene A. Carruthers * Public Books *"Jafari Allen’s There’s a Disco Ball Between Us has been so helpful and clarifying for me. . . ." -- Ashon Crawley * Public Books *"At once an intellectual history, a manifesto, a self-reflexive ethnography, and a memoir, Allen’s book is a genre-defying text that revises our understanding of the Black experience." -- Frank Andrew Guridy * Public Books *“Allen has skillfully woven together the experiences of an ‘anthologized generation’ without falling into the trap of eliding them. Rather, like a disco ball, the many reflections and refractions come together to form a theory of Black gay life that is at once coherent and infinitely diverse.” -- Baird Campbell * American Anthropologist *"Truly expansive. . . a call to read, think, and act differently." -- Emily R. Bock * Black Perspectives *"A stunning and ambitious model. . . . There’s a Disco Ball Between Us advances a vision for Black Queer historical inquiries, inquiries that utilize interdisciplinary methods, trouble conventional historical periodization, (re)constitute expansive archives and centers the Diaspora. This book stands as a comprehensive intellectual, social, and political history of Black queer life globally during the last five decades." -- Jennifer Dominique Jones * Black Perspectives *"Rather than seeking to define Black gay life as any one experience, Allen deftly makes room for the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives that have nonetheless been anthologized as a bounded, coherent group. ... [He] has skillfully woven together the experiences of an “anthologized generation” without falling into the trap of eliding them." -- Baird Campbell * American Ethnologist *"This breathtakingly innovative book pulls together a remarkable collection of Black feminist and queer theorists into a generous, important, and personal meditation on the past and futures of Black queerness. And don’t let the fact that the book’s academic drag discourage or put you off: the running House and Disco soundtrack alone will keep you vogueing thought the pages." -- Reginald Harris * Lambda Book Review *Table of ContentsAn Invitation ix Introduction. Pastness Is a Position 1 I. A Stitch in Space Time. The Long 1980s 25 1. The Anthological Generation 27 2. "What It Is I Think They Were Doing, Anyhow" 61 3. Other Countries 76 4. Disco 118 5. Black Nations Queer Nations? 139 II. Black/Queerpolis 165 6. Bonds and Disciplines 167 7. Archiving the Anthological at the Current Conjuncture 192 8. Come 221 9. "Black/Queer Mess" as Methodological Case Study 245 10. Unfinished Work 261 III. Conclusion. Lush Life (in Exile) 295 Acknowledgments 313 Notes 325 Bibliography 379 Index 403
£22.49
Duke University Press Semiotics of Rape
Book SynopsisRupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is a language through which issues ranging from caste to justice to land are contested.Trade Review"This poignant, timely, and urgent discussion of rape and sexual politics in rural India, Oza underscores that Dalit women’s bodies, often marked by the problematic images of vigilante justice, are defined by their sexual subjectivity and are not victims. Instead, they are complex sexual subjects which assert their choices in rape cases. . . . Oza’s monograph, therefore, makes an important contribution to the fields of gender, women’s and sexuality studies, transnational studies, anthropology, and South Asian studies. It will also be helpful for introductory feminist theory graduate courses." -- Nidhi Shrivastava * South Asian Review *"An interesting read for scholars pursuing research on gender/women’s studies, sexuality, and related topics. Policymakers should find this book interesting to sensitise authorities dealing with cases of violence against women." -- Rituparna Bhattacharyya * Asian Studies Review *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Consent 36 2. Compromise 65 3. Land 104 4. Death 130 Conclusion 161 Notes 173 Sources 185 Index
£70.55
Duke University Press When Forests Run Amok
Book SynopsisDaniel Ruiz-Serna examines how the devastation caused by war impacts nonhuman inhabitants in the forests and rivers in the traditional lands of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.Trade Review"When Forests Run Amok is an ambitious work that challenges readers' understandings of culture, territories, and justice. . . . Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." -- A. E. Leykam * Choice *"When Forests Run Amok is a provocative work that will no doubt spark animated discussion. Whether or not we, as readers, entirely follow Ruiz-Serna’s epistemological leap, his approach does provide for an exceptionally intimate, creative, and illuminating study of a place and conflict that have rightly been receiving a lot of scholarly attention." -- Nancy P. Appelbaum * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Flow of Selves 35 2. Still Waters Run Deep 71 3. Imperishable Evils 90 4. Awakening Forests 117 5. The Shared World of the Living and the Dead 152 6. A Jaguar and a Half 185 7. A Life of Legal Concern 209 Conclusion 231 References 243 Index 263
£74.70
Duke University Press All That Was Not Her
Book SynopsisWhile studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the diTrade Review“This beautiful, smart, and unique book cuts into ethnography and race in powerful and necessary ways, stepping off the plane of current critical race theory into risky, generative thinking and writing. An intimate, frank account of a situation and relationship beyond the convenient stability of an understanding or meaning, All That Was Not Her is an absolutely compelling read.” -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds *“All That Was Not Her is an exceptionally compelling reflection on the long-term complicated relationship through time between an anthropologist and a key interlocutor. Todd Meyers remarkably gets at the fraught, complex, and entangled forms of connection and difference, offering a new understanding of the interpersonal, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of work undertaken in contemporary medical and sociocultural anthropology. This is an altogether necessary book for these times.” -- Robert Desjarlais, author of * The Blind Man: A Phantasmography *"Meyers’s conscience-driven reflections regarding the utility of his work, the shifting parameters of the researcher-interlocutor relationship, and the special challenges of communicating across gaps of class and race, form the heart of the book. He makes academic writing his leaping-off point for a deeply thoughtful, lyrically expressed ethical and philosophical enquiry. This is a book that can be slotted into many non-fiction categories, but don’t be put off: it is a unique work of literature." -- Ian McGillis * Montreal Gazette *"Meyers’ writing is compelling for its beauty and for the honesty of his descriptions. More than anything, I took from this its head-on confrontation with the uneasiness inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer and their subject that should be familiar to anyone with experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork." -- Esca van Blarikom * Sociology of Health & Illness *"The book is not about truth but about swimming in ambiguity. It is not even about the cliché conflict between 'truth' and 'accuracy,' as even these terms begin to disintegrate in the text. Meyers asks us to sit with discomfort and dwell in the fraught nature of ethnography. In this sense, the book is not quite an ethnographic portrait. It is rather an ethnography of ethnography itself—and where ethnography starts to break down." -- Emily Lim Rogers * American Ethnologist *"I thoroughly enjoyed reading All That Was Not Her, by Todd Meyers. The book is beautiful to look at, with artwork unusual in an academic publication. Meyers writes well as he shares with the reader what might most easily be described as a case study. . . . This is an excellent text to prompt critical thought and debate around the important topics of ethics, power relations, and the positioning of the researcher within research that involves people as participants." -- Khyati Tripathi * H-Death, H-Net Reviews *"What his account of Beverly gets her to think about, even though she can’t really grasp it, is the importance of reading for negativity even in those most crushed by the violences of late liberalism. In such an enterprise, our politics will have to be vandalized, experiments in academic writing will need to be undertaken, and the failures depicted in All That Was Not Her will remain beautiful, venerable, and worthy of preservation." -- Elizabeth A. Wilson * Somatosphere *"I was moved by Meyers’s reflections on the unfinished: the errors, failures, and obsessions inherent to the work of an anthropologist." -- Margaux Fitoussi * Somatosphere *"All That Was Not Her is an unsentimental yet vulnerable reckoning of fieldwork. An ethnography of ethnography." -- Andrés Romero * Somatosphere *Table of ContentsUndoing ix 1. These Moments Formed between Us 1 2. Still Life 13 3. The Accident of Contact 41 4. Resuscitations 63 5. A Living Room 85 6. Thoughts of Suicide 97 7. [ . . . ] 123 8. Breathing Feels like a Falsehood 133 9. Notes on a New Moralism 151 10. Black Figurine 175 Reassembling 199 Notes 203 Bibliography 215
£18.89
Duke University Press In the Shadow of the Palms
Book SynopsisWith In the Shadow of the Palms, Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant. As Chao notes, it is no secret that the palm oil sector has destructive environmental impacts: it greatly contributes to tropical deforestation and is a major driver of global warming. Situating the plant and the transformations it has brought within the context of West Papua’s volatile history of colonization, ethnic domination, and capitalist incursion, Chao traces how Marind attribute environmental destruction not just to humans, technologies, and capitalism but also to the volition and actions of the oil palm plant itself. By approaching cash crops as both drivers of destruction and subjects of human exploitation, Chao rethinks capitalist violence as a multispecies act. In the process, Chao centers hoTrade Review“[In the Shadow of the Palms] is a beautiful read, a brilliantly executed thesis. . . . [Chao’s] explanations of the Marind life-worlds are grounded thoroughly in lived-experience shared through cohabitation, active-listening, and situated entangled interaction.” -- Robert Wolfgramm * Pacific Circle Newsletter *"In the Shadow of the Palms is a brave, compelling piece of ethnographic work, cleverly structured and delightful in its elegant yet accessible prose, offering a new, powerful take on the longstanding issue of agribusiness expansion in Indonesia." -- Silvia Pergetti * ANUAC - Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale *"This is a brilliant book—beautifully written—based on rigorous and sensitive ethnography and sharp theoretical analysis that seamlessly blends ethnography with theory. Chao’s respect and admiration for her interlocutors shines through the text and brings to life Marinds kinship with sago and more-than-human becomings—and how this is under threat by the oil palm as an actor of multispecies violence. In the Shadow of the Palms is an important contribution to environmental anthropology and will be of interest to those interested in extractive agriculture, posthumanism, indigenous studies and settler colonialism, decolonising anthropology, political ecology and development studies—both within and beyond Southeast Asia and Papuan Oceania." -- Camelia Dewan * Anthropology Book Forum *"In the Shadow of the Palms offers a haunting and novel perspective on themes of dispossession and alienation wrought by the expansion of oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia. . . . In the Shadow of the Palms stands out for its courageous attempt to apprehend and translate the internal experience of the Marind community. Meticulous descriptions of interactions with various animal and plant species evidence a profound intersubjectivity of human and environment in the Marind world." -- Carter Beale * Forest and Society *"This was a story that needed to be told. A counter-narrative to the development agenda that promises a rosy future, without elaborating on the destruction and loss that it entails. . . . Chao's deeply thought-provoking and riveting tome is both theoretical and real, development economics and the anthropology of slow violence. It is a homage to an indigenous community with their own means of resistance—until they too finally fall prey to oil palm." -- Serina Rahman * Journal of Southeast Asian Economies *"In sum, this book is beautifully written, deeply researched, and deserves to be read widely. Not only by students and scholars of Indonesia, but for all those interested in Southeast Asia and environmental politics. In the Shadow of the Palms may well become a classic in both anthropological studies and studies of Southeast Asia. No mean feat for a first book." -- Tomas Cole * Asian Studies Review *“[In the Shadow of the Palms] is ethnographically rich, analytically incisive, and politically engaged. . . . Chao brings people, plants, and animals into a muddled assemblage to explore relationships, interdependencies, oppression, and generation with great effect. . . . This book will appeal greatly to scholars of more-than-human worlds and global capitalism.” -- Sebastian Antoine * Journal of Anthropological Society of Oxford *“As a reader, I laud Chao’s caring analysis and description; her eye for trouble—abu-abu—and her unrelenting commitment to thinking with rather than for the Marind. This accessible yet in-depth account of Marind ontologies, their fracturing, and their tentative remaking in the face of the oil palm is an important volume for diverse scholars and students in different fields, for instance those engaged with plantation ecologies, multispecies thought, and indigenous ontologies.” -- Irene van Oorschot * Etnofoor *“In the Shadow of the Palms represents, above all, a deeply ethical project—in the sense of giving voice to otherwise marginalised and silenced people; and ethical in its broader existential ambitions. This is a book we all need to read: it speaks to the current predicaments facing all of us.” -- Warwick Anderson * The Australian Journal of Anthropology *"In the Shadow of the Palms is a wonderful book that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and activists. This includes those whose work is specifically focused on the necrobiopolitics of the Plantationocene, as well as anyone who might be having trouble finding possibilities for hope in this moment of planetary undoing." -- Kevin Burke * American Ethnologist *"Chao has a superpower — her writing. ... You’d have to search long and hard for a book that better captures the ineluctable violence of our times, that makes the damage feel so poignant, so inexorable, so real." -- Danilyn Rutherford * Journal of Asian Studies *Table of ContentsPrologue ix Introduction 1 1. Pressure Points 33 2. Living Maps 51 Interlude: Lost in the Plantation—The Dream of Yustinus Mahuze 75 3. Skin and Wetness 77 4. The Plastic Cassowary 95 Interlude: Metamorphosis—The Dream of Yosefus Samkakai 115 5. Sago Encounters 117 6. Oil Palm Counterpoint 143 Interlude: The Empty Sago Grove—The Dream of Agustinus Gebze 165 7. Time Has Come to Stop 167 8. Eaten by Oil Palm 183 Interlude: Black Waters of the Bian—The Dream of Elena Basik-Basik 201 Conclusions 203 Epilogue: Endings—The Author's Dream 219 Acknowledgments 221 Notes 227 References 269 Index 311
£20.69
Duke University Press Arc of Interference
Book SynopsisThe radically humanistic essays inArc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons. Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, SalmaaTrade Review“This is a book about life and death and about the aftermath of death. That alone makes it relevant to our species and to others, but Arc of Interference is also a book about the possibility of something more and something wonderful: across the continents, people struggle to care for one another.” -- Paul Farmer, from the Foreword“In this rich collection, leading medical anthropologists demonstrate ethnography as care. Attending to intimate realities and to the productive power of narrative, they use anthropology for collective healing.” -- Helena Hansen, coauthor of * Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America *“Arc of Interference is essential reading for anyone who cares about our troubled times. Its ethnographic creations mend what is broken by asking us to listen, care, and act.” -- Angela Garcia, author of * The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande *“A major undertaking of humanist anthropology, this volume insists on the necessity of medical anthropology for facing the great challenges of our time, from pandemics and structural violence to climate change and political oppression. Arc of Interference is a milestone in medical anthropology.” -- Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of * Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda *“Biehl, Adams, and their contributors have . . . penned a classic in Arc of Interference. . . . In our current times of reckoning–both global and disciplinary–contributions like Arc of Interference are a good place to start.” -- Evelyn Hoon * LSE Review of Books *"As a family physician who treats patients, not disease states, I found this book both reinvigorating and challenging. ... The book is a worthwhile read for physicians who care for their patients, whether domestically or globally." -- Mark K. Huntington * Family Medicine *Table of ContentsForeword. Against the Grain: Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer xi Introduction. Art of Interference / João Biehl and Vincanne Adams 1 Part I. Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures 1. Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet / Vincanne Adams 23 2. Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderland / Davíd Carrasco 42 3. In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change / Adriana Petryna 65 Part II. The Category Fallacy and Care Amid the Experts 4. Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call of Decolonizing Global Health / Salmaan Keshavjee 91 5. The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India / David S. Jones 112 6. Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness / Janis H. Jenkins 133 Part III. Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power 7. A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India / Lawrence Cohen 161 8. Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception / Marcia C. Inhorn 187 9. Environments and Mutable Selves / Margaret Lock 210 Part IV. Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies After Hope Has Departed) 10. Anthropology in a Mode of Dying / Robert Desjarlais 239 11. Ethnographic Open / João Biehl 257 12. Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human / Jean Comaroff 287 Afterword. Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care / Arthur Kleinman 305 In Memoriam 327 Acknowledgments 329 Bibliography 331 Contributors 371 Index 373
£21.59
Duke University Press An Archive of Possibilities
Book SynopsisIn An Archive of Possibilities, anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imTrade Review“This ethnography of violence and repair, hospitals and therapeutics, is set in eastern Congo’s still warlike Kivu region. It is mediated by the astute eyes and sensibilities of the very talented American anthropologist and surgeon, Rachel Marie Niehuus. Her focus on the intimate, the clinical, and the traumatic, with her pressing arguments about repair, stands to transform how anthropologists and conflict studies scholars approach medical practice, violence, enmity, and injury in Congo and well beyond. Awash with original contributions to studies of violence, humanitarianism, and the affective, this moving book tells some crucial regional histories while it investigates lively strands about hope and possible futures.” -- Nancy Rose Hunt, author of * A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo *“In this outstanding work of storytelling and ethnography, Rachel Marie Niehuus delves deep into the harrowing realities of life in the war-torn landscape of eastern Congo. Beyond the hospital’s sterile walls, amid the constant specters of violence and death, Niehuus uncovers a resilient and profoundly human story of survival, repair, and healing. Vivid and eye-opening, An Archive of Possibilities is a poignant exploration of a people’s unwavering determination to create a future beyond the scars of their past. An immensely thought-provoking and illuminating book.” -- Laurence Ralph, author of * Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Where the Scars Are So Thick 1 1. Dirt Work 21 Interlude 1: A Timeline 45 2. A Sea of Insecurity 47 Interlude 2: Running 69 3. The Body, the Flesh, and the Hospital 73 Interlude 3: Where War Is (Always) Coming 95 4. When Life Demands Release 99 Interlude 4: Joy 121 5. “We Are Creating a World We Have Never Seen” 123 Interlude 5: Otherwise 143 Conclusion: Cohabitation 147 Notes 157 Bibliography 179 Index
£18.89
University of Toronto Press Behind the Glass
Book SynopsisPart family history, part memoir, Behind the Glass tells the story behind the famous Villa Tugendhat.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Part I: House and Family 1. People Who Live in Glass Houses 2. Writing the Family Part II: Family and Firm 3. Before Löw-Beers 4. Founding the Firm 5. The Patriarch and His Siblings 6. The Sister Wives 7. The Double Cousins, before the War 8. Departures and After 9. The Patriarch’s Son Part III: Grete and Her World 10. Grete and Her Family, in Former Times 11. Grete and Her Family, the War Years 12. Grete and Her Family, after the War 13. The Philosophers: Helene Weiss, Käte Victorius, Ernst Tugendhat, Martin Heidegger 14. Tugendhat, after Heidegger Part IV: The Family Regrouped and Represented 15. The Reunion 16. Reconciliations in Brno 17. Looking Back: Conundrums of Identity and Representation Notes Timeline Acknowledgments Index
£26.99
University Press of Mississippi Folklore in Baltic History
Book SynopsisFolklore in the Baltic History: Resistance and Resurgence is about the role of folklore, folklore archives, and folklore studies in the contemporary history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--together called the Baltic countries. They were occupied by Russia, by Germany, and lastly by the USSR at the end of the Second World War. They regained freedom in 1991.The period under the rule of the USSR brought several changes to their societies and cultures. Individuals and institutions dealing with folklore--archives, university departments, and folklorists--came under special control, attack, and surveillance. Some of the pioneer folklorists escaped to other countries, but many others witnessed their institutions and the meaning of folklore studies transformed. The USSR did not stop folklore studies but led the field to new methods. In spite of all the pressure, folklore continued to be a matter of identity, and folksongs became the marching songs of crowds resisting Soviet contro
£29.21
Cornell University Press Fear and Fortune
Book SynopsisMongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The widespread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country where people''s lives were disrupted by the end of the USSR and tens of millions of livestock were killed in devastating droughts in the early 2000s. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity, born out of uncertain times, poses an intense moral problem; in the land of dust, disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. Tracing the continuities and discontinuities between human and nonhuman worlds, Mette M. High follows the paths of gold as it is excavated and converted intoTrade Review"Fear and Fortune is an important and timely ethnographic account of the Mongolian gold rush. Not only does it make a useful contribution to the burning issue of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of mining economies, but it does so in an accessible and engaging style, rendering people's daily lives with an intimate yet tactful touch." -- Grégory Delaplace, coeditor of Frontier Encounters"Fear and Fortune is a well-crafted, highly accessible, and very attractive read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. Mette M. High fully succeeds in drawing in and keeping the reader's attention while presenting her findings at a brisk pace. She offers up some highly original discussions of what 'money’ constitutes in a part of the world where the same value is neither consistently nor automatically attributed to the national currency. Mongolians conceptualize, handle, and transact money in ways that fall outside of the usual expectations surrounding it. High enables us to have a uniquely up close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice, and ways of envisioning and experiencing what counts as `value’ in the Mongolian gold rush today." -- Katherine Swancutt, author of Fortune and the CursedTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgmentsxi Note on Transliteration and Translationxv Introduction: Land of Fortune1 1 Burden of Patriarchy25 2 Power of Gold43 3 Angered Spirits59 4 PollutedMoney77 5 Wealth and Devotion93 6 Trading Gold111 Notes131 Glossary139 References141 Index157
£22.79
Cornell University Press The Promise of Piety
Book SynopsisIn The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of da
£22.49
MB - Cornell University Press Schoolishness
Book Synopsis
£21.59
Stanford University Press Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in
Book SynopsisWaste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.Trade Review"There are so many reasons to read this book: it's brilliantly written, theoretically innovative, and politically necessary. Waste Siege is not only one of the most original accounts of waste to date, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the ongoing occupation of the West Bank from the perspective of ordinary Palestinians."—Joshua Reno, author of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill"Waste Siege is an original and innovative account of living with the inundation of debris and toxicity in Palestine. Taking the reader on a journey through landfills and rubbish markets, encounters with bags of bread left hanging on the sides of dumpsters, and the movement of sewage across political barriers, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins brilliantly excavates the ambient politics of waste and its management."—Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics"[An] insightful, penetrating account of life under six decades of military occupation for the nearly three million Palestinians....In this well-written, intelligent account based on firsthand ethnographic fieldwork, the author displays a keen understanding of both waste ecology and contemporary life in occupied Palestine. Highly recommended."—G. M. Massey, CHOICE"Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance."—Kareem Rabie, PoLAR"Waste Siege is a welcome addition to the sparse literature about the environment, waste, and infrastructure in Palestine and the Middle East more broadly.[An] important work."—Basma Fahoum, Arab Studies Quarterly"By tracing the flows and forces of waste siege, this text enables a more refined understanding of the socio-political worlds forged with, under, and against occupation....In Stamatopoulou-Robbins's ethnography, environment, occupation, and everyday life are grasped in a single frame."—Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Benjamin Kaplan Weinger, Cultural Geographies"Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste."—Sharon Stephens Book Prize Committee"Stamatopoulou-Robbins provides a visceral and theoretically sophisticated guide to the disposability, toxicity, and ethical dilemmas that Palestinians confront in the West Bank today.Grounded in the anthropology of waste, the state, the environment, and infrastructure,Waste Siegeis a theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, beautifully written exploration of the 'kind of living we do in the constantly changing ruins we have made.'"—Andy Clarno,Journal for Palestine Studies"Waste Siege is a captivating book on the impact of the global inundation of waste, and waste infrastructure, on the lives of Palestinians. In a sense, Stamatopoulou-Robbins carves out the constellation surrounding waste, and in a bigger picture, a global economy of inundation... This book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in the lives of Palestinians under occupation from a refreshing perspective on the nation, and the nation-state. It is a wonderful analysis of Palestinian statehood and the ensuing debate on the Authority's success as a governing body."—Christina Bouri, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy"Stamatopoulou-Robbins's interviews are a particular strength of Waste Siege. Some of her interlocutors are the men of the rabish and the consumers of second-hand goods who tell a story about garbage intertwined with the issues of class and views of the other, all set within the sprawling networks of flea markets."—Lauren Banko, International Journal of Islamic Architecture"Waste Siegeis a brilliant and insightful ethnography into the West Bank's inundation of waste dumped from Israel, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian cities. Stamatopoulou-Robbins does not just focus on what the Israeli military does to the Palestinians, but the role Palestinian political parties, bureaucrats, humanitarian NGOs, and the international community play in the slow degradation of Palestinian life through waste."—Tina Guirguis, Society and SpaceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Compression: How to Make Time at an Occupied Landfill 2. Inundated: Wanting Used Colonial Goods 3. Accumulation: Toxicity and Blame in a Phantom State 4. Gifted: Unwanted Bread and Its Stranger Obligations 5. Leakage: Sewage and Doublethink in a "Shared Environment" Conclusion
£23.39
Stanford University Press The Subject of Human Rights
Book SynopsisThe Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights—as discourse, law, and practice—shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.Trade Review"Returning the 'human' to human rights, The Subject of Human Rights is a path-breaking, multi-disciplinary exploration of selfhood and subjecthood. An indispensable rethinking of the field of contemporary human rights studies."—James Loeffler, University of Virginia"This book challenges familiar paradigms for theorizing and contesting the universality of the subject of human rights. The authors extend our critical gaze to the subjectivities shaped by human rights values, to those who implement them, and to us all as addressees of the call to live our lives accordingly."—Dianne Otto, Melbourne Law School"Celermajer and Lefebvre bring together an impressive interdisciplinary cast of cutting-edge thinkers to interrogate the subject of human rights. This thoughtful book offers refreshing perspectives on current human rights debates and points to numerous intriguing alternative futures for the human rights project."—William Paul Simmons, University of Arizona"In The Subject of Human Rights, a diverse group of outstanding scholars reflect on the meaning of the "human" in human rights, shedding light on the current status and direction of the field. An essential contribution to the literature."—Ruti Teitel, New York Law SchoolTable of ContentsIntroduction: Bringing the Subject of Human Rights into Focus —Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre 1. The Relational Self As the Subject of Human Rights —Jennifer Nedelsky 2. The Misbegotten Monad: Anthropology, Human Rights, Belonging —Mark Goodale 3. "Are Women Animals?": The Rise and Rise of (Animal) Rights —Joanna Bourke 4. Indigenous Peoples As the Subject of Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer and Michael Dodson 5. "Escaped": Gendered Precarity and Human Rights Recognition —Wendy S. Hesford 6. Training Subjects for Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer 7. Who Deserves Inalienable Rights?: The Subjectivity of Violent State Officials and the Implications for Human Rights Protection —Rachel Wahl 8. Human Rights As Therapy: The Healing Paradigms of Transitional Justice —Ronald Niezen 9. Cinematic Aesthetics and the Subjects of Human Rights: On Eliane Caffé's Era o Hotel Cambridge —Andrew C. Rajca 10. Human Rights As Spiritual Exercises —Alexandre Lefebvre 11. The Child Subject of Human Rights —Linde Lindkvist 12. The Secular Subject of Human Rights —Jenna Reinbold 13. The Subject of Human Rights: An Interview with Samuel Moyn —Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre
£23.79
Stanford University Press States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in
Book SynopsisOn any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability. Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.Trade Review"Original, lucidly written, and theoretically rigorous, this rich ethnography tells us how to find the state in a quite unexpected place: the bakery. An outstanding book."—John Chalcraft, London School of Economics, author of Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East"The exciting States of Subsistence not only challenges how we think about state power in Jordan, but offers a nuanced reading of the literature on state power and an original theoretical approach. José Ciro Martínez provides a roadmap for examining quotidian practices of state power in democracies and non-democracies alike."—Jillian Schwedler, author of Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent"Beautifully written, rich in ethnographic detail, States of Subsistence examines the constitution of the state at a novel site: the bakery. Drawing on remarkable access to the inner workings of both bakeries and government bureaucracy, José Ciro Martínez offers a nuanced account of how subsidized bread figures in people's everyday lives and encounters with the state."—Jessica Barnes, author of Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt"Jose Ciro Martinez's brilliant new book,States of Subsistence, largely sets aside those dominant questions of bread riots, food security, regime survival and economic reforms to craft a uniquely important and absolutely fascinating look into the political meaning of the lived experience of subsidized bread in Jordan."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"In this fascinating book, [Martínez] reveals the extent to which the bread subsidy is intimately woven into the economic, social, and political life of the kingdom."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"Centering the perspectives of Jordanians with intimate knowledge of bread and baking, Martínez demonstrates the analytical payoff of taking cultures of consumption and culinary knowledge seriously."—Anny Gaul, Current History"Martínez sees the consumption and production of bread as a microcosm for how Jordanians coexist with authoritarian power. There is no other book about the politics of subsidizing bread in Jordan, certainly none that bestows such a memorable conclusion."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information Project"I have long waited for this kind of book, an embodied political economy of a staple food such as bread, and how it literally—rather than just symbolically—sustains a nation. Martinez's evocative ethnography of bread and political stability in Jordan is a prime example of how minute attention to everyday food practices can yield deep analytical insights into the workings of a state."—Katharina Graf, Gastronomica"This splendid ethnographic study addresses one of political science's most glaring lacunae. Few things weigh more heavily than food upon both citizens and governments alike. Yet few other concepts are as understudied as this one, particularly by political scientists working on the Middle East.... To make sense of this uncertain future, observers of Jordan should consider how politics and food became wedded to one another in the first place. States of Subsistence is a magnificent place to start."—Sean Yom, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. A New Style of Administration 2. Sensing the State 3. Statecraft 4. Echoes, Absences, and Reach 5. Tactics at the Bakery 6. Leavened Apprehensions Conclusion
£23.39
Stanford University Press The Right to Dignity: Housing Struggles, City
Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"
£23.79
Stanford University Press The Alternative University: Lessons from
Book SynopsisOver the last few decades, the decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms. Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival inquiry, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives.Trade Review"In a world in dire need of alternatives to a neoliberal model that declared we no longer have any, Mariya Ivancheva reminds us that the semiperiphery has always taught the world-system important lessons. The book is a powerful plea for a radical response to commodified higher education, for treading carefully among the contradictions inherent to revolutionary projects and against presentism."—Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg"The Alternative University underscores the way that the neoliberalization and marketisation of higher education is a truly global process. This extremely powerful and ethnographically documented account of the inner workings of an alternative university poses some searching questions about university autonomy, the historical role of student movements, and the subsequent role of leaders of those movements in both the academy and politics."—John Gledhill, University of ManchesterTable of Contents1. The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy 2. The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy: The University as a Historic Battlefield 3. Evaluation Matters: Teachers' Training at an Alternative University 4. The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State 5. Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University Conclusion Epilogue: De(colonial) Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production
£53.60
University of Pennsylvania Press In Light of Another's Word: European Ethnography
Book SynopsisChallenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe. These authors—William of Rubruck among the Mongols, "John Mandeville" cataloguing the world's diverse wonders, Geraldus Cambrensis describing the manners of the twelfth-century Welsh, and Jean de Joinville in his account of the various Saracens encountered on the Seventh Crusade—display an uncanny ability to see and understand from the perspective of the very strangers who are their subjects. Khanmohamadi elaborates on a distinctive late medieval ethnographic poetics marked by both a profound openness to alternative perspectives and voices and a sense of the formidable threat of such openness to Europe's governing religious and cultural orthodoxies. That we can hear the voices of medieval Europe's others in these narratives in spite of such orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the productive forces of disorientation and destabilization at work on these early ethnographic writers. Poised at the intersection of medieval studies, anthropology, and visual culture, In Light of Another's Word is an innovative departure from each, extending existing studies of medieval travel writing into the realm of poetics, of ethnographic form into the premodern realm, and of early visual culture into the realm of ethnographic encounter.Trade Review"Khanmohamadi has rendered a valuable service to scholars and students of medieval travel writing, human geography, and cultural contact. She presents a clear-sighted and well-articulated vision here of the distinctive generic and discursive characteristics of medieval empirical ethnography." * Marianne O'Doherty, American Historical Review *"Extremely well written, lucidly exposed, Shirin Khanmohamadi's argument is carried by a graceful narrative and powerful close readings spanning three centuries and ranging from one edge of the known world, twelfth-century insular Britain and Wales, to the other extreme, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mongolia and Cathay. . . . A required point of reference in medieval studies and an indispensable classroom text." * The Medieval Review *"In prose regularly both fresh and elegant, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi transforms our understanding of the formal features of medieval ethnography, and offers an exciting account of the diverse ways ethnography can work." * Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University *"Shirin Khanmohamadi persuasively demonstrates the distinctiveness of medieval (versus antique and early modern) representations of non-European others. Shaped by a scrupulous attention to relative chronology and historical context, her analyses combine a sure-handed command of critical and theoretical discourses with nuanced close readings. In lucid prose, she makes a strong case for the variety and flexibility of Latin Europe's encounter with various non-Christian others across three languages and over three centuries. In Light of Another's Word is destined to become an indispensable entry in the bibliography of 'postcolonial' medievalism." * Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz *
£19.79
University of Minnesota Press Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in
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
£20.69
University of Utah Press,U.S. The Geoarchaeology of a Terraced Landscape: From
Book SynopsisThe toil of several million peasant farmers in Aztec Mexico transformed lakebeds and mountainsides into a checkerboard of highly productive fields. This book charts the changing fortunes of one Aztec settlement and its terraced landscapes from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. It also follows the progress and missteps of a team of archaeologists as they pieced together this story. Working at a settlement in the Toluca Valley of central Mexico, the authors used fieldwalking, excavation, soil and artifact analyses, maps, aerial photos, land deeds, and litigation records to reconstruct the changing landscape through time. Exploiting the methodologies and techniques of several disciplines, they bring context to eight centuries of the region's agrarian history, exploring the effects of the Aztec and Spanish Empires, reform, and revolution on the physical shape of the Mexican countryside and the livelihoods of its people. Accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, this well-illustrated and well-organized volume provides a step-by-step guide that can be applied to the study of terraced landscapes anywhere in the world. The four authors share an interest in terraced landscapes and have worked together and on their own on a variety of archaeological projects in Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean, Poland, and the United Kingdom.
£68.25
Texas A&M University Press We Dance for the Virgen Volume 19: Authenticity
Book SynopsisThe danza de matachines is a tradition with roots in the Spanish colonization of Mexico that summons history for Mexican, Chicano, and indigenous communities. In this volume Robert Botello reviews the history of the tradition .
£30.36
Rutgers University Press The Politics of Potential: Global Health and
Book SynopsisThe first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its effects on clinical care and the lives of childbearing women in South Africa. Why was the First One Thousand Days project so readily adopted by South Africa and many other countries? Pentecost not only explores this question but also discusses the science of intergenerational transmissions of health, disease, and human capital and how this constitutes new forms of intergenerational responsibility. The women who are the target of first one thousdand days interventions are cast as both vulnerable and responsible for the health of future generations, such that, despite its history, intergenerational responsibility in South Africa remains entrenched in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.Trade Review"The Politics of Potential examines a powerful new intervention that seeks to alter the future by tinkering with the present conditions of the unborn. Pentecost provides a riveting and at times dystopian account of how epigenetic interventions layer on to other global health interventions in disadvantaged communities in post-apartheid South Africa. From this laboratory of poverty, will it indeed be possible to finally break the cycle of violence and deprivation into which such communities seem locked?" -- Vinh-Kim Nguyen * author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS *"This nuanced ethnography of South Africa’s First 1000 Days program offers brilliant insights about how global health’s long-standing obsession with maternal-child health is being reinvented under new scientific demands for epigenetic modeling and their temporal gymnastics in a place with a particularly fraught history of social injustice. Pentecost troubles the simplistic assessment of intervention success and failure by reminding readers of how recognition of a responsibility toward historic injury unveils the individualizing, situated, and justice-effacing effects of such programs." -- Vincanne Adams * editor of Metrics: What Counts in Global Health *Table of ContentsForeword by Lenore Manderson Introduction 1 The First 1000 Days: Origin Stories 2 Situated Biologies: The View from Khayelitsha 3 The Traveling Technology of Mother and Child 4 Life Between Protocols 5 Intergenerational Transmissions: The Work of Time 6 Ambivalent Kin: On Gender and Violence Conclusion: The Politics of Potential Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£30.60
The Chinese University Press Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia
Book SynopsisThrough the lens of Chinese food, the authors address recent theories in social science concerning cultural identity, ethnicity, boundary formation, consumerism and globalization, and the invention of local cuisine in the context of rapid culture change in East and Southeast Asia.
£32.21
University of the West Indies Press The Blackest Thing in Slavery Was Not the Black
Book SynopsisThis book represents the final instalment of research and analysis by one of the Caribbean's foremost historians. In this volume, Eric Williams reflects on the institution of slavery from the ancient period in Europe down to New World African Slavery. The book also includes other forms of bondage which followed slavery, including Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Pacific peoples in many locations worldwide. The book points ways in which this bondage led to European and American prosperity and the manner in which bonded peoples created their own spaces. This they did through the preservation and revival of the transported culture to the new locations. The book makes a significant contribution in that it moves beyond African slavery. It continues the narrative after abolition by showing how the capitalist impulse enabled Europe and the United States to devise other (non-slavery) ways of further exploitation of non-African people in third world countries. These nations fought this further exploitation in banding together to create the south-to-south nonaligned movement which gave mutual assistance in a number of areas. Most other works tend to separate these issues or deal with them on a regional basis. Eric Williams offers a comprehensive view, tying up many themes in a vast compendium.
£36.71
Cambridge University Press Forces of Reproduction
Book SynopsisThe concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents ''Man'' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour or the ''forces of reproduction''. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.Table of Contents1. Introduction; 2. A master's narrative; 3. Undoing the Anthropocene; 4. Conclusions; 5. Epilogue. Within and beyond the Covid19 pandemic.
£17.00
Rutgers University Press Near Human: Border Zones of Species, Life, and
Book SynopsisNear Human takes us into the borders of human and animal life. In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive care unit, extremely premature infants prompt questions about whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, whether they will face a life of severe disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen shows that practices of substitution redirect the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human. The near humanness of preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel how neonatal life is imagined, how societal belonging is evaluated, and how the Danish welfare state is forged. This courageous multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs and different kinds of humans belong in Denmark. Trade Review"Near Human examines the moral sensibilities and substitution practices through which human and non-human lives come to be valued, sustained, and included within the collectivity – or killed and excluded. In Svendsen’s masterful account, vivid stories from Denmark – about piglets and preemies, scientists and migrants, global exchanges and border closures – speak to fundamental questions about how human lives and societies get shaped, alongside the lives of animals. A breathtaking achievement!" -- Janelle S. Taylor * author of The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram *"In this pathbreaking book, Mette Svendsen shows the ways in which Denmark relies upon pigs as fodder for its welfare state. Expanding the frames of translational medicine, Svendsen shows how the pig figures as a source of health and wealth that sustains the Danish population. The human-animal nexus becomes a prism to explore the boundaries of the nation, its citizenry and the politics of (non)belonging. This compelling and beautifully written book shows just how much can be learned by making other-than-human animals central to medical anthropology." -- Carrie Friese * author of Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals *"Near Human examines the moral sensibilities and substitution practices through which human and non-human lives come to be valued, sustained, and included within the collectivity – or killed and excluded. In Svendsen’s masterful account, vivid stories from Denmark – about piglets and preemies, scientists and migrants, global exchanges and border closures – speak to fundamental questions about how human lives and societies get shaped, alongside the lives of animals. A breathtaking achievement!" -- Janelle S. Taylor * author of The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram *"In this pathbreaking book, Mette Svendsen shows the ways in which Denmark relies upon pigs as fodder for its welfare state. Expanding the frames of translational medicine, Svendsen shows how the pig figures as a source of health and wealth that sustains the Danish population. The human-animal nexus becomes a prism to explore the boundaries of the nation, its citizenry and the politics of (non)belonging. This compelling and beautifully written book shows just how much can be learned by making other-than-human animals central to medical anthropology." -- Carrie Friese * author of Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Foreword by Lenore Manderson Prologue Introduction 1 Feeding: Cows, Pigs, and Humans in Interspecies Kinship 2 Killing: Pigs as Sacrificeable Beings 3 Treating: Infants at the Margins of Life 4 Metabolizing: Humans and Nonhumans in a Global Field Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes References Index
£30.60
Little, Brown & Company Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and
Book SynopsisThe thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas:- Gender is a social construct.- Race is a social construct.- Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in.It is not a story to be feared. "There are no monsters in the closet," Murray writes, "no dread doors we must fear opening." But it is a story that needs telling. Human Diversity does so without sensationalism, drawing on the most authoritative scientific findings, celebrating both our many differences and our common humanity.
£27.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Dawn of Everything
Book SynopsisINSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolutionfrom the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequalityand revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlikeeither free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democ
£22.68
Simon & Schuster Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can
Book Synopsis
£28.00
University of California Press Giving to God
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Provides a discourse of charity that challenges and disrupts dominant secular and liberal notions of humanitarian aid. The book is recommended not only to anthropology and sociology students and scholars but also to ones of economics, theology, and religious studies.” * KULT Online *"Amira Mittermaier has written a marvelous book. Giving to God will be of considerable value not only to anthropologists of Islam and charitable giving, but also to historians and political scientists who seek to understand the persistence of a longstanding model of Islamic charity in the face of political, economic, and social upheaval." * Reading Religion *"A masterpiece of the anthropology of charity and the ethos of Islamic economics." * Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations *"Mittermaier has created an important study of Muslims negotiating their religious lives in the modern world." * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *Table of ContentsIllustrations Note on Transliteration Acknowledgments Introduction during the revolution 1 • Revolutions Don’t Stop Charity giving 2 • Divine Minimum Wage 3 • Caravan to Paradise receiving 4 • Performances of Poverty 5 • All Thanks Belong to God after the revolution 6 • Tomorrow Is Better Postscript Notes Glossary Bibliography Index
£22.50
Simon & Schuster Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can
Book Synopsis
£17.60
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Putin and the Return of History
Book SynopsisAn original history of Russia''s thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin''s politics and rekindled the Cold War.Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance - a hubris that shaped how the West would treat Russia for the next two decades. But history wasn't over. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. The Putin of the 2020s is an autocratic nationalist, dedicated to repression at home and anti-Western militarism abroad. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support Trade ReviewClear, lively, and not afraid to be controversial: a stimulating anatomisation of Russia’s poisonous relationship with the West, Ukraine, and its own dark past. -- Anna Reid, author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine and A Dirty Little WarThis is a very important account of the build-up to Russia’s invasions of Ukrainian territory. Most books and articles on the Russia-Ukraine war are very one-sided; the great merit of this book is that the Sixsmiths take a long historical perspective and enable the reader to appreciate the aspirations of both sides. The authors focus on the defects of Western societies as well as on those of Russia. This is a study that needs to be taken into account when we try to understand the lessons of the war. -- Geoffrey Hosking, Emeritus Professor of Russian History, University College LondonA fascinating and highly readable account of the background to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, informed by Martin Sixsmith’s long involvement with the region since his days as a BBC correspondent covering the last days of the Soviet Union. -- Peter Conradi, author of Who Lost Russia? From the Collapse of the USSR to Putin's War on UkraineA tremendous study of how Putin has tragically manipulated national myths for personal gain and revanchist patriotism. -- Starred Review, Kirkus Review
£13.49
University of California Press Skin
Book SynopsisOur intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This title celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations.Trade Review“ Skin offers an accessible and well-referenced overview of many aspects of the biology of human skin. . . . Beauty may only be skin deep, but Jablonski shows us that the skin, be it thin or thick, is the true mirror of the soul.” * Science *“Biology is a historical science. Ask a 'why?' question about biology, as Nina Jablonski keeps doing in her book Skin, and you invite an evolutionary answer. She also tells us everything we might want to know about skin; perhaps more than some people want to know.” * Nature *“Jablonski has an endearing sense of humor that keeps the narrative nimble as it delivers surprisingly dense lessons on anatomy, biochemistry, physiology and sociology. . . . A fascinating read.” * San Francisco Chronicle *“Skin is the largest and most visible organ in the human body. Its biological richness and complexity are exceeded only by the brain and immune system. And now at last it has the book it deserves. . . . [Jablonski’s] fascinating book is as all-encompassing as skin itself. . . . a fascinating, thought-provoking book.” * Financial Times *"Skin is, as Jablonsky ably illustrates, a marvel of engineering: tough, stretchable, impermeable, pliable, a bacterial and UV shield and sensitive to heat, cold, deformation and the slightest of touches. The book explores the social nooks and biological crannies of this complex set of tissues, from color to artificial skin and the role of sweat in our evolutionary history." * New Scientist *“A rich mix of just about everything you would want to know about the necessary and complex covering of your body. Nina Jablonski writes not only as an anthropologist but also as an ethologist, comparative biologist, and psychologist. She weaves a vivid, compelling history, which at times is intertwined with social discourse (skin color and racism) and advice (skin and sun protection).” * New England Journal of Medicine *"This amply illustrated rhapsody to the body's largest and most visible organ showcases skin's versatility, importance in human biology and uniqueness: human skin is hairless and sweaty, has evolved in a spectrum of colors and is a billboard for self-expression. . . . Jablonski nimbly interprets scientific data for a lay audience, and her geeky love for her discipline is often infectious" * Publishers Weekly *“In Skin, her fascinating, nuanced, often exhilarating, and for the most part crisply written new book, Nina Jablonski . . . urges us to consider our skin as we have never, even in our pubertal angst, pored over it before. . . . May you read it with pleasure and by the sweat of your brow.” * American Scholar *STARRED REVIEW: "A marvelous exploration of the organ we ignore until an abnormality prompts us to seek professional help. The chapters skillfully lead from one topic to the next and cover the history and physiology of skin, sweating, color, touch, tattoos and painting, and more. Jablonski's writing is clear; her enthusiasm for the topic, evident.” * Library Journal *“Jablonski engages the reader with her clear, informed style that makes Skin a very readable book.” * American Biology Teacher *"Anthropologist Jablonski delves into the natural history of skin in animals and people and explains its structure and function, its evolution as a nearly hairless body covering in people, and the utility of its pigment melanin. She also examines the role of skin in activities as varied as finding food and bonding socially. Finally, she looks at the prospects for artificial skin." * Science News *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface to the 2013 Edition Introduction 1 Skin Laid Bare 2 History 3 Sweat 4 Skin and Sun 5 Skin's Dark Secret 6 Color 7 Touch 8 Emotions, Sex, and Skin 9 Wear and Tear 10 Statements 11 Future Skin Glossary Notes References Index
£18.90
University of California Press Paradoxes of Green
Book SynopsisA multidisciplinary study of green and its significance from multiple perspectives: aesthetic, architectural, environmental, political, and social. It is centered on the Kingdom of Bahrain, where green has a long and deep history of appearing cooling, productive, and prosperous-a radical contrast to the hot and hostile desert.Trade Review"Doherty is as comfortable reflecting on the aesthetic aspects of colour as he is describing the ecological implications of property development... the portrait Doherty paints is of a fascinating, quickly changing, and - yes - paradoxical place." Environment and Urbanization "Beautifully written." Landscape Architecture MagazineTable of ContentsNotes on Transliteration and Translation Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Two Seas, Many Greens 1. Green Scenery 2. The Blueness of Green 3. How Green Can Become Red 4. The Memory of Date Palm Green 5. The Struggle for the Manama Greenbelt 6. The Promise of Beige 7. Brightening Green 8. The Whiteness of Green Notes Glossary List of Named Participants Bibliography Index
£22.50
