Social and cultural anthropology Books
The University of Chicago Press City Creatures Animal Encounters in the Chicago
Book SynopsisWe usually think of cities as the domain of humans-but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. Chicago residents knowingly move among familiar creatures like squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, but might be surprised to learn about all the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers to an astonishing diversity of urban wildlife with a unique and accessible mix of essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs. The contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves. The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate Backyard Diversity, live giraffes loom at the zoo and taxidermy-in-progress pheasants fascinate museum-goers in Animals on Display, and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in Water Worlds. Although the book is rooted in Chicago's landscape, nature lovers from cities around the globe will find a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to a new world that has been there all along. Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout will help readers see the city-and the creatures who share it with us-in an entirely new light.
£24.70
The University of Chicago Press The Insane Chicago Way The Daring Plan by
Book SynopsisThe Insane Chicago Way is the untold story of a daring plan by Chicago gangs in the 1990s to create a Spanish Mafia-and why it failed. John M. Hagedorn traces how Chicago Latino gang leaders, following in Al Capone's footsteps, built a sophisticated organization dedicated to organizing crime and reducing violence. His lively stories of extensive cross-neighborhood gang organization, tales of police/gang corruption, and discovery of covert gang connections to Chicago's Mafia challenge conventional wisdom and offer lessons for the control of violence today. The book centers on the secret history of Spanish Growth & Development (SGD)-an organization of Latino gangs founded in 1989 and modeled on the Mafia's nationwide Commission. It also tells a story within a story of the criminal exploits of the C-Note$, the minor league team of the Chicago's Mafia (called the Outfit), which influenced the direction of SGD. Hagedorn's tale is based on three years of interviews with an Outfit soldier as well as access to SGD's constitution and other secret documents, which he supplements with interviews of key SGD leaders, court records, and newspaper accounts. The result is a stunning, heretofore unknown history of the grand ambitions of Chicago gang leaders that ultimately led to SGD's shocking collapse in a pool of blood on the steps of a gang-organized peace conference. The Insane Chicago Way is a compelling history of the lives and deaths of Chicago gang leaders. At the same time it is a sociological tour de force that warns of the dangers of organized crime while arguing that today's relative disorganization of gangs presents opportunities for intervention and reductions in violence.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Cruel Attachments
Book SynopsisExploring different cases of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders, this book details a secular ritual process aimed not only at preventing future acts of molestation but also at fundamentally transforming the offender, who is ultimately charged with creating an almost entirely new self.Trade Review"Cruel Attachments is wholly absorbing, in the sense that it is unputdownable, but also in the sense that it provides numerous occasions for what can feel like utterly contaminating, destabilizing emotional identifications: with victims, family members, therapists, prison guards, the anthropologist himself-and, however unnervingly, also perpetrators. It is no small feat to bring readers inside the emotional worlds of all these players. To have done so, and with such subtlety and nuance, is remarkable and unprecedented." (Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York)
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Unpopular Sovereignty
Book SynopsisIn 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. The author shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa.Trade Review"Unpopular Sovereignty is an insightful and important book, one that sheds a great deal of light on the complexities of sovereignty, self-determination, and citizenship; on the possibilities and limitations of electoral politics; and on the relationship of territorial politics to global norms." (Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960)
£79.80
The University of Chicago Press Unpopular Sovereignty
Book SynopsisIn 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. The author shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa.Trade Review"Unpopular Sovereignty is an insightful and important book, one that sheds a great deal of light on the complexities of sovereignty, self-determination, and citizenship; on the possibilities and limitations of electoral politics; and on the relationship of territorial politics to global norms." (Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960)
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Modes of Uncertainty Anthropological Cases
Book SynopsisOrganizing contributions from various anthropological subfields, including economics, security and environment, the authors offer tools which consider uncertainty, its management, and the differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to it. The also present ways of thinking about danger and risk from an analytical and anthropological perspective.Trade Review"Modes of Uncertainty gives an impressive view of powerful and original scholarship, precise research, and strong linkages between theorizing and analyzing data, addressing the question of how humans in a variety of settings are dealing in concrete ways with unknown but highly important near futures that are directly linked to, but not controlled by, their actions." (Reiner Keller, author of Doing Discourse Research)
£87.00
The University of Chicago Press Modes of Uncertainty Anthropological Cases
Book SynopsisTaking up policies and experiences as objects of research and analysis, the essays here seek a rigorous inquiry into a sound conceptualization of uncertainty in order to better confront contemporary problems. This book offers different ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective.Trade Review"Modes of Uncertainty gives an impressive view of powerful and original scholarship, precise research, and strong linkages between theorizing and analyzing data, addressing the question of how humans in a variety of settings are dealing in concrete ways with unknown but highly important near futures that are directly linked to, but not controlled by, their actions." (Reiner Keller, author of Doing Discourse Research)
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press From Notes to Narrative Writing Ethnographies
Book SynopsisEthnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science. Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well. From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off. Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to ef
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Players and Pawns How Chess Builds Community and
Book SynopsisA chess match seems as solitary an endeavor as there is in sports: two minds, on their own, in fierce opposition. In contrast, Gary Alan Fine argues that chess is a social duet: two players in silent dialogue who always take each other into account in their play. Surrounding that one-on-one contest is a community life that can be nearly as dramatic and intense as the across-the-board confrontation. Fine has spent years immersed in the communities of amateur and professional chess players, and with Players and Pawns he takes readers deep inside them, revealing a complex, brilliant, feisty world of commitment and conflict. Opening with a close look at a typical tournament in Atlantic City, Fine carries us from planning and setup through the climactic final day's match-ups between the weekend's top players, introducing us along the way to countless players and their relationships to the game. At tournaments like that one, as well as in locales as diverse as collegiate matches and communit
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press Archives of the Insensible Of War Photopolitics
Book SynopsisIn this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantanamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty's claims to transcendental right -whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic-by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press NonSovereign Futures French Caribbean Politics
Book SynopsisAs an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions-or even paradoxes-in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity-challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution-in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself. Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Kinship in Bali
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£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Restless Anthropologist New Fieldsites New
Book SynopsisWhat does a move from a village in the West African rain forest to a West African community in a European city entail? This book brings together eight eminent scholars to recount the personal and intellectual dynamics of uprooting one's life - and decades of work - to embrace a new fieldsite.Trade Review"Much in the way of the development of new topics, new questions, and new variants on the classic method of anthropological fieldwork has depended on the nature and experience of a now characteristic break with the investments of early-career fieldwork projects. Alma Gottlieb's collection is the first in-depth treatment of these 'moments' in anthropological careers, which are crucial to the understanding of new developments, forms, and interests in anthropological research generally." (George Marcus, University of California, Irvine)"
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Braided Worlds
Book SynopsisBraiding their own stories with those of the villagers of Asagbe and Kosangbe, the authors recounts a host of unexpected dramas with these West African villages, prompting serious questions about the fraught nature of cultural contact.Trade Review"At this moment in the history of our divided and violent world, we profoundly need to hear the voices of Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham as they return to the Beng people of the Cote d'Ivoire and write not just about this remarkable people but about the ways that all of us are inextricably 'braided' together by our love, through our humanity, of sharing the great mystery of existence. Braided Worlds is not only an enthralling book but an important one. And linked with Gottlieb and Graham's earlier Parallel Worlds, the two books form a masterpiece of travel memoir." (Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain)"
£23.00
University of Chicago Press Readings in Linguistics I II
Book SynopsisFocusing on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks of a variety of biological approaches to political attitudes and preferences, this title considers such topics as the comparative basis of political behavior, the utility of formal modeling informed by evolutionary theory, and the genetic bases of attitudes and behaviors.Trade Review"A major paradigmatic contribution relevant well beyond political science, Man Is by Nature a Political Animal provides a primer of what has been happening at the intersection of political science, biology, and cognitive neuroscience for the past twenty years. Hatemi and McDermott have put together a formidable group of the most creative scholars in the discipline, each of whom has attempted to show how the various methodologies and theoretical frameworks operate." (John M. Orbell, University of Oregon)"
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Conceptualizing Capitalism Institutions Evolution
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£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Subject to Death Life and Loss in a Buddhist
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£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Learning to Smoke
Book SynopsisWhy do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction to demonstrate how sociocultural and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it.Trade Review"Learning to Smoke makes very original arguments about the use of tobacco in Western societies. Mindful of major sociological theories and nicely supported by a wealth of historical documentation, this study will find an enthusiastic audience among both specialists and anyone interested in the smoking problem." - Howard Becker, University of California, Santa Barbara
£31.35
The University of Chicago Press Mothers on the Move Reproducing Belonging between
Book SynopsisThe massive scale and complexity of international migration today tends to obscure the nuanced ways migrant families seek a sense of belonging. In this book, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg takes readers back and forth between Cameroon and Germany to explore how migrant mothers through the careful and at times difficult management of relationships juggle belonging in multiple places at once: their new country, their old country, and the diasporic community that bridges them. Feldman-Savelsberg introduces readers to several Cameroonian mothers, each with her own unique history, concerns, and voice. Through scenes of their lives at a hometown association's year-end party, a celebration for a new baby, a visit to the Foreigners' Office, and many others as well as the stories they tell one another, Feldman-Savelsberg enlivens our thinking about migrants' lives and the networks and repertoires that they draw on to find stability and, ultimately, belonging. Placing women's individual voices with
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Beheading the Saint Nationalism Religion and
Book SynopsisThrough much of its existence, Quebec's neighbors called it the priest-ridden province. Today, however, Quebec society is staunchly secular, with a modern welfare state built on lay provision of social services a transformation rooted in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. In Beheading the Saint, Genevi ve Zubrzycki studies that transformation through a close investigation of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist of June 24. The celebrations of that national holiday, she shows, provided a venue for a public contesting of the dominant ethno-Catholic conception of French Canadian identity and, via the violent rejection of Catholic symbols, the articulation of a new, secular Quebecois identity. From there, Zubrzycki extends her analysis to the present, looking at the role of Quebecois identity in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage issues that also offer insight on similar debates elsewhere in the wo
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press On Social Organization and Social Control
Book SynopsisIn the four decades following the end of World War II, Morris Janowitz (1919-88) published major works in macrosociology, urban and political sociology, race and ethnic relations, and the study of armed forces and society. His research was deeply rooted in the traditions of philosophical pragmatism and the Chicago school of sociology, influences which led him to reject grand theories and mechanistic explanations of social life. Yet he remained confident in the capacity of sociological reason to come to grips with central aspects of the human condition. On the basis of his studies, Janowitz came to believe that the transition from early to advanced industrial society radically altered institutional organization to make democratic social control more difficult, though not impossible, to achieve. The task of his pragmatic sociology was to identify fundamental trends in the social organization of industrial societies, to indicate their substantive implications for social control, and to cl
£38.00
The University of Chicago Press The Territories of Science and Religion
Book SynopsisThis work develops methods for unravelling the mysteries of emotions and aims to answer fundamental questions at the heart of emotional life. By using videotapes, interviews and ethnographic description, the author studies emotions as physical and embodied rather than as remembered and recounted.
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Crying for Our Elders African Orphanhood in the
Book SynopsisThe HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the disease. But in Crying for Our Elders, anthropologist Kristen Cheney argues that these humanitarian groups have misread the crisis. Moreover, she explains how the global humanitarian focus on orphanhood often elides the social and political circumstances that present the greatest adversity to vulnerable children in effect, actually deepening the crisis and thereby affecting children's lives as irrevocably as the disease itself. Through ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research with children in Uganda, Cheney traces how the 'best interest' principle that governs development work targeting children often does more harm than good, stigmatizing orphans and leaving children in the post-antiretroviral era even more vulnerable to exploitation. She details the d
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press Crying for Our Elders African Orphanhood in the
Book SynopsisThe HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the disease. But in Crying for Our Elders, anthropologist Kristen Cheney argues that these humanitarian groups have misread the crisis. Moreover, she explains how the global humanitarian focus on orphanhood often elides the social and political circumstances that present the greatest adversity to vulnerable children in effect, actually deepening the crisis and thereby affecting children's lives as irrevocably as the disease itself. Through ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research with children in Uganda, Cheney traces how the 'best interest' principle that governs development work targeting children often does more harm than good, stigmatizing orphans and leaving children in the post-antiretroviral era even more vulnerable to exploitation. She details the dramatic effects this has on traditional family support and child protection, and stresses child empowerment over pity. Crying for Our Elders advances current discussions on humanitarianism, children's studies, orphanhood, and kinship. By exploring the unique experience of AIDS orphanhood through the eyes of children, caregivers, and policymakers, Cheney shows that despite the extreme challenges of growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, the post-ARV generation still holds out hope for the future.
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Governing Educational Desire Culture Politics
Book SynopsisThat parents in China greatly value higher education for their children is a well-known aspect of contemporary Chinese culture, but the intensity and effects of their desire to achieve this goal have largely gone unexamined. This title explores this universal desire for a college education and its vast consequences.Trade Review"Kipnis convincingly demonstrates how crucial education is for shaping the strategies, dreams, and desires of Chinese families. But the main contribution of this book is the way it manages to place this educational desire in a larger context of how China is governed and in a comparative framework that shows Chinese students' feverish desire for education as part of a global phenomenon that cannot be reduced to Chinese, or even East Asian, cultural peculiarity." (Stig Thogersen, Aarhus University)"
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Music in the World Selected Essays
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£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Mobile Secrets Youth Intimacy and the Politics of
Book SynopsisIn just over a decade, mobile phones have become part of everyday life almost everywhere, radically transforming how we access and exchange information. Many have argued that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, this improved access to technology and information will usher in socio-economic development, changing everything from health services to electoral participation to engagement with the global economy. With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault reveals how better access to information is not necessarily a good thing, and offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb who have adopted mobile phones in their daily lives, Archambault shows that they have become necessary tools for pretense and falsification, allowing youths not only to mitigate but also court, produce, and sustain uncertainty in their efforts to create fulfilling lives in the harsh world of postwar
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press The Mediterranean Incarnate
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£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Socialist Peace Explaining the Absence of War in
Book SynopsisFor the last twenty years, the West African nation of Guinea has exhibited all the characteristics that have correlated with civil wars in other countries, and Guineans themselves regularly talk about the inevitability of war tearing their country apart. Yet the country has narrowly avoided civil conflict again and again. In A Socialist Peace?, Mike McGovern asks how this was possible, how a nation could beat the odds and evade civil war. All six of Guinea's neighbors have experienced civil war or separatist insurgency in the past twenty years. Guinea itself has similar makings for it. It is rich in resources, yet its people are some of the poorest in the world. Its political situation is polarized by fiercely competitive ethnic groups. Weapons flow freely through its lands and across its borders. And, finally, it is still recovering from the oppressive regime of Sekou Toure. Yet it is that aspect which McGovern points to: while Toure's reign was hardly peaceful, it was successful ofte
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Beyond Surgery Injury Healing and Religion at an
Book SynopsisOver the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backwards culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. With Beyond Surgery, medical anthropologist Anita Hannig unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation. Through her in-depth ethnography of two repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belo
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Beyond Surgery
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£24.00
The University of Chicago Press The Returns of Fetishism Charles de Brosses and
Book SynopsisFor more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term fetishism has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to magic but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all: On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy. The product of de Brosses's autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses's work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism throu
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press To be a Man is Not a OneDay Job Masculinity Money
Book SynopsisRefrains about monetary hardships are ubiquitous in contemporary Nigeria, frequently expressed with the idiom to be a man is not a one-day job. But while men talk constantly about money, underlying their economic worries are broader concerns about the shifting meanings of masculinity, marked by changing expectations and practices of intimacy. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in southeastern Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith takes readers through the principal phases and arenas of men's lives: the transition to adulthood; searching for work and making a living; courtship, marriage and fatherhood; fraternal and political relationships among men; and finally, the attainment of elder status and death. He relates men's struggles to fulfill both their own aspirations and society's expectations. He also considers men who behave badly, mistreat their wives and children, or resort to crime and violence. All of these men face similar challenges as they navigate the complex geometry of m
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press To Be a Man Is Not a OneDay Job Masculinity Money
Book SynopsisRefrains about monetary hardships are ubiquitous in contemporary Nigeria, frequently expressed with the idiom to be a man is not a one-day job. But while men talk constantly about money, underlying their economic worries are broader concerns about the shifting meanings of masculinity, marked by changing expectations and practices of intimacy. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in southeastern Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith takes readers through the principal phases and arenas of men's lives: the transition to adulthood; searching for work and making a living; courtship, marriage and fatherhood; fraternal and political relationships among men; and finally, the attainment of elder status and death. He relates men's struggles to fulfill both their own aspirations and society's expectations. He also considers men who behave badly, mistreat their wives and children, or resort to crime and violence. All of these men face similar challenges as they navigate the complex geometry of m
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Flip the Script European Hip Hop and the
Book SynopsisHip hop has long been a vehicle for protest in the United States, used by its primarily African American creators to address issues of prejudice, repression, and exclusion. But the music is now a worldwide phenomenon, and outside the United States it has been taken up by those facing similar struggles. Flip the Script offers a close look at the role of hip hop in Europe, where it has become a politically powerful and commercially successful form of expression for the children and grandchildren of immigrants from former colonies. Through analysis of recorded music and other media, as well as interviews and fieldwork with hip hop communities, J. Griffith Rollefson shows how this music created by black Americans is deployed by Senegalese Parisians, Turkish Berliners, and South Asian Londoners to both differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to the dominant culture. By listening closely to the ways these postcolonial citizens in Europe express their solidarity with African Ameri
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Flip the Script European Hip Hop and the
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£26.00
The University of Chicago Press The Madness of the Saints Ecstatic Religion in
Book SynopsisAs conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, this work suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life. It calls for a fresh point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions.Trade Review"Stephen C. Lubkemann makes a compelling case for a new kind of anthropology of war. His book will be widely read, cited, and debated not only by regional scholars, but also among academics and policymakers - in Africa and beyond - seeking to better understand the complexities of war and human displacement." - Harry G. West, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London"
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press The Politics of Custom Chiefship Capital and the
Book SynopsisHow are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the postCold War erachanges in which they are themselves deeply implicated. This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guisesfrom university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmersbut, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that traditional authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa's history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making proc
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Hawking Incorporated
Book SynopsisThese days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of science fiction and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another, constantly connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through technology. The author focuses on a man who is permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices, and collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.Trade Review"First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet's book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways... Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet's study uses a thick description of Hawking's 'extended body' to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say 'he thinks'? What's the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is 'original' and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet's work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with." (Carla Nappi New Books in Science, Technology, and Society) "For Helene Mialet, what we know is not Hawking but a construct she calls 'HAWKING,' which is sustained by an extended network of nurses, postgraduate assistants, students and other ancillaries, further institutional support, plus indispensable media assistance. In this rather thorough exploration, she gives us a thick description of how this all works, interwoven with much discussion of distributed identities and personhood in performance." (Jon Turney Times Higher Education Supplement) "Hawking Incorporated will draw readers because of the extraordinary fame of its subject. However, it is most valuable because its case study identifies exaggerated but important features of ordinary science in practice." (Jon Agar Science) "He is a household name, and not just in scientific circles. As the world's most famous living scientist, Stephen Hawking needs no introduction - whether appearing on late night chat shows or an episode of The Simpsons. But why? In Hawking Incorporated, historian and philosopher of science Helene Mialet sets out to answer this question, and in the process comes to some interesting conclusions about the way we perceive science and scientists." (New Scientist) "Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject by Helene Mialet is a book that deserves a spot on every Transhumanist's virtual bookshelf... [A] must read." (Peter Rothman h+) "This fascinating book takes a fresh approach to Stephen Hawking... Highly recommended." (V. V. Raman, Rochester Institute of Technology Choice) "From a disability studies perspective, Hawking Incorporated serves as a superb case study for examining the ordinary practices that maintain disability as an undertheorized phenomenon. Disability, depicted by Mialet as a forceful provocation, puts the reader on the path to witness how various competencies are enabled by an able-ist network of power and knowledge. Moreover, this book is an excellent addition to science and technology studies; anthropology of the knowing subject; sociology of work; and, of course, a must-read for those interested in thinking critically about Stephen Hawking." (Tanya Titchkosky, University of Toronto Disability & Society) "Hawking Incorporated, while very much a work of anthropology based in the present, sits at the intersection of some of the most pressing questions for historians of science. To pose just a few: what is the relationship between individual and collective scientific activity? How do materials and machines matter in theoretical sciences? How is a subject constituted in an archive? How do private and public images of science shape scientific knowledge and practice and vice versa? Each question turns on Mialet's presiding interest in just who and what make up the knowing subject, a figure she unpacks in ways that can challenge and enrich many historians' work." (Michael J. Barany, Princeton University British Journal for the History of Science) "The book is written engagingly and may perhaps attract readers to the remarkable literature on the social and cultural workings of science that anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers have produced over the past four decades or so." (American Ethnologist) "A unique story." (Ian Hacking Common Knowledge) "Hawking Incorporated offers a new analysis of the ways in which the scientist Stephen Hawking's persona is produced and used in an astonishingly wide range of spheres. Using materials from interviews, film and audio records, correspondence and informal documents, Helene Mialet offers nothing less than a new anthropology of the contemporary scientist. This is a story with a fascinating cast: assistants, students, secretaries, archivists, physicians, engineers, journalists, and filmmakers all figure as key participants in the enormous work of sustaining and distributing Hawking's projects. Mialet's tactful and astute inquiry addresses the intimate details of the modern scientific world: its artful use of ingenious software, computational diagrams, and calculating aids; its ceremonial system of lectures and conferences; its career structure of disciplinary training and public mastery. The book will be of inestimable value both as a highly original biography of a fascinating intellectual presence and a broad study of one of the most important themes in the culture of modern sciences." (Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge) "Helene Mialet has offered a brilliant and provocative book, taking the example of Stephen Hawking to probe the contemporary articulation of 'man.' What we discover is the anthropos radically rethought as an assemblage of body, machine, media event and image, object, and industrial effect. Indeed, the human body turns out to be a series of interrelated connections, and this book persuades us to rethink our most basic ideas of human form and the tasks of science itself." (Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley) "On a terribly risky topic, Helene Mialet manages with a delicate and caring touch to approach one of the most vexing questions of science studies: how to give a concrete description of the material network able to generate abstraction? By connecting disability studies, distributed cognition, and the ethnography of formalism, she also manages to write a moving portrait of an embodied mind at work." (Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris) "Hawking Incorporated provides a social anatomy of how Stephen Hawking - as a physicist, person, and cyborgian collective - lives and breathes in human space-time, even as his theories reach toward a cosmic elsewhere. Helene Mialet takes the reader on an anthropological odyssey through the worlds of those assistants, machines, students, and TV documentary teams that have helped to conjure Hawking as the singular figure he has become. When Mialet finally meets Hawking in person, the results are riveting and revelatory." (Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Mialet doesn't ask what the famous scientist has taught us about cosmology. She asks what his life and career can teach us about scientific thinking in general - and about ordinary thinking too, for that matter. There is no doubt that Hawking is doubly exceptional, both in his mind and his body. The brilliant gambit of Mialet's book is to explore this exceptionalism in order to reveal how scientific knowledge is made under far more ordinary circumstances." (Ken Alder LA Review of Books)
£90.00
The University of Chicago Press Song Walking Women Music and Environmental
Book Synopsis
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Irrevocable
Book SynopsisIn his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, warand disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis's investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Irrevocable A Philosophy of Mortality
Book Synopsis
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Living in the Stone Age Reflections on the
Book SynopsisIn 1961, John F. Kennedy referred to the Papuans as living, as it were, in the Stone Age. For the most part, politicians and scholars have since learned not to call people primitive, but when it comes to the Papuans, the Stone-Age stain persists and for decades has been used to justify denying their basic rights. Why has this fantasy held such a tight grip on the imagination of journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large? Living in the Stone Age answers this question by following the adventures of officials sent to the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s to establish a foothold for Dutch colonialism. These officials became deeply dependent on the good graces of their would-be Papuan subjects, who were their hosts, guides, and, in some cases, friends. Danilyn Rutherford shows how, to preserve their sense of racial superiority, these officials imagined that they were traveling in the Stone Agea parallel reality where their own impotence was a reasonable response to otherworldly conditions rather than a sign of ignorance or weakness. Thus, Rutherford shows, was born a colonialist ideology. Living in the Stone Age is a call to write the history of colonialism differently, as a tale of weakness not strength. It will change the way readers think about cultural contact, colonial fantasies of domination, and the role of anthropology in the postcolonial world.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Savages Romans and Despots
Book SynopsisFrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europeans struggled to understand their identity in the same way we do as individuals: by comparing themselves to others. In Savages, Romans, and Despots, Robert Launay takes us on a fascinating tour of early modern and modern history in an attempt to untangle how various depictions of foreign cultures and civilizations saturated debates about religion, morality, politics, and art. Beginning with Mandeville and Montaigne, and working through Montesquieu, Diderot, Gibbon, Herder, and others, Launay traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds. Some of these writers drew caricatures of savages, Oriental despots, and ancient Greeks and Romans. Others earnestly attempted to understand them. But, throughout this history, comparative thinking opened a space for critical reflection. At its worst, such space could give rise to a sense of E
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Confident Pluralism Surviving and Thriving
Book SynopsisInazu mounts a rousing case for the importance of pluralism as a cornerstone value of American (and international) society, arguing that we really can live peaceably together despite our differences and that we can and should reorient our legal and political system to acknowledge difference while still valuing social cohesion.
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press The Browning of the New South
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This provocative book upends the conventional wisdom about relationships between Latinos and African-Americans. Jones shows in vivid detail how shared experiences of hostility from the white majority generate new forms of solidarity and organization. The Browning of the New South has important implications for the future of American politics and scholarly understandings of cross-ethnic coalitions."--David FitzGerald "co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas " "Jones offers a dynamic, complex, compellingly argued account of the remarkably understudied black-Latinx alliances, an account that will surely resonate far beyond Winston-Salem. At this political moment, she shines a bright light on the possibilities for powerful minority coalitions, which can be key for necessary social change. The Browning of the New South is insightful, timely, and inspiring. I cannot recommend it highly enough."--Cecilia Menj var, University of California, Los Angeles
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Someone The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities
Book SynopsisImagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these misfit sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities--whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms. As a portrait of fragile sexuaTrade Review"Michael Lucey is far and away the best critic of modern French literature writing today. Someone is a riveting analysis, through Bourdieu, of the relation between sexuality, writing, and the social world. In attentive, rigorously contextualized, and casually assured readings, Lucey invites us to return to Colette, Genet, and Simone de Beauvoir, to Duras, Leduc, and Guibert, and to know them again, as if for the first time."--Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge "Simply spectacular. Lucey proposes a whole new way of problematizing sexual identity and upends in the process many conceptual frameworks that hold sway over contemporary scholarship. His constant, generous attention to the peculiar, the odd, the idiosyncratic that goes hand in hand with the realities of sexual desire makes his work uniquely humane, ethical even. Someone is an outstanding accomplishment."--David Caron, author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Someone The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities from
Book SynopsisImagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these misfit sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities--whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms. As a portrait of fragile sexuaTrade Review"Michael Lucey is far and away the best critic of modern French literature writing today. Someone is a riveting analysis, through Bourdieu, of the relation between sexuality, writing, and the social world. In attentive, rigorously contextualized, and casually assured readings, Lucey invites us to return to Colette, Genet, and Simone de Beauvoir, to Duras, Leduc, and Guibert, and to know them again, as if for the first time."--Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge "Simply spectacular. Lucey proposes a whole new way of problematizing sexual identity and upends in the process many conceptual frameworks that hold sway over contemporary scholarship. His constant, generous attention to the peculiar, the odd, the idiosyncratic that goes hand in hand with the realities of sexual desire makes his work uniquely humane, ethical even. Someone is an outstanding accomplishment."--David Caron, author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV
£26.00
