Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisThe international legal framework of human rights presents itself as universal. But rights do not exist as a mere framework; they are enacted, practiced, and debated in local contexts. Rights After Wrongs ethnographically explores the chasm between the ideals and the practice of human rights. Specifically, it shows where the sweeping colonial logics of Western law meets the lived experiences, accumulated histories, and humanitarian debts present in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Through a comprehensive survey of human rights scholarship, Shannon Morreira explores the ways in which the global framework of human rights is locally interpreted, constituted, and contested in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Musina and Cape Town, South Africa. Presenting the stories of those who lived through the violent struggles of the past decades, Morreira shows how supposedly universal ideals become localized in the context of post-colonial Southern Africa. Rights After Wrongs uncovers the disconnTrade Review"Rights After Wrongs explores how human rights discourses and the practices they enjoin travel—or fail to—as migrants move between sovereign states. Exploring disjunctures between ideals and practices, Morreira shows migrants' strategic use of discourses of rights and ubuntu. Unbound by national borders, this book is exceptional in its range and reach—a critical resource for scholars of rights and justice."—Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town"The global movement of refugees and migrants is the human rights issue of the twenty-first century. Shannon Morreira elegantly documents the struggles of Zimbabwean refugees and exiles in South Africa, drawing out the wider implications for concepts of personhood, rights, and migration. Challenging the conventional distinction between economic migrants and political refugees, Morreira's analysis of the contradictions in the law has a direct bearing on policy discussions of immigration and asylum in South Africa and beyond."—Richard A. Wilson, University of Connecticut"Shannon Morreira's Rights After Wrongs: Local Knowledge and Human Rights in Zimbabwe is a lucid examination of how urban Zimbabweans have strategically engaged with human rights under the regime of Robert Mugabe, widely recognized as one of Africa's longest-standing dictators.Ultimately, this book is a valuable reminder that as people around the world face political repression and authoritarianism, violence, economic inequality, and refugee precariousness, "human rights" are unlikely to provide a panacea."—Kristin C. Doughty, American AnthropologistTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Rise of Rights Talk in Zimbabwe 1. 'Panel-Beating the Law': Constitution Making in Zimbabwe 2. Justice in a Time of Impunity: Remaking Social Worlds after Political Violence 3. Producing Knowledge about Human Rights in Harare 4. Personhood and Rights among Zimbabwean Migrants in South Africa Conclusion: The Situationality of Human Rights

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Book SynopsisBodies of Truth offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence, focusing on the intertwined themes of embodiment, injury, victimhood, and memory. In 2002, victims of apartheid-era violence filed suit against multinational corporations, accusing them of aiding and abetting the security forces of the apartheid regime. While the litigation made its way through the U.S. courts, thousands of victims of gross human rights violations have had to cope with painful memories of violence. They have also confronted an official discourse claiming that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s sufficiently addressed past injuries. This book shows victims'' attempts to emancipate from their experiences by participating in legal actions, but also by creating new forms of sociality among themselves and in relation to broader South African society.Rita Kesselring''s ethnography draws on long-term research with members of the viTrade Review"Bodies of Truth is essential reading for all those interested in the twenty-year aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kesselring's innovative ethnography with victims seeking redress in the South African and U.S. Courts examines the limits of law and also makes a powerful case for the transformative potential of new forms of shared sociality. The imaginative combination of the anthropology of law and the body to understand the after-effects of violence in people's lives makes this a ground-breaking work." -- Richard Ashby Wilson * author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa *"Deeply serious and imaginative, Bodies of Truth connects anthropology of law and anthropology of the body. Rita Kesselring reveals that even when much is achieved legally in the struggle for transitional justice, bodily experiences of victimhood continue to haunt the victims, and endemic, systematic violence continues to shape the political sphere long after it has ended. Kesselring presents readers with ways in which liberation from habitual victimhood might be achieved." -- Paul Connerton * University of Cambridge *"In capturing the difficulty of understanding pain, Kesselring's subtle, challenging ethnography will make essential reading for any scholar trying to understand the challenges of coming to terms with victimhood and its aftermath and will be particularly important reading for scholars of apartheid and its wake." -- Nicholas Rush Smith * Anthropological Quarterly *"Bodies of Truth is essential reading for anyone interested in victims' quests for financial reparations since the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission finalized its work in 1998. Grounded in extensive transnational ethnography with a national victims' group that participated in class action lawsuits in the South African and US courts, Rita Kesselring's inventive monograph identifies the limits of law in recognizing and ameliorating harms committed by official agents of the avowedly racist apartheid government....Crucially, because Bodies of Truth integrates recent developments in the anthropology of the body with long-standing concerns about vernacular understandings of the law, this imaginative combination makes it a ground-breaking work." -- Richard Ashby Wilson * American Ethnologist *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction provides an overview of how the political and social environment has changed for apartheid-era victims in South Africa since apartheid rule formally ended. Although the question of apartheid victimhood was prominent in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, since then, victims have experienced a stark decline in attention and support. Yet for most victims, the past lingers on in their lives and in their bodies. The chapter provides an overview of the two strands of analysis—the law and the body—through which the book examines the legacy of apartheid and the impact of the TRC on victims' social standing today. It presents the main theme of the book: how legal avenues and embodied memories of violence shape the possibility for new forms of sociality in a postconflict society. 1Apartheid Victimhood before the Courts chapter abstractThis chapter documents the emergence of a victims' subject position during the TRC hearings, in post-TRC politics, and in the legal cases filed in South African and US courts. It outlines the gradual formation of a victims' consciousness around the Khulumani Support Group, a victims' advocacy group established in the early 1990s. In contrast to the reconciliatory approach of the TRC, there has been a juridification of the issue of apartheid victimhood. In reaction to the Mbeki administration's lack of interest in matters of victimhood and its preoccupation with pardoning the perpetrators, civil society has brought victimhood back to the attention of the state and the broader society through prominent civil lawsuits. Focusing on national and international politics, the chapter details how the apartheid litigations, which allege that multinational companies aided and abetted the apartheid regime, came to be filed under the Alien Tort Statute, and evaluates their significance. 2Reparation, Representation, and Class Actions chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the actual workings of both South African and US courts hearing class actions. For plaintiffs, class actions offer the opportunity to make their claims heard as a collective. The law, however, needs to personalize an act of injury in order to adjudicate it. In South Africa, class actions are an emerging legal means. The chapter shows that both the judges and the victims who submit their shared social concerns to the courts must grapple with the tension between structural injury and individual injury. Although the law provides a discourse for articulating experiences vis-à-vis a public, drawing on the logic of the law may also break up a social collective. This force the law derives from a societal postconflict situation in which being different potentially makes one suspect and a target for accusations of witchcraft. 3Embodied Memory and the Social chapter abstractThe chapter explores the different ways in which apartheid victims seek to make their victimhood social by communicating it to others. Many victims suffer from chronic pain or injuries. Chronic pain is particular, because it becomes part of a person's habituated being. It is unpredictable, because it is a restless habit that constantly threatens to disrupt one's life. The ethnographic data suggest that there is a real risk in speaking publicly about one's experiences. Society offers victims a limited number of social roles to occupy and to claim. However, victims' experiences of pain are not always malleable enough to adapt to these roles. As a result, victims' injured personhood often turns them into suspicious subjects in the eyes of the society. Silence is thus a solution for many victims to protect their painful memories. 4The Formation of the Political chapter abstractThe TRC was a governing institution that has had lasting effects for victims and their standing in society. Ever since it completed its work victims have to relate their personhood to the strong discourses shaped by the TRC. This chapter looks at how a new discourse can emerge in a hardened political and legalized environment. Employing several ethnographic vignettes, it shows that victims have to emancipate themselves from the bodily dimension of their victimhood to some degree in order to be politically effective. When people with similar experiences recognize one another in their subjectivities, collective political action may come about. Lawyers, precisely because their professional mandate is limited, play a key role in the emergence of a critical political mass. 5Emancipation from Victimhood chapter abstractThe chapter addresses the question of how social change can happen if experiences of structural and socioeconomic violations of human rights are embodied. What kind of responses do people develop to routinized forms of suffering? It presents ethnographic data on the reconcilability of the body and outlines the social conditions that make it possible to change an injured personhood. Through new social and sensory experiences, people try to add new layers of habit memories to their subjective and social being. The tentative forms of sociality that emerge may help them to assume a new social position. Broader society needs to be receptive to these practices for them to be successful, though. 6Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological Knowledge chapter abstractThis chapter is a methodological postscript to the book. Ethnographies originate in everyday interactions with others, but anthropologists' analysis and interpretation of people's social world is often restricted to their words and identifiable actions. As is the case in every social setting, much of the knowledge we acquire during fieldwork remains unarticulated and habitual. We often lack the tools to even become aware of it, let alone to bring it into the predicated realm. Still, its existence is the only basis we have for recognizing unarticulated experiences of others. Anthropologists have become very interested in bodily experiences but have tended either to cognitively interpret the experience of others or to privilege their own experiences as a basis for ethnography. The chapter argues that we should instead use our own bodily experiences to intersubjectively recognize those of others, and proposes avenues for doing so. Conclusion: The Embodiment of Experiences of Violence as Seeds of New Forms of Sociality chapter abstractThe conclusion revises the anthropology of the law and suggests new avenues for the study of the body. In post-apartheid South Africa, ordinary victims do not have sufficiently differentiated public acknowledgment that will allow them to claim their victimhood in a positive way. As a result, there is a schism between persons who struggle to overcome their victimhood and those who have managed to reap the harvest of the "new South Africa." Legal developments in post-apartheid South Africa are manifestations of this tension. The chapter evaluates transitional justice mechanisms, which often work by proxy but fail to address lived experience. In contrast, the mundane and unspectacular practices of victims are emancipatory in the sense that they explore new forms of sociality based on lived experiences not directly related to dominant discourses.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Strange Child offers a lucid and compassionate analysis of the increasingly uncertain lives of children and young adults in post-bubble Japan. With extreme rigor and effortless grace, Arai shows us how the institutions of the state, family, school, law enforcement, and psychology encroach into the lives of youth. The Strange Child is a must read for scholars of Japan studies and anyone interested in process of subject-formation deployed on children and young adults in the contemporary global political-economy of uncertainty."—Miyako Inoue, Stanford University"The Strange Child is a stunning interpretative articulation between historical analysis and detailed ethnographic reporting on an everydayness that brackets its history. In Arai's reckoning, Japan's late 20th century economic recession produced symptoms of unease that were unburdened on the figure of the child, undermining a postwar representation of a managed national identity promoting dependence. She has both constructed a brilliant accounting of how the child was constituted as a problem for restructuring a new collective identity and defined the role played by psychology and education in formulating a remedial ideology recommending greater independence to meet the demands of neoliberal capitalism."—Harry Harootunian, Columbia University"Andrea Arai's highly anticipated book how the Japanese state and a range of diverse institutions imbushowsed the figure of the 'child' with the myriad anxieties of economic recession, beginning in the 1990s. The Strange Child powerfully critiques the deleterious effects of neoliberal reforms on Japanese society, particularly children and youth, yet also reveals unexpected possibilities for creativity and community among the 'strange children' now transforming Japan in the aftermath of ongoing financial uncertainty, political restriction, and nuclear disaster."—Marilyn Ivy, Columbia University"Based upon initial fieldwork from 1999 through 2001, and extended with return visits to Tokyo, Kobe, and Kochi through 2014, this book has benefitted greatly from the processes of long-term research resulting in a complexly woven engagement with Japan as it scrambles to make sense of its own dislocation.The best monographs are those that generate questions because they draw us in and make us think. Indeed, The Strange Child does this."—Christine R. Yano, Journal of Japanese Studies"Arai's analysis is highly persuasive, weaving together her wealth of ethnographic data with insights drawn from her extensive reading of the educational, sociological, and cultural studies literature....Arai's contribution is to show how psychological pseudoscience and moralistic grandstanding have been used to frame mainstream understandings of the national predicament. She argues convincingly that these discourses have helped legitimize a radically regressive redistribution of wealth and opportunity and have engendered a disturbing tilt toward nationalism. Ind doing so, she brings considerable sophistication and depth to debate over education."—Edward Vickers, Monumenta Nipponica"The book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debates within Japan and scholars of Japan regarding the role of public policy and corporate strategies in overcoming the apparent weaknesses in Japanese governance and schooling."––June A. Gordon, Pacific Affairs

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

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Book SynopsisOffers a celebration of Arapaho oral narrative traditions in all the richness of their original language. Working with Alonzo Moss, Sr., and William J. C'Hair, Andrew Cowell retranscribes Arapaho texts into modern Arapaho orthography, and retranslates and annotates them in English.

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Book SynopsisFor more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. The images they depict enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. This book is the first delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments.Trade ReviewTouching on themes ranging from settler colonialism to heritage tourism, Cynthia Culver Prescott's engaging study relates these monuments to the core beliefs they embodied, such as manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, and explains how gendered narratives of white motherhood helped build and reproduce modern American views of the ideal family."" - Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America|""In Pioneer Mother Monuments, Cynthia Culver Prescott uncovers a long history of debates, silences, and responses to pioneer commemoration, reflecting shifting desires and anxieties prevalent in American culture and mirroring broader historical and art historical trends."" - Alison Fields, author of Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma""An innovative and groundbreaking study, Pioneer Mother Monuments weaves race, gender, and public memory together and challenges readers to rethink the place of pioneer monuments in our communal landscape. Prescott makes a compelling case for understanding these monuments as visible elements of the nation's settler colonial history."" - Abigail Markwyn, author of Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

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Book SynopsisProvides an emotionally evocative, story-rich analysis of family caregiving for Oaxacan elders living with dementia. Based on his extensive research in a Zapotec community, Jonathan Yahalom presents the conflicted experience of providing care in a setting where illness is steeped in stigma and locals are concerned about social cohesion.Trade ReviewCaring for the People of the Clouds is a serious and significant contribution to the ethnography of care. Important, original, and relevant to the global study of aging and dementia, this sensitive ethnography illumines a people, a time, and a disorder and its fate. A fine blend of scholarship and clinical sensibility "" - Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University, author of The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition""Caring for the People of the Clouds offers an intimate look at how Zapotec families cope with 'forgetful elders.' Honoring local epistemologies of health, caring, death, and coping, Yahalom offers a new window on cross-cultural models of caregiving useful for a broad range of social, psychological, and medical sciences."" - Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon, author of We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements""With the aim of restoring a ""sensibility of care"" to his own profession of clinical psychology, Yahalom deftly uses the tools of anthropology to craft moving stories of how caregiving for elders with dementia is manifest in the intimate details of everyday life in Oaxaca. What results is a compelling argument about the need for a restoration of human dignity on both personal and societal levels, as well as in clinical practice."" - Larry Davidson, Yale University, author of Living Outside Mental Illness: Qualitative Studies of Recovery in Schizophrenia""Person- and relationship-centered care are vital but can be achieved only with an understanding of and sensitivity to the unique cultural heritage of those in need of care. Yahalom speaks admirably and compellingly to this all-too-often sadly neglected aspect of providing care."" - Steven R. Sabat, Georgetown University, associate editor of Dementia: The International Journal of Social Research and Practice""Caring for People of the Clouds makes important contributions to studies of Alzheimer's disease across cultures and to studies of caregiving. Yahalom challenges clinical assumptions about responses to Alzheimer's by taking readers to a cultural and social context where Alzheimer's is understood and responded to differently than in the United States."" - Peter J. Guarnaccia, Rutgers University, editor of A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship

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Book SynopsisThis pioneering work brings the pre-Columbian and colonial history of Latin America home: rather than starting out in Spain and and the ‘discovery’ of New World peoples, this volume begins with the Mesoamerican and South American nations as they were before European colonialism - and only then moves on to the Spanish arrival and its impact.

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Book SynopsisDeftly interweaves a mass of archaeological, anthropological, and archival source material to resurrect the lost history of a forgotten people, from their earliest contacts with Europeans to their final expulsion just before the American Revolution.

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Book SynopsisThe Lakhota are among the best-known Native American peoples. In popular culture and even many scholarly works, they were once lumped together with others and called the Sioux. This book tells the full story of Lakhota culture and society, from their origins to the twenty-first century, drawing on Lakhota voices and perspectives.Trade Review“In this rangy, ambitious work, Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus center LakȟÓta voices, language, and conceptual worlds to craft a stunning narrative that takes readers on a journey far removed from old familiar histories. LakȟÓta: An Indigenous History is a remarkable and important contribution, one not to be missed.”—Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract“This book surpasses earlier histories of the Lakȟóta. With its meticulous attention to the distinctive cultural and complex political foundations of the Lakȟóta, it sets a new standard in Plains Indian scholarship.”—Mark van de Logt, author of War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army“Lakȟóta: An Indigenous History brilliantly contextualizes winter counts and other Lakȟóta sources to reveal a Native point of view on events commonly interpreted through a Western lens.”—Candace S. Greene, coeditor of The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian"In revealing how Lakhota traditions illuminate this people's perspectives on their own past, Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus have rendered a clear, comprehensive exploration of Lakhota experience, initiative, and endurance. Lakhota: An Indigenous History is a rare achievement."—Louis S. Warren, author of God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

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Book SynopsisBrings together lesser-known historical accounts of the Wendats from their mid-seventeenth-century dispersal through their establishment of new homelands, called Wendakes, in Quebec, Michigan, Ontario, Kansas, and Oklahoma. What emerges is a complex picture that encapsulates both the cultural resilience and the diversity of these peoples.

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Book SynopsisOffers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection's long sequence, “A Field Guide to People”, is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct.

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Book SynopsisThe half century of European activity in the Caribbean that followed Columbus's first voyages brought enormous demographic, economic, and social change to the region. Ida Altman examines the interactions of diverse groups and individuals and the transformation of the islands of the Greater Antilles.

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Book SynopsisHilbert demonstrates the historical connection between the nineteenth-century theory of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, in which sociology had its origins, and the ethnomethodological approach articulated in the 1960s by Harold Garfinkel. The author rejects the conventional view that draws radical distinctions between the two systems and provides an intellectual genealogy of ethnomethodology.

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Book SynopsisTropicalia was a watershed cultural movement in Brazil. This title shows how the tropicalists appropriated and parodied cultural practices in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a tropical ""garden"" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

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Book SynopsisAn illustrated book which offers a glimpse into the lives and creativity of African-American quilters during the era of slavery. It examines the history of quilting in the enslaved community and places the quilts into a historical and cultural context.

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Book SynopsisHere, Blevins sketches a portrait of a place far more nuanced than the backward and deliberately unprogressive region depicted in stereotype. He covers a wide range of Ozark social life, including the development of agriculture and the rise and fall of extractive industries.Trade Review"Easily the best comprehensive history of the Ozarks yet accomplished. It will be a benchmark in the field." - Robert Cochran, University of Arkansas

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Book SynopsisHow do we define 'religion'? For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. This book shows that cultural notions about what constitutes 'religion' are crucial to public debates over religious freedom.

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Book SynopsisAs an introduction to how the history of an African society can be reconstructed from largely nonliterate sources, and to the Swahili in particular, . . . a model work.International Journal of African Historical StudiesTrade Review"The authors, respectively a linguist specializing in Swahili and related Bantu languages and a historian specializing in the history of East Africa, have assembled an impressive array of evidence-linguistic, archaeological, documentary, and oral-traditional-in support of the argument that Swahili culture, often regarded as an Arabian transplant on the East African coast, is actually 'a dynamic synthesis of African and Arabian ideas within an African historical and cultural context.'" * American Anthropologist *"A fine achievement, mixing original material, fresh insights, generally excellent use of sources, conciseness, and a highly readable style. As an introduction to how the history of an African society can be reconstructed from largely nonliterate sources, and to the Swahili in particular, it is almost a model work." * International Journal of African Historical Studies *Table of ContentsMaps Figures Preface Acknowledgments 1 Swahili and Their History 2 The African Background of Swahili 3 The Emergence of the Swahili-Speaking Peoples 4 Early Swahili Society, 800-1100 5 Rise of the Swahili Town-States, 1100-1500 Appendices Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe essays in Coming Home? examine the unique return migration experiences of refugees, migrants, and various others as they confront social pressures and sense of displacement.Trade Review"Coming Home? offers ethnographically rich portrayals of the way the imaginings and realities of 'home' affect refugee experiences and subjectivities. . . . The volume is an important contribution to migration scholarship and an especially welcome examination of the overlooked and understudied phenomenon of return migration." * Journal of Anthropological Research *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Toward an Ethnography of Return —Ellen Oxfeld and Lynellyn Long PART I: IMAGINED RETURN Chapter 1: Illusions of Home in the Story of a Rwandan Refugee's Return —John Janzen Chapter 2: Contemplating Repatriation to Eritrea —Lucia Ann McSpadden Chapter 3: Filipina Depictions of Migrant Life for Those at Home —Jane Margold PART II: PROVISIONAL RETURN Chapter 4: Viet Khieu on a Fast Track Back? —Lynellyn Long Chapter 5: Chinese Villagers and the Moral Dilemmas of Return Visits —Ellen Oxfeld Chapter 6: Changing Filipina Identities and Ambivalent Returns —Nicole Constable PART III: REPATRIATED RETURN Chapter 7: Returning German Jews and Questions of Identity —John Borneman Chapter 8: Repatriation and Social Class in Nicaragua —James Phillips Chapter 9: Refugee Returns to Sarajevo and Their Challenge to Contemporary Narratives of Mobility —Anders H. Stefansson Chapter 10: The Making of a Good Citizen in an Ethiopian Returnee Settlement —Laura Hammond Chapter 11West Indian Migrants and their Rediscovery of Barbados —George Gmelch Chapter 12: An Historical Exploration of "Coming Home" from Central Africa —David Newbury Index List of Contributors Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisCrossovers brings together four decades of popular and academic writings by folklorist, anthropologist, and jazz scholar John Szwed.Trade Review"In this collection of thirty-one short articles, essays, and reviews written over a thirty-six-year period, John Szwed consistently displays the extraordinary imagination and ingenuity that have made him one of the most respected scholars in African-American and Afro-diasporic Studies. Crossovers is both a revealing intellectual history of Szwed's development as a scholar and critic, and a unified and integrated argument on behalf of the aesthetic, moral, and political genius of the African diaspora." * George Lipsitz, H-Urban *Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. Musical style and racial conflict 3. Musical adaptation among Afro-Americans 4. An American anthropological dilemma: the politics of Afro-American culture 5. Reconsideration: the myth of the Negro past 6. Reconsideration: Lafcadio Hearn in Cincinnati 7. The forest as moral document: the achievement of Lydia Cabrera 8. Race and the embodiment of culture 9. After the myth: studying Afro-American cultural patterns in the plantation literature 10. Speaking people, in their own terms 11. The lizards fake the fake 12. As it is prophesied, so it used to be 13. Greenwich's good gnosis 14. Free samples: Roy Nathanson and Anthony Coleman 15. Milling at the mall 16. Childhood's ends 17. Sweet feet 18. From "Messin' around" to "Funky western civilization": the rise and fall of dance instruction songs 19. The Afro-American transformation of European set dances and dance suites 20. All that beef, and symbolic action, too! : notes on the occasion of the banning of 2 Live Crew's As nasty as they wanna be 21. The real old school 22. Josef Skvorecky and the tradition of jazz literature 23. World views collide: the history of jazz and hot dance 24. Way down yonder in Buenos Aires 25. Improvising under apartheid: Afro blue 26. Sonny Rollins in the age of mechanical reproduction 27. Sun Ra, 1914-1993 28. Ornette Coleman: ?civilization 29. The local and the express: Anthony Braxton's title-drawings 30. Magnificent declension: Solibo magnificent 31. Metaphors of incommensurability

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, Peter Mancall offers a brief, elegant account of the environmental understandings of both the Europeans who came to settle and exploit the resources of North America and the Caribbean, and the native groups who were already doing those things. . . . The book features illustrations large enough to reward examination, underlining their role as integral components of the argument." * Times Literary Supplement *"How to research indigenous culture in pre-modern America is a perennial challenge, given the nature of that society and the records that historians conventionally use. Mancall makes the case for visual material, oral history and legend as recorded in antiquarian sources in order to break the hold of the Western historical tradition. . . . Like some of the maps that it studies, Mancall's book charts the possibilities of what those new encounters with Atlantic history might be." * English Historical Review *"Mancall draws mainly from the Anglophone scientific tradition, in which knowledge about Spanish and Portuguese documents of the sixteenth century is still quite exceptional. His book reads like a companion, accessible to an audience beyond specialized scholars . . . Mancall suggests with this well-documented and wonderfully illustrated study that Europeans and indigenous Americans started from similar points of view in the past-which implies that, from a global perspective, the culture of the Enlightenment did more to broaden the distance than to advocate for a better understanding of their mutual specifics." * Isis *"In recent years an active research topic on the early modern era has been the intersection of human beings and the natural world. From all sides have come significant works investigating the science of describing natural history and the invention of exoticism and the endemic or the indigenous. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic explores the natural world as conceived in the sixteenth-century Atlantic basin. With footings in both history and anthropology, Peter C. Mancall is well positioned to plumb the topic . . . [and the book] delights as it enlightens at every turn." * Journal of Southern History *"[A] graceful and sumptuously illustrated collection of essays exploring the cultural impact of encounters with American habitats and inhabitants on early modern European ideas about nature . . . [T]he book draws on a rich corpus of images and the author's deep familiarity with European visual culture to consider how the nature of the New World sometimes echoed and sometimes challenged European knowledge about the environment and even the nature of that knowledge itself." * Envorinmental History *"Through a wide-ranging series of case studies, this book weaves a compelling narrative of visual, cultural, and ecological exchange in the early modern Atlantic world . . . The use of oral history and folklore helps to develop a broad perspective on early encounters in the Atlantic basin, expanding upon previous scholarly explorations of the subject that do not always pay such close attention to these types of sources." * Winterthur Portfolio *"Brilliantly illustrated and written with flashes of wit and humor, Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic traces the shift in people's thinking about nature from the medieval to the modern period. Peter C. Mancall brings his encyclopedic knowledge of the primary and secondary sources to bear on monsters, insects, tropical forests, and indigenous peoples and shows that a new fascination with the material spectacle of the New World contributed to secular explanations of natural phenomena." * Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance *"Peter C. Mancall's Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic introduces the reader to a wondrous variety of ways that individuals, both individually and collectively, attempted to view and conceptualize the early modern Atlantic ecological world, from insects to maps and from imagined monsters to actual peoples. Abundantly illustrated, it is a tour de force of creative synthesis, engagingly drawing us into an era marked by a complex meeting of beliefs and ideas, and setting the stage for the intellectual traditions that would follow in its wake." * Joanne Pillsbury, The Metropolitan Museum of Art *"In this compact, learned, and beautifully illustrated book, Mancall probes a wide array of written, oral and art historical sources on the real and imagined flora and fauna of the Americas in the sixteenth century, examining everything from monsters to mosquitoes. He shows in exquisite detail how the integration of the Atlantic world unsettled sensibilities toward nature." * J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1640-1914 *Table of ContentsPreface Chapter 1. The Boundaries of Nature Chapter 2. A New Ecology Chapter 3. The Landscape of History Postscript. The Theater of Insects Note on Sources Notes Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Through his deft ethnography, Joshua Moses is able to show that 9/11, now fading into collective memory, crystallized something we are all still living with. We are haunted by the possibility that we will wake up to a once familiar landscape made suddenly strange—like a Manhattan suddenly without its Twin Towers. For Moses, this prefigures the changes we will all face with rising sea levels, balmy winters, and the like. Anxious Experts is an ethnography of that anxiety, how it came to be, and how it continues to sit with us, as we face an uncertain future." * Eduardo Kohn, McGill University *

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Book SynopsisThis thoughtful study should interest anyone concerned with social and political life at the periphery of today's Russian Federation.-ChoiceTrade Review"This thoughtful study should interest anyone concerned with social and political life at the periphery of today's Russian Federation." * Choice *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Note on Transliteration and Translation Preface Introduction: Fieldwork, Socialism in Crisis, and Identities in the Making 1: Central Peripheries and Peripheral Centers: Evenki Crafting Identities over Time 2: A Siberian Town in the 1990s: Balancing Privatization and Collectivist Values 3: Red Ties and Residential School: Evenk Women's Narratives and Reconsidering Resistance 4: Young Women Between the Market and the Collective 5: Inside the Residential School: Cultural Revitalization and the Leninist Program 6: Taiga Kids, Incubator Kids, and Intellectuals 7: Representing Culture: Museums, Material Culture, and Doing the Lambada 8: Revitalizing the Collective in a Market Era Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisEthnography After Antiquity explores the modes and motivations of Byzantine ethnographic writing, shedding new light on how Byzantines distinguished themselves from foreign cultures.Trade Review"Kaldellis has written a considered, very readable book that is bound to stimulate intellectual debate." * Teresa Shawcross, English Historical Review *"It is a joy to read a book where the logic of the argument is so clear and so solidly based on the sources. Anthony Kaldellis argues for a new approach to Byzantine identity and self-definition, one that accepts Byzantines' own account of themselves as Romans surrounded by barbarians. The book is a must-read not only for Byzantinists but also for those involved in broader conversations about identity in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period." * Tia Kolbaba, Rutgers University *Table of ContentsPreface Chapter 1. Ethnography in Late Antique Historiography Chapter 2. Byzantine Information-Gathering Behind the Veil of Silence Chapter 3. Explaining the Relative Decline of Ethnography in the Middle Period Chapter 4. The Genres and Politics of Middle Byzantine Ethnography Chapter 5. Ethnography in Palaiologan Literature Epilogue: Looking to a New World List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisChallenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and 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.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 *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Conquest, Conversion, Crusade, Salvation: The Discourse of Anthropology and Its Uses in the Medieval Period 2. Subjective Beginnings: Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales 3. Writing Ethnography "In the Eyes of the Other": William of Rubruck's Mission to Mongolia 4. Casting a "Sideways Glance" at the Crusades: The Voice of the Other in Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis 5. Dis-Orienting the Self: The Uncanny Travels of John Mandeville Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisThrough a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation.Trade Review"No Place for Grief is simply breathtaking. This harrowing ethnography of lives barred from hope and yet seeking an ordinary existence in occupied Palestine is permeated by political urgency and a captivating poetic hesitancy. Lotte Buch Segal's intense listening and probing analysis brings these characters and their demolished households out of obscurity, letting them shatter and recast our understanding of political violence, chronic suffering, and human endurance in the twenty-first century." * João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment *"Imaginatively conceived and written with great compassion and grace, No Place for Grief makes a rich contribution to our understanding of social suffering and the folding of violence into everyday life." * Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University *"Lotte Buch Segal's No Place for Grief is not just another addition to stories of suffering and trauma among the Palestinians-rather, it shows how the relation between gender and violence is paramount to the way in which political violence might be understood in long, drawn-out conditions of war and occupation. As such, No Place for Grief is relevant not only to psychologists and anthropologists, but also to global and public health readers who seek to understand what life is like in a context of protracted and ongoing exposure to political violence." * Rita Giacaman, Birzeit University, Palestine *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Chapter 1. The Grammar of Suffering in Occupied Palestine Chapter 2. Domestic Uncanniness Chapter 3. Enduring Presents Chapter 4. On Hardship and Closeness Chapter 5. Solitude in Marriage Chapter 6. Enduring the Ordinary Conclusion Notes References Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisThe city of Hebron is important to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions as home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of three biblical couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Today, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the Israel-Palestine conflict, consisting of two unequal populations: a traditional Palestinian majority without citizenship, and a fundamentalist Jewish settler minority with full legal rights. Contemporary Jewish settler practices and sensibilities, legal gray zones, and ruling complicities have remade Hebron into a divided Palestinian city surrounded by a landscape of fragmented, militarized strongholds.In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman examines how religion functions as ideology in Hebron, with a focus on Jewish settler expansion and its close but ambivalent relationship to the Israeli state. Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish QTrade Review"Through extensive fieldwork, interviews with settlers, soldiers, Palestinian residents as well as archival research, Neuman provides a fascinating and often disturbing account of a tense, abnormal co-existence between Palestinians and Jews in an occupied territory populated mostly by Palestinians yet administered by Israeli soldiers . . . This book is a must read for those who wish to understand the motives that drive the Jewish settlement movement. Anthropologists of the West Bank and the settlements, as well as political anthropologists will find this book most illuminating." * Journal of Modern Jewish Studies *"Tamara Neuman's book is essential for understanding the conflict over the holy city of Hebron as well as the question of land, settlement, and ideology in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. It demonstrates the de facto Israeli control and the blurring of the Green Line between Israel proper and the West Bank." * Reading Religion *"A stunning ethnographic account of the dynamic and intricate-and often intimate-entanglements of militarism, nationalism, gender, and Jewish fundamentalism in the West Bank." * Carol J. Greenhouse, Princeton University *"Settling Hebron is an impressive piece of research that greatly adds to our understanding of the politics of Jewish settlement in the West Bank." * Lihi Ben Shitrit, University of Georgia *Table of ContentsNote on Transliteration, Translation, and Terms Introduction Chapter 1. Orientations Chapter 2. Between Legality and Illegality Chapter 3. Motherhood and Property Takeover Chapter 4. Spaces of the Everyday Chapter 5. Religious Violence Chapter 6. Lost Tribes and the Quest for Origins Conclusion: Unsettling Settlers Notes References Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisA sensitive ethnography of former Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) combatantsAfter sixteen years of civil war (1976—1992) between the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) and the government of Mozambique, over 90,000 former combatants were disarmed and demobilized by a United Nations-led program. Former combatants were to find their ways as civilians again, assisted by community-based reintegration rituals. While the process was often presented as a success story of peace, renewed armed conflict involving RENAMO combatants in 2013 and onward suggests that the reintegration of former guerrillas was a far more complex story.In Former Guerrillas in Mozambique, Nikkie Wiegink describes the trajectories of former RENAMO combatants in Maringue, a rural district in central Mozambique. Rather than focus on violence, trauma, and the reacceptance of these ex-combatants by the community, Wiegink emphasizes the ways in which RENAMO veterans have navigatTrade Review"[A] well-written and sensitively researched and inclusive ethnography about the Mozambican civil war and its post-war trajectories of Renamo excombatants in Maringue. The painstaking work of putting individuals back into local history is apparent here. Wiegink, during her time in Maringue, attempted to become integrated in the local community and use that opportunity to see how their lived experiences compare with the stories they told her. What differs from most ther recent analysis on Mozambique is that Wiegink treats the post-conflict individual and community responses as open-ended and seeks to understand anddescribehowtheseex-combatantsnavigate‘unstableandsometimesdangerous landscapes, seeking to increase their social possibilities and life chances’" * Journal of Southern African Studies *"Grounded in anthropological methodology even as it speaks directly to debates in development studies and international relations, Former Guerrillas in Mozambique provides an irrefutable case for integrating the rigorous study of the lives of the most marginalised into the analysis of state and international politics." * Journal of Southern African Studies *"With its in-depth ethnographic engagement, its synthesis of recent and classic studies of veterans, and its sophisticated use of the concept of the social navigation of persons through dynamic environments, Former Guerrillas in Mozambique is an important contribution to peace and conflict studies, political anthropology, the anthropology of kinship, and African studies." * Alice Wilson, University of Sussex *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations and Acronyms Introduction Part I. Setting the Stage Chapter 1. War Stories Chapter 2. When Elephants Fight Part II. Family Affairs Chapter 3. Wartime Kin and Wartime Husbands Chapter 4. Navigating the Supernatural World Chapter 5. Why Did the Soldiers Not Return Home? Part III. Navigating Politics Chapter 6. About Eating and Drinking Chapter 7. "Only a Bit Mozambican" Conclusion Epilogue Glossary Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisA journey into de facto state-building based on ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern CyprusWhat is de facto about the de facto state? In Sovereignty Suspended, this question guides Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay through a journey into de facto state-building, or the process of constructing an entity that looks like a state and acts like a state but that much of the world says does not or should not exist. In international law, the de facto state is one that exists in reality but remains unrecognized by other states. Nevertheless, such entities provide health care and social security, issue identity cards and passports, and interact with international aid donors. De facto states hold elections, conduct censuses, control borders, and enact fiscal policies. Indeed, most maintain representative offices in sovereign states and are able to unofficially communicate with officials. Bryant and Hatay develop the concept of the aporetic statTrade Review"This book is an extensive and critical study on the KKTC’s and Turkish Cypriots’ in-between/limbo history. It has a well-structured content and theoretical framework, consolidated by intelligible language and spot-on case analysis. Moreover, [Bryant and Hatay] strive to overcome antagonistic dichotomies and unilateral claims about unresolved Cyprus conflicts, such as representing Turkish Cypriots as victims and Turkey as their saviour by critically underlining the peculiarity of the building of KKTC and its subjects. Thus, their critical and genealogical approach to this frozen conflict contributes substantively to their outstanding work in this field." * Mediterranean Politics *"Sovereignty Suspended is a treat. Organizing their analysis around concerns with perceptions and (in)visibility, with recognition and (non-)naming, and with agency and modes of getting by, Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay have prepared two gifts for us: a riveting historical ethnography of the Turkish Cypriot sovereignty project, now embodied in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), and a sophisticated analytical toolbox to think through questions of sovereignty well beyond this ‘de facto’ state. What is particularly impressive is that those two contributions are developed in close interaction, giving the lie to the stereotypical division of labour between authors whose contribution is said to be ‘theoretical’ or ‘regional’ respectively...[R]ead Sovereignty Suspended. This is a big book: big on empirical insight, big on conceptualization...very big on inspiration. It’s big on volume too, and worth every page of it. " * History and Anthropology *"Part ethnography, part political theory, and part war memoir, Sovereignty Suspended is a valuable addition for anthropologists and scholars in adjacent disciplines working on issues of statecraft, borders, and political uncertainty. The book’s ethnographic and theoretical vigor is undeniable: it stems from, and supplements, a long corpus of previous collaborative work by the two authors." * American Anthropologist *"In a world in which such ambivalent, state-like entities seem to have proliferated, the case of northern Cyprus offers many useful lessons for understanding what statehood actually does-lessons that the authors of this insightful and original book artfully extract from a wonderful array of personal experience, documentary evidence, and ethnographic observation." * Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University *"Sovereignty Suspended is an absolute joy to read and easily one of the best books written on de facto states. Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay use their extensive knowledge and years of research on the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to provide an extremely rich and original analysis of the processes of de facto state-building: how state-builders tried to make Turkish Cypriots perceptible and recognizable to the world, how this has resulted in a state that seems made up, and the resilient tactics that Turkish Cypriots have developed to go on with their lives. But Bryant and Hatay are not simply interested in state-building in de facto states, and their analysis allows them to reconceptualize sovereignty as capacity, as a form of institutionally realized agency. This is an important contribution which should make this impressive book of interest to anyone interested in state-building and sovereignty." * Nina Caspersen, University of York *"Sovereignty Suspended is a creative contribution to the cultural turn in state theory, presenting an original approach to state formation by focusing on the aspiration to statehood as a political and social situation sui generis, involving distinct methodological and theoretical problems for would-be citizens (as the authors call them) and scholars alike." * Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University *Table of ContentsPreface Note on Toponyms and Turkish Pronunciation Introduction. The Aporetic State Part I. The Border That Is Not One Chapter 1. Building a "Border" Chapter 2. Mastering the Landscape Chapter 3. Planting People Part II. Enacting the Aporetic State Chapter 4. The So-Called State Chapter 5. The Political Economy of Spoils Chapter 6. Federalism as Fetish Part III. The Aporetic Subject Chapter 7. Victim and Citizen Chapter 8. The Ambiguities of Domination Chapter 9. The Politics of Dis/simulation Conclusion. The Absurdity of the Aporia Appendix: Turkish Cypriot Institutions Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisSince the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim frontier peasants, savage mountaineers, and Christian ethnic minorities, suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India''s construction of one of the world''s longest and most highly militarized border fences.Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape Trade Review"Malini Sur's prose is always clear and often lyrical. Searing insights from many years of indefatigable and intrepid research shine through as Jungle Passports makes contributions to the study of gender, development, human-animal relations, kinship, ethnic strife, and solidarity. Sur shows the enactment of nation-states as tenuous yet brutal entities in the borderlands of South Asia. Her work offers valuable lessons for understanding such phenomena anywhere in the world." * Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University *"Jungle Passports is a wonderful book, combining theoretical sophistication with ethnographic richness. While a lot has been written on borders and borderlands lately, Malini Sur offers novel insights. She is also a great storyteller and writer." * Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University *Table of ContentsContents Timeline Introduction Chapter 1. The Rowmari-Tura Road Chapter 2. Rice Wars and Nation Building Chapter 3. Cow Smuggling and Fang Fung Chapter 4. Kinship, Identities, and "Jungle Passports" Chapter 5. Fear, Reverence, and the Fence Chapter 6. Bangladeshi "Suspects" and Indian "Citizens" in Assam Afterword Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisWhen Ecuador's cut-flower industry took off in the mid-1980s, it rode a wave of international credit peddling and currency speculation that would lead countries of the Global South into successive debt crises and northern financial firms to fortune and dominion. By the start of the twenty-first century, as the Ecuadorian economy collapsed and its ties with international finance became strained, flower exporters rebuilt their businesses around the profitability of their indigenous labor force, drawing local communities deeply into new plantation systems taking over the highlands. In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa goes inside Ecuador's booming cut-flower industry to chronicle the ways its capitalist pioneers built a booming export industry around a racial ideology, turning indigenous people's purported differences into resources for industrial expansion. At the core of this racial system is a belief, central to postcolonial science and politics in Ecuador, in capitalism's uniqueTrade Review"This brilliant, powerful study is a pioneering ethnography of capitalist production and its long history of degrading lives through racializing structures of inequity. Krupa’s genius is to focus on the chain of intertwining relations, spanning continents and industries, organizational forms and systemic structures, politics and world views that are involved in the production of delicacies prized in North America and made through the labor of Ecuadorian peasants. Because of his innovative work, we come to understand the weight and trajectory of these transformations making Indigenous, subsistence farmers into ‘modern’ workers for a burgeoning, North American flower industry. Krupa’s insights, compelling prose, personal commentaries—and wit—make us take account of our roles in these histories and realize how we are also accomplices in producing chains of inequity. After reading this book, we will never look at roses the same way." * Irene Silverblatt, Duke University *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Through his deft ethnography, Joshua Moses is able to show that 9/11, now fading into collective memory, crystallized something we are all still living with. We are haunted by the possibility that we will wake up to a once familiar landscape made suddenly strange—like a Manhattan suddenly without its Twin Towers. For Moses, this prefigures the changes we will all face with rising sea levels, balmy winters, and the like. Anxious Experts is an ethnography of that anxiety, how it came to be, and how it continues to sit with us, as we face an uncertain future." * Eduardo Kohn, McGill University *

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book Synopsis

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisExamining history not as it was recorded, but as it is remembered, An Incurable Past contextualizes the classist and deeply disappointing post-Nasserist period that has inspired today’s Egyptian revolutionaries. Public performances, songs, stories, oral histories, and everyday speech reveal the ways in which ordinary people experience and remember the past.Trade Review“Spanning virtually the entire twentieth century and as timely as the outbreak of the 2011 ‘January Revolution,’ this work has much to say about where Egypt has been, who Egyptians are and, ultimately, where they may take their country.”—Joel Gordon, author of Nasser: Hero of the Arab Nation“A truly extraordinary accomplishment that is thought provoking, creative, and inspiring. Belli is the first in Middle Eastern studies to examine the cultural history of twentieth- century Egypt through the interactions between education and remembrance. Her revised theoretical approach is applicable not only to Middle Eastern societies and cultures, but to others worldwide.”—Israel Gershoni, Tel Aviv University“An interesting history of memory that is diverse, dynamic, and disparate. Makes an outstanding contribution to our understandings of Egyptian national identity and memory.”—Nancy L. Stockdale, University of North Texas

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Book SynopsisExplains how archaeologists can use Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' mode of production concept to study long-term patterns in human society. Presenting a range of different perspectives from researchers working in a wide variety of societies and time periods, this volume clearly demonstrates why historical materialism matters to the field of archaeology.Trade ReviewFor more than a century, scholars have critiqued, misinterpreted, and bickered about Marx’s concept of mode of production. Modes of Production and Archaeology cuts through the dense and thorny intellectual thicket that grew up from these debates. The book presents an easily understood discussion of Marx’s concepts and demonstrates how archaeologists can analyze modes of production to explain long term patterns in cultural change.”—Randall McGuire, author of Archaeology as Political Action “Shows clearly how historical materialist ideas and concepts are productive in developing the theory and practice of archaeology.”—Robert Chapman, author of Archaeologies of Complexity “Covers a huge range of ground and brings together ideas and analyses in a way that has not really been done yet in archaeology.”—Colin Grier, Washington State University

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