Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisTeach for Arabia offers an ethnographic account of the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators in Education City, Qatar. Education City, home to the branch campuses of six elite American universities, represents the Qatari government's multibillion dollar investment over the last two decades in growing a local knowledge-based economy. Though leaders have eagerly welcomed these institutions, not all citizens embrace the U.S. universities in their midst. Some critics see them as emblematic of a turn away from traditional values toward Westernization. Qatari students who attend these schools often feel stereotyped and segregated within their spaces. Neha Vora considers how American branch campuses influence notions of identity and citizenship among both citizen and non-citizen residents and contribute to national imaginings of the future and a transnational Qatar. Looking beyond the branch campus, she also confronts mythologies of liberal and illiberal peoples, places, and ideologies that have developed around these universities. Supporters and detractors alike of branch campuses have long ignored the imperial histories of American universities and the exclusions and inequalities that continue to animate daily academic life. From the vantage point of Qatar, Teach for Arabia challenges the assumed mantle of liberalism in Western institutions and illuminates how people can contribute to decolonized university life and knowledge production.Trade Review"Neha Vora has written a compelling, and personal, account of American campuses in Qatar, one that is as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking. Teach for Arabia brings to life the constantly evolving dynamics and debates within these campuses and offers great insight into the global expansion of American higher education institutions." -- Kristian Coates Ulrichsen * Rice University, author of Qatar and the Arab Spring *"Teach for Arabia is a groundbreaking contribution to understanding the goals and consequences of establishing US branch campuses in the Arab Gulf. Neha Vora interrogates the claim that universities export liberal education, arguing that such assertions rely on the reification of an illiberal other and a romanticization of the US academy. Her rich ethnographic detail makes this a unique and engaging read." -- Fida Adely * Georgetown University *"Teach for Arabia boldly challenges academic cosmopolitanism within the United States, demonstrating how notions of the liberal universities of the West versus their supposed illiberal counterparts among Arab states are firmly embedded in liberal ideologies. An attentive ethnography of the lived contradictions within Education City, this book shows how critique has no region and authoritarianism has no territory. Neha Vora's book represents a spectacular and hopefully developing direction in critical university studies." -- Roderick Ferguson * University of Illinois, Chicago, author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference *"If the measure of good anthropology is whether or not one's arguments have resonance with the people being written about, then Vora has produced stellar anthropology. Teach for Arabia should be essential reading for anyone interested in education, modernity and development, citizenship and nationalism, the global university, and most of all, discourses of liberalism and how these discourses travel."––Sami Hermez, Political and Legal Anthropology Review"[Vora] provides an ethnographic account of college life at six branches of respected American universities in Qatar. By drawing on her experiences working as a professor in the Gulf, attending various conferences and lectures, and interacting with countless students, Vora provides valuable insight on how these branches serve as "postcolonial" institutions established by the West." -- Refael Kubersky * Middle East Journal *"At a time when the Gulf region is undergoing tremendous political transformation, Neha Vora succeeds brilliantly in highlighting an important ongoing pedagogical and cultural transition." -- Morgan C. Packer * Journal of Arabian Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Mythologies of Liberalism chapter abstractThe introduction presents academic understandings of liberalism, illiberalism, and the Middle East, and how these inform the sense of contemporary crisis around the future of American academia, especially as it globalizes. Critiques by US-based scholars of internationalization projects reproduce certain mythologies about liberalism, namely that it is universal, positive, and ahistorical. Nostalgia for a time when the university was less entangled with projects of capitalism and empire pervades many of these narratives, and in the process centers a disembodied, unmarked subject whose belonging within the academy is natural and unquestioned. The introduction also interrogates contemporary academic understandings of illiberal places and the cultures, people, and forms of power that are presumed to map onto them. It highlights how ideas about the Gulf region were produced through British social science and colonial practices of proxy governance, as well as through American oil imperialism and the proliferation of Western expertise. 1Unlearning Knowledge Economy chapter abstractKnowledge economy has become a buzzword in Qatar, used to discuss almost every new development project. This chapter highlights how this concept and the narratives associated with it function as forms of received knowledge about Qatar and the Gulf in much academic knowledge production, institutional rhetoric, and everyday conversation, both inside and outside the region. This terminology, like other exceptionalizing vocabulary about the Gulf, forecloses nuanced research and instead invites knowledge production that reproduces statist interests and the products of previous and ongoing imperial entanglements. The chapter argues that the rhetorics of knowledge economy and the actual effects of national development projects in Qatar are quite divergent, and offers a methodological intervention into the vocabularies of seeing and knowing higher education, national development, and forms of belonging in Qatar and the Gulf. 2Pedagogies of Essentialism chapter abstractThis ethnographic chapter shows how the contradictions between university mission and liberal celebrations of multiculturalism produced essentialized ideas about Qatariness, which led to segregation between Qatari and non-Qatari students. Faculty and administrators at branch campuses implemented nativist policies and privileged Qataris as the intended beneficiaries of liberal education, despite ever-present celebrations of diversity and multiculturalism. The misinterpretation of nation building as being for nationals only, along with reductive understandings of Qatariness, naturalized Qatari privilege within campuses, while Qataris themselves ended up feeling marginalized. Meanwhile, students were encouraged to interact with each other through essentialized understandings of difference, which reproduced existing social hierarchies instead of creating more inclusive campus climates. 3Mixed Meanings chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on how the category of "Qatari woman" and the parameters of proper national femininity were produced within Education City's coeducational spaces. The Qatari state considered women's education and employment within mixed workplaces essential to modernization, to transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and to achieving greater Qatarization. Yet, gender integration was also considered a threat to women's bodily purity, reputation, and to the gender roles and norms attached to Qatar's emergent national identity. The overt and covert ways coeducational anxiety permeated Education City played out on the bodies and actions of Qatari women in particular, both as a group to be protected from criticism, and as the source of gender threat itself. Tasked with playing a critical role in Qatar's modernization, but also expected to represent a timeless national culture, young Qatari women constantly negotiated competing expectations and parameters of what constituted proper femininity. 4Local Expats chapter abstractThis chapter pays particular attention to how local expatriate students—those who were raised in Qatar but had no access to citizenship—navigated what appeared to be a disjunction between Qatarization, a policy that structurally favored citizens, and a university system charged with actively promoting cosmopolitan global citizenship based on beliefs in individualism and meritocracy. Understanding contradictions built into their branch campus experiences actually prompted students to criticize the American academy, which, in their view, failed to live up to its egalitarian promise, rather than Qatar and its legal restrictions on foreign residents. Thus students understood that global citizenship, meritocracy, and egalitarianism, as constituted in the United Statees, were inherently unequal and did not become less equal or more flawed when they moved to a supposedly non-liberal space like Qatar. Branch campuses were increasing their belonging to Qatar and cementing its transnational future. 5Expat/Expert Camps chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the daily lives of faculty and staff in Education City, recruited mostly from North America and predominantly white. Most of these expatriates, like their counterparts in other sectors, spend their days shuttling between various compounds: those of the companies where they work, the shopping malls and hotels where they spend their leisure time, and the gated housing communities and high-rise buildings where they live. Their nationalities in many ways define their mobility and opportunities in the country, as do their Western professional accreditations, their English-language skills and—to a large extent—their whiteness. The concept of the "expert/expat camp" highlights how these subjects are both laborers who are segregated into compounds and a privileged elite who can enjoy the pleasures of raced and classed segregation while disavowing their ability to do anything about structural inequalities within an illiberal, repressive state. Conclusion: Anthropology and the Educational Encounter chapter abstractThe conclusion explores in particular the creation of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU), which encompasses all of the institutions within Education City. Education City's ongoing and uneven transition into HBKU coincided with shifts in Qatar Foundation's rhetoric away from global education toward local heritage and social formations. The author tracks her experiences of moving between spaces that increasingly embodied different epistemologies, gender norms, and social expectations in order to highlight how, rather than producing a more fractured landscape of higher education, these changes were quite ordinary reflections of how institutions incorporate political contestations and calls for greater representation. The conclusion's title also speaks directly to anthropology, and to Talal Asad's important volume urging a decolonization of the discipline—it is perhaps time for anthropologists to also take more ownership over how their concepts and categories of difference are problematically deployed across contemporary iterations of liberal education.

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Book SynopsisPhilosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole.Trade Review"This stunning book is unlike any other I have read on the topic of death. Hans Ruin's philosophical analysis does important work that previous books simply have not attempted or achieved. His investigation into what we do with the dead allows us to gain purchase on what is at stake in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, literature, religion, and above all history."—Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University"Hans Ruin's excellent book extends the phenomenology of death in new and interesting ways. His insights into the cultural significance of death, integrating it with the philosophical literature, make this a remarkable achievement."—James Risser, Seattle University"What is the historian's relationship to death? What does it mean to be with the dead: as their caretakers, keepers of their legacy, guardians of their afterlife? These are the questions at the center of Hans Ruin's highly original exploration of the connections between burial practices and historical writing. This beautifully written book is an example of interdisciplinarity at its best, combining deft philosophical argument with the insights of social and cultural history. It should provoke historians, especially, to think critically about the ethical, spiritual, and political stakes of the work they do."—Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study"Being with the Dead is beautifully written and offers interdisciplinary breadth and philosophical rigour on a subject that lies at the very core of memory studies."—Siobhan Kattago, Memory Studies"Being with the Dead [is] a work whose clarity, interdisciplinary prowess, and originality rank it among the best and most provocative philosophical works in the continental idiom in recent years."—Jason M. Wirth, Los Angeles Review of Books"Ruin's study offers a subtle yet by no means recondite project, broad and interdisciplinary in scope."—Babette Babich, History and Theory"Ruin's critique offers a compelling argument for the ways in which necropolitics reveal the othering practices and colonialist discourse of many disciplines in the academy."—Candi K. Cann, Journal of the American Academy of Religion"Ruin's book is... a well-written reading that seems incredibly worthwhile for historians. His thoughts about what it means 'to be with the dead' open the view to the fact that death and the deceased are playing a role in every area of society. This is supported above all by the logical structure and the clearly structured argumentation in the book. Numerous connectivities for further research are offered to the reader, through which the ontological, ethical and political dimensions of what it means to be with the dead can be explored. And, above all, Being with the Dead is a successful contribution to give the dead more space in the human sciences." –Ekkehard Coenen, Human Studies"In contemporary phenomenology, grief and death are growing areas: Ruin's interdisciplinary attempt to think of being-with as a being with the dead in a spectral community makes of his book a novel approach in this field. More generally, it is a fascinating reading for sociologists, historians and anyone interested in how the relation to the dead shapes the sense of history and of the community."—Manon Piette, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences"One of the finest philosophical works in the Continental idiom in the last two decades."—Jason M. Wirth, Research in PhenomenologyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Thinking after Life: Historicity and Having-Been 2. Thanatologies: On the Social Meanings of Burial 3. Ancestrality: Ghosts, Forefathers, and Other Dead 4. Necropolitics: Contested Communities and Remains of the Dead 5. Ossuary Hermeneutics: Necropolitical Sites of Archaeology 6. Visiting the Land of the Dead: History as Necromancy 7. The Tomb of Metaphysics: Writing, Memory, and the Arts of Survival

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book investigates the emergence and evolution of the organ trade across North Africa and Europe. Seán Columb illuminates the voices and perspectives of organ sellers and brokers to demonstrate how crime and immigration controls produce circumstances where the business of selling organs has become a feature of economic survival. Drawing on the experiences of African migrants, Trading Life brings together five years of fieldwork charting the development of the organ trade from an informal economic activity into a structured criminal network operating within and between Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, and Europe. Ground-level analysis provides new insight into the operation of organ trading networks and the impact of current legal and policy measures in response to the organ trade. Columb reveals how investing financial and administrative resources into law enforcement and border securitization at the expense of social services has led to the convergence of illicit smuggling and organ trading networks and the development of organized crime. Trading Life delivers a powerful and grounded analysis of how economic pressures and the demands of survival force people into exploitative arrangements, like selling a kidney, that they would otherwise avoid. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, organized crime, and exploitation.Trade Review"Trading Life vividly and persuasively shows that anti-trafficking law and policy directed at suppressing the organ trade in Cairo has precisely the opposite effect, predictably resulting in greater brutality and exploitation of the most vulnerable. A compelling and powerful look at how law generates violence." -- Audrey Macklin * University of Toronto *"Trading Life is a real exploration that finally gives victims a voice and allows an understanding of the mechanisms and conditions leading them to sell their organs. One of the most concrete books on organ trafficking." -- Agnès Noël * Le Monde *"This is a timely, scholarly study, based on rich and at times risky fieldwork. It will be of great interest to the general public, as well as scholars in criminology, law and society, and public policy." -- Federico Varese * Oxford University *"Columb has succeeded in writing a book that is accessible and understandable for a broad audience, including law -and policy makers, scholars, teachers and students with an interest in migration issues, exploitation, trafficking, smuggling and illicit networks. It is also insightful for those aiming to understand what happens to a market once it becomes illegal. Scientifically, Columb has provided essential building blocks that help to advance knowledge of the organ trade, both empirically and theoretically. His insights have opened up new methods of approach, demonstrating the need to incorporate corporate crime perspectives, crimmigation, and legal/state-induced forms of exploitation to the study of the organ trade. Columb's book should be a core resource for anyone studying this crime." -- Frederike Ambagtsheer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Excavating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe introductory chapter provides contextual background on the organ trade and outlines the key themes and arguments in the book. The current legal and policy response to the organ trade is critically examined at the international level. This analysis leads to an explanation of how law and policy produce and construct vulnerability to exploitation in organ markets. Egypt is introduced as the main research site, where in-depth narrative interviews were carried out with organ sellers, brokers, and transplant professionals. 2The Illegal Trade in Organs chapter abstractChapter 2 examines how an illegal market in organs emerged in the Egyptian-Sudanese context. Contrary to popular opinion, the organ trade is not a direct consequence of a global shortage in organs. Rather, the trade in organs is causally related to the transfer of transplant capabilities to the global South. Accordingly, the commercial expansion of the transplant industry is linked to the emergence of organ trading as an economic activity. The organ trade is thus better understood as an informal economy activity as opposed to a human trafficking offense. 3Organ Trading Networks chapter abstractThe findings in Chapter 3 reflect personal encounters with Sudanese (North and South) nationals who sold or arranged the sale of kidneys. Their accounts provide unique insights into the organization and activities of organ trading networks in Cairo and the political and social arrangements that compel people to consider selling a kidney. 4Disqualified Bodies chapter abstractChapter 4 examines the background conditions and legal structures that underpin exploitative relations in organ markets. Although some of the study respondents were physically coerced into organ removal, it is exploitation experienced at the structural level that ultimately pushes people into organ sale. In this regard, the oppressive processes of exploitation that position migrant populations as organ sellers in Cairo are explored through the social and legal context in which migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have sold a kidney. The wider implications of legal measures established in response to reports of organ trafficking are considered. 5Exodus chapter abstractChapter 5 engages with the narratives of African migrants who attempted to make the journey to Europe using irregular routes. Unable to finance the cost of travel, people smugglers (referred to as samsara by the respondents) encouraged them to sell a kidney to raise the necessary capital. The experiences of the Sudanese, Eritrean, and Ethiopian migrants interviewed in Cairo are used to examine the impact of crime and immigration controls on informal market dynamics and to explore the convergence of smuggling and organ trading networks in Cairo's informal economy. 6Organ(ized) Crime chapter abstractChapter 6 explores how changes to the regulatory environment influenced the level of physical violence involved in the organ trade and the organizational structure of a criminal group operating within and between Khartoum, Sudan, and Cairo, Egypt. The criminal organization described in this chapter should not be taken as representative of the organ trade as a whole, as it exists in Egypt or elsewhere. It does, however, signal a need for policy change to prevent the development of more pernicious forms of organized crime. 7Regulating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe adverse effects of crime and immigration policies suggest that more far-reaching legal reforms are needed with regard to the organ trade and to other forms of exploitation nominally defined as trafficking offenses. In this final chapter alternative regulatory approaches beyond criminal sanction are explored.

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Book SynopsisThe military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.Trade Review"A forgotten struggle; a glorious but fated political moment in which peasants took on Pakistan's military might and for more than a decade seemed to be winning. Rizvi tells this complex story with a lot of flare and feeling, providing historical and social context for a remarkable movement with the most unlikely of heroes." -- Mohammed Hanif * The New York Times *"In this incisive study Rizvi blends history and ethnography to analyze the continuing impacts of colonial land colonization on relationships between state and society, city and country. Theoretically sophisticated, the book represents a milestone in reorienting how we think about contemporary, agrarian Pakistan." -- David Gilmartin * North Carolina State University *"[The Ethics of Staying] addresses urgent questions, such as: How did sharecroppers disarm the Pakistani Army in the midst of dictatorial rule? Why and on what basis did they risk their lives for land they didn't legally own? How have they managed to survive in the context of extreme repression?....[This] book is a hopeful and necessary read." -- Mel Gurr * PoLAR *"[An] engaging ethnographic account....The Ethics of Staying is a fascinating read and should be of interest to scholars of rural social movements, subaltern studies, and development." -- Kurt Schock * Mobilization *"[Rizvi's] detailed and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is the real strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims that exceed legal property rights." -- Humeira Iqtidar * Pacific Affairs *"The Ethics of Staying is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on land conflicts and popular politics in South Asia. Rizvi's account of the [Punjab Tenants Association's] successful mobilisation for rights to land and livelihood also offers a glimmer of hope at a conjuncture where both Pakistan and India are turning increasingly authoritarian and display ever-decreasing tolerance for the rights-based claims of subaltern movements." -- Kenneth Bo Nielsen * Journal of Contemporary Asia *"In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir Rizvi provides an immense depth of ethnographic detail surrounding a farmers' movement that captured the national imagination during a time of military rule. In its endeavour to examine the many internal and external dynamics that shaped the biography of a social movement, it also speaks to the future of any politics against commodification and dispossession. As such, it forms an extremely important contribution to scholarship on civil-military relations, social movements, and land in contemporary Pakistan." -- Aisha Ahmad * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction chapter abstractThis chapter describes the series of events by which a local struggle became a national event. It introduces the primary interlocutors and takes the reader to three different villages where the author conducted most of the interviews. These villages varied between the oldest predominantly Christian village, another predominantly Muslim village and a third largely mixed Muslim-Christian village in Okara district. It introduces the different occupational castes, the traditional forms of solidarity, and how these bonds of solidarity changed with the rise of the tenants' mobilization. It outlines arguments on the spatial history of rights, the provisional solidarities enabled by social movements, and the varied effect of NGOs and urban activists on rural grassroots mobilizations. 2Politics as Process in Okara Military Farms chapter abstractThis chapter describes the political negotiation, ruptures, and innovations that allowed disparate groups of tenant farmers to come together across caste, gender, and religious differences and mobilize around a class identity as sharecroppers. The ethnographic analysis of AMP mobilization challenges the bifurcation of social movements between the "the politics of distribution" and "the politics of recognition." This chapter argues that the fate of social movements is forged by how they negotiate both sides of power. It argues that peasant movements foreground different concepts of political possibilities from their own alternative and deeply rooted traditions as refracted through social histories. Hence, AMP does not presume an organic, essentialist position that is sometimes projected onto indigenous or peasant communities, nor does it posit a utopian open future. The politics of AMP are provisional, based around tenants' ability to translate customary rights and obligations into political action. Chapter 3: The Afterlife of Colonial Infrastructure chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the regional history of canal colonization and provides a context for the establishment of military farms at the turn of 20th century Punjab. The canal irrigation projects ushered in a new era of regional modernity in Punjab with far reaching consequences for the relationship between land and people in this region. This chapter analyzes the formation of a distinct regional modernity in Punjab that brought the colonial state and peasantry in a direct relationship. It develops the classic theory of gift exchange to analyze the highly personalized relationship between people and colonial institutions that was created through large infrastructure projects that worked through dual idioms of modern technology and customary identities. This chapter illustrates how these dual links are appropriated and repurposed by tenant farmers to make claims over land. Chapter 4: What Remains Buried Under Property? chapter abstractThis chapter examines the moral economy of land rights and the broader understanding of land rights politics as they are understood by different members of AMP. Land is one of the most important yet overlooked elements of social movements because it is often regarded as an economic resource, or exclusively as the object of contestation. However, the variation of land settlements, land relations, and the evolution of the property regime showcase varied cultural understandings of rights, value, and political subjectivity that is shaped by different conceptions of land rights. This abstract question also became an important source of discussion for the tenant farmers once they were able to occupy and cultivate their lands. 5Movement and Mobilization chapter abstractThis chapter describes the subaltern meaning of land rights, which is different from the conception of rights based on citizenship and/or property ownership. This chapter argues that the central force of a social movement is ontological: it ushers a new way of seeing and relating to the world. Social movements have the ability to take particular issues and universalize them as a form knowledge and praxis. For instance, the AMP enlarged tenants' objections to cash contract farming into a discussion of land reform, citizenship rights, democracy, and human rights in Pakistan by relating them to a history of the hardships of settlement, the experience of partition, and the poverty of the sharecropping regime. This provisional political identity is built around a narrative that allowed the tenant farmers to bridge gender, caste, and religious differences. However, this provisional source of solidarity grew weaker as the tenants made some gains. 6Solidarities, Fault Lines, and the Scale of Struggle chapter abstractThis chapter examines the problems faced by AMP as the tenants' leadership allied with urban activists, civil society groups, and NGOs to gain publicity and visibility for their struggle. The aim here is to understand how scalability figures into subaltern politics of survival. The AMP subaltern and highly local articulations of land rights were represented in the abstract and universal framework of "Rights" favored by NGOs and "Class struggle" advocated by Left activists. These organization helped increase the visibility of AMP but they also created strong differences between the tenant farmers causing a split in the movement. 7Coda chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the author's approach to the study of AMP as a relationship between land (spatiality), rights, and political subjectivity in Punjab. Rather than looking at the settlement of the Okara military farms or the rise of peasant mobilization in isolation, the author demonstrates the relational aspects of technology, territory, identity, and power in shifting relations of rule and political agency.

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Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

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Book SynopsisThe military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.Trade Review"A forgotten struggle; a glorious but fated political moment in which peasants took on Pakistan's military might and for more than a decade seemed to be winning. Rizvi tells this complex story with a lot of flare and feeling, providing historical and social context for a remarkable movement with the most unlikely of heroes." -- Mohammed Hanif * The New York Times *"In this incisive study Rizvi blends history and ethnography to analyze the continuing impacts of colonial land colonization on relationships between state and society, city and country. Theoretically sophisticated, the book represents a milestone in reorienting how we think about contemporary, agrarian Pakistan." -- David Gilmartin * North Carolina State University *"[The Ethics of Staying] addresses urgent questions, such as: How did sharecroppers disarm the Pakistani Army in the midst of dictatorial rule? Why and on what basis did they risk their lives for land they didn't legally own? How have they managed to survive in the context of extreme repression?....[This] book is a hopeful and necessary read." -- Mel Gurr * PoLAR *"[An] engaging ethnographic account....The Ethics of Staying is a fascinating read and should be of interest to scholars of rural social movements, subaltern studies, and development." -- Kurt Schock * Mobilization *"[Rizvi's] detailed and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is the real strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims that exceed legal property rights." -- Humeira Iqtidar * Pacific Affairs *"The Ethics of Staying is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on land conflicts and popular politics in South Asia. Rizvi's account of the [Punjab Tenants Association's] successful mobilisation for rights to land and livelihood also offers a glimmer of hope at a conjuncture where both Pakistan and India are turning increasingly authoritarian and display ever-decreasing tolerance for the rights-based claims of subaltern movements." -- Kenneth Bo Nielsen * Journal of Contemporary Asia *"In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir Rizvi provides an immense depth of ethnographic detail surrounding a farmers' movement that captured the national imagination during a time of military rule. In its endeavour to examine the many internal and external dynamics that shaped the biography of a social movement, it also speaks to the future of any politics against commodification and dispossession. As such, it forms an extremely important contribution to scholarship on civil-military relations, social movements, and land in contemporary Pakistan." -- Aisha Ahmad * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Introduction chapter abstractThis chapter describes the series of events by which a local struggle became a national event. It introduces the primary interlocutors and takes the reader to three different villages where the author conducted most of the interviews. These villages varied between the oldest predominantly Christian village, another predominantly Muslim village and a third largely mixed Muslim-Christian village in Okara district. It introduces the different occupational castes, the traditional forms of solidarity, and how these bonds of solidarity changed with the rise of the tenants' mobilization. It outlines arguments on the spatial history of rights, the provisional solidarities enabled by social movements, and the varied effect of NGOs and urban activists on rural grassroots mobilizations. 2Politics as Process in Okara Military Farms chapter abstractThis chapter describes the political negotiation, ruptures, and innovations that allowed disparate groups of tenant farmers to come together across caste, gender, and religious differences and mobilize around a class identity as sharecroppers. The ethnographic analysis of AMP mobilization challenges the bifurcation of social movements between the "the politics of distribution" and "the politics of recognition." This chapter argues that the fate of social movements is forged by how they negotiate both sides of power. It argues that peasant movements foreground different concepts of political possibilities from their own alternative and deeply rooted traditions as refracted through social histories. Hence, AMP does not presume an organic, essentialist position that is sometimes projected onto indigenous or peasant communities, nor does it posit a utopian open future. The politics of AMP are provisional, based around tenants' ability to translate customary rights and obligations into political action. Chapter 3: The Afterlife of Colonial Infrastructure chapter abstractThis chapter looks at the regional history of canal colonization and provides a context for the establishment of military farms at the turn of 20th century Punjab. The canal irrigation projects ushered in a new era of regional modernity in Punjab with far reaching consequences for the relationship between land and people in this region. This chapter analyzes the formation of a distinct regional modernity in Punjab that brought the colonial state and peasantry in a direct relationship. It develops the classic theory of gift exchange to analyze the highly personalized relationship between people and colonial institutions that was created through large infrastructure projects that worked through dual idioms of modern technology and customary identities. This chapter illustrates how these dual links are appropriated and repurposed by tenant farmers to make claims over land. Chapter 4: What Remains Buried Under Property? chapter abstractThis chapter examines the moral economy of land rights and the broader understanding of land rights politics as they are understood by different members of AMP. Land is one of the most important yet overlooked elements of social movements because it is often regarded as an economic resource, or exclusively as the object of contestation. However, the variation of land settlements, land relations, and the evolution of the property regime showcase varied cultural understandings of rights, value, and political subjectivity that is shaped by different conceptions of land rights. This abstract question also became an important source of discussion for the tenant farmers once they were able to occupy and cultivate their lands. 5Movement and Mobilization chapter abstractThis chapter describes the subaltern meaning of land rights, which is different from the conception of rights based on citizenship and/or property ownership. This chapter argues that the central force of a social movement is ontological: it ushers a new way of seeing and relating to the world. Social movements have the ability to take particular issues and universalize them as a form knowledge and praxis. For instance, the AMP enlarged tenants' objections to cash contract farming into a discussion of land reform, citizenship rights, democracy, and human rights in Pakistan by relating them to a history of the hardships of settlement, the experience of partition, and the poverty of the sharecropping regime. This provisional political identity is built around a narrative that allowed the tenant farmers to bridge gender, caste, and religious differences. However, this provisional source of solidarity grew weaker as the tenants made some gains. 6Solidarities, Fault Lines, and the Scale of Struggle chapter abstractThis chapter examines the problems faced by AMP as the tenants' leadership allied with urban activists, civil society groups, and NGOs to gain publicity and visibility for their struggle. The aim here is to understand how scalability figures into subaltern politics of survival. The AMP subaltern and highly local articulations of land rights were represented in the abstract and universal framework of "Rights" favored by NGOs and "Class struggle" advocated by Left activists. These organization helped increase the visibility of AMP but they also created strong differences between the tenant farmers causing a split in the movement. 7Coda chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the author's approach to the study of AMP as a relationship between land (spatiality), rights, and political subjectivity in Punjab. Rather than looking at the settlement of the Okara military farms or the rise of peasant mobilization in isolation, the author demonstrates the relational aspects of technology, territory, identity, and power in shifting relations of rule and political agency.

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Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFew places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair—a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment—which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In this book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond.Trade Review"Richly ethnographic, this study of an environmental movement in Bangladesh takes a fresh and contemporary look at the role of the crowd in democratic politics, distinguishing it from the citizen and the people. Focusing on such everyday phenomena as money, ID cards, accidents, and social media, Nusrat Chowdhury provides unusual glimpses into emotions such as hope, despair, opportunism, and fear that animate crowds assembled for political action." -- Partha Chatterjee * Columbia University *"Theorists of democracy and public life have long been unsettled by the unstable energy of popular assemblies—their capacity both to destroy and create, to betray authority and imagine it anew. Chowdhury's bold, compelling analysis, in contrast, puts the paradoxical power of the street at the center of Bangladeshi history: the spontaneous crowd, she shows, is the very embodiment of popular sovereignty, conjuring the volatile fervor and the 'imperceptible politics' that fuel mass democracy, not only in South Asia, but way beyond." -- Jean Comaroff * Harvard University *"Chowdhury's fascinating ethnography of popular protest in Bangladesh will resonate far beyond her home discipline of anthropology. Paradoxes of the Popular makes an essential contribution to the study of crowd politics in the international contexts of modern mass democracy." -- Jason Frank, Robert J. Katz Chair of Government * Cornell University *"[Paradoxes of the Popular] introduces readers to a novel theoretical terrain, and notions such as the 'imperceptible politics' of mass protests and the act of 'seeing like a crowd' force a reappraisal of anthropological approaches to 'public' life and space. In an era of rising populism, Chowdhury's ethnography has much to offer scholars interested in mass democracy and its inherent paradoxes in South Asia and beyond. Highly recommended." -- E. R. Swenson * CHOICE *"[A] especially rich ethnography of the political....Paradoxes of the Popular shows how mass feelings (from fear and despair to joy and possibility) become political, and how the political (from notions of democracy to demagoguery) is conceptualized in the everyday. The book will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students interested in contemporary Bangladesh, South Asian democracies, and political anthropology more generally." -- Rashmi Sadana * Political and Legal Aanthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the idea of "paradox" to make sense of the contingencies that make up Bangladesh's political modernity as well as the constitutive paradoxes of popular sovereignty. I introduce the Bangla term janata as a vernacular iteration of the concept of the crowd of social and political theory. Drawing on literary representations and scholarly work, the chapter shows why the crowd is the ethnographic object and analytical locus of the book. It sets the theoretical and conceptual stage for locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass politics. 1Picture-Thinking chapter abstractIn chapter 1, I analyze a set of public texts in circulation during a state of emergency—letters published in newspapers, a national identification card, a controversial photograph. Doing so has two ends: First, the chapter expands on the impasse that South Asian democracies often experience when confronting the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. In this logic, a repressive and undemocratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified as a way to protect the masses from their own nature. Second, the chapter expounds on the presumed distinctions between a reading public versus unruly crowds. The letters written by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning "guru of micro credit," remind us how the distinction between the stranger/citizen and an embodied crowd was mobilized at this time so as to usher in a novel era in politics. 2Seeing Like a Crowd chapter abstractAgainst the backdrop of the transparency fetish of the emergency, Phulbari's protest culture presents an alternative politics of seeing—what I describe as "seeing like a crowd." By identifying the significance of money in aesthetic productions and political acts, I show how the preoccupation with money differed from the nationwide drive against corruption. The chapter focuses first on a painting by a Phulbari artist. I argue that its message contrasts with the viciously apolitical desire for efficiency and good governance in a globally recognized language of neoliberal transparency. I then present the recollections of a socially marginalized woman who became the face of grassroots mobilization. I situate the looting and burning of money by the crowds within the larger context of the national political crisis. These popular strategies were a form of a transparency-making enterprise, if only with different political effect than the anticorruption agenda of the state. 3Accidental Politics chapter abstractChapter 3 is an ethnographic account of the accidental, the contingent, and the imperceptible nature of crowd politics. To understand the political possibilities of accidents and to assess their ethnographic significance, in this chapter I approach accidents both literally and conceptually. Can accidents be political? What kinds of politics take shape in the wake of an accident? And what are the ethico-political possibilities that are made available, or are foreclosed, within various discourses of the accidental? Anthropological perspectives on accidents, I argue in this chapter, rescue the concept from its usual modernist and technicist moorings while opening up spaces of radical contingencies that are enframed in local logics of culture and politics. 4Crowds and Collaborators chapter abstractCollaboration, in the sense of working for the enemy and benefiting from it, has given rise to a particular kind of crowd politics. From the vantage point of most protesters, a collaborator (dalal) was a figure that straddled the boundaries of the community and whatever stood beyond it. A dalal was by definition a local, though his ties to the foreign were exposed through suspicion, gossip, jokes, and assaults. Chapter 4 examines this culture of accusation of collaboration in order to illuminate the entangled effects of aggressive resource extraction, collective sovereignty, and popular and state-initiated attempts at settling the score with the nation's past. Following Walter Benjamin's writing on the "intriguer" and scholarly interest in the "neighbor," I submit that the dalal is a third type that disturbs the duality of friend and enemy. This ambivalence produces a culture of doubt and suspicion that demands certainty, often through violence. 5The Body of the Crowd chapter abstractChapter 5 is located in post-emergency Bangladesh. Its primary sites are spaces of politics and activism that are both emergent and historically poignant. I explore a particular fascination with the body and its relationship to crowd politics in the context of protests against the International Crimes Tribunal. The chapter comments on the proliferation of technologies that has impacted social and political communication. Increased surveillance in public spaces indicates more rigorous efforts to control spaces and bodies, illustrated by two events I analyze: an exposé of public sexual harassment and a viral video of a public lynching. On the one hand, I argue, secular and religious crowds, in their desires to be seen and heard, often end up mirroring each other. On the other hand, individual social media users often act collectively, performing the excess and volatility associated with crowds. Conclusion chapter abstractIn August 2017, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division released the text of a verdict that scrapped the sixteenth constitutional amendment. Passed in 2014, the amendment gave Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges for misconduct or incapacity. After it went public, Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha faced the wrath of politicians and party loyalists. "No nation, no country is made of or by one person," Sinha wrote in a judgment partly aimed at salvaging the collectivity that played a formative role in achieving national independence. This single line was excerpted and disparate meanings were tagged onto it in order to cast Sinha as disloyal. The fact that his relatively straightforward commitment to a normative assumption of liberal democracy was enough to cost him his job reveals a heightened role of paranoia in Bangladeshi politics. Indeed, it has raised anew the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and political representation in Bangladesh.

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

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Book SynopsisThis book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.Trade Review"How often do anthropologists rethink field materials from a long-completed project? It's rare. And it's even more rare for them to do so with the depth of commitment and breadth of knowledge Silber brings to this remarkable book. Writing with clarity, humility, and a deep sense of engagement, she has produced an ethnography unlike any I've ever read."—Danilyn Rutherford, The Wenner-Gren Foundation"After Storiesis a beautiful example of how profoundly powerful reflexive, long-term ethnographic research can be! Silber urges us to question the relationships between the 'befores' and 'afters' of transformative change, reframes our understandings of truth and justice, and reorients the project of anthropology as a whole. A real tour de force!"—Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"Ethnographic studies like Silber's tend to defy singular theses, meaning the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts....Recommended."—E. Ching, CHOICE"After Stories is accessible to a wide audience and written in the voice of an ethnographer who has spent time listening to, and learning to tell, stories about rural El Salvador.... The book contains several creative interventions, including a critical, disquieting reflexivity and addressing the reader directly with the use of the second person singular. It is a valuable addition to the social sciences and opens multiple possibilities for interdisciplinary theorizing and collaboration."—Mike Anastario, Journal of Anthropological ResearchTable of ContentsOne: Before Two: Numbers Three: Bodies Four: Objects Five: After

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Book SynopsisIn recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.Trade Review"Chiara De Cesari provides a creative and thoroughly researched account of the way space and the material reality of buildings have become an important, if also contradictory, site for Palestinian claims. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural and architectural heritage, urban transformation, museums, or landscape—and how these are used to counter dispossession." -- Helga Tawil-Souri * New York University *"Chiara De Cesari boldly and creatively shows that politics does not always happen where we expect it to be. In this book, heritage emerges as a site of political mobilization, one in which Palestinian women do more than play a central part: They shape the idioms and create the very materiality in which the temporalities of struggle are woven through people's lives. Through the stories of activists, architects, and residents of Palestine, De Cesari makes a strong case for how Palestinian heritage can make claims and demands on the Israeli state." -- Ann Laura Stoler * The New School for Social Research *"This pathbreaking book links cultural heritage and the postcolonial condition in new and provocative ways. Chiara De Cesari's nuanced ethnography of Palestine reconfigures our understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and culture." -- John F. Collins * author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy *"De Cesari's rigorous analysis takes the reader through a web of complexities which show the different dynamics of heritage. A meticulous treatise indeed—the book makes for valuable reading, in particular when it comes to understanding the many layers of resistance against cultural dispossession and Israel's colonial violence." -- Ramona Wadi * The New Arab *"Chiara De Cesari's book on Palestine appears as a groundbreaking work that offers a different option for understanding how heritage is deployed in a proxy state, a political entity under siege, whose international sovereignty is still being renegotiated." -- Cheikh Lo * Journal of Folklore Research *"De Cesari argues convincingly that NGOs and museums are initiating processes of institutionalization and governance in the absence of a stable [Palestinian] state....This book provides an important opening for a critical discussion regarding the ways in which the word "Palestine" has not lost meaning." -- Rasmieyh R. Abdelnabi * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Chiara de Cesari's study is noteworthy for its acute analysis of the relations between cultural heritage and the nation-state, and for the thoroughness with which she examines this relationship in the case of Palestine." -- Rosemary Sayigh * Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies *"Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine is an illuminating study, useful for both a better understanding of life and struggles in Palestine, and for a broader discussion of the politics of heritage." -- Adi Kuntsman * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Stakes of Heritage and the Politics of Culture chapter abstractThe introduction opens with the story of the Palestinian heritage organization rehabilitating the occupied and colonized Old City of Hebron. This story encapsulates many facets of the book, particularly the relationship between heritage making and Palestinians laying claims to sovereignty (that is, resisting colonization) and instantiating provisional, improvised, resourceful forms of government. It lays out the key argument of the book that Palestinian heritage has transformed from a practice of resistance into a mode of "governing" the Palestinian landscape and society that is deeply connected to transnational regimes of development and a precarious if resourceful process of state building in the absence of a sovereign state. Finally, the introduction outlines the book's key theoretical concerns: how heritage functions in mutating colonial formations and as a form of anticolonial governmentality beyond the nation-state as well as the work of heritage as expanding transnational framework of practices and meanings. 1A Political History of Palestinian Heritage chapter abstractChapter 1 examines the history of heritage preservation in Palestine in the 20th century. It begins with the work of Palestinian orientalists and ethnographers under the British Mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, to analyze how they rework colonial science in the spirit of a nascent Palestinian cultural nationalism. It then focuses on the Folklore Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and particularly its connection to the national liberation movement and the women's movement as well as its practice of anticolonial resistance and activist preservation in the occupied territories. 2Government Through Heritage in Old Hebron chapter abstractChapter 2 discusses the project of historic conservation and urban revitalization in the Old City of Hebron, which remained under Israeli control after the Oslo Accords because of the presence of several Jewish settlements. The chapter explores informal governmentalities through heritage. Countering the settlers' takeover of the Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has restored and repopulated a large part of the city's dilapidated central quarters. But in order to sustain livelihoods in difficult conditions, it has begun to work on socioeconomic development through a broad set of interventions, adopting the language and practices of international development. Over the years, with the Palestinian Authority not being able to work in the occupied Old City, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee has come to function as a hybrid institution of local government. 3Heritage, NGOs, and State Making chapter abstractChapter 3 examines the state-building role of heritage NGOs and the complex relationship between these organizations and the heritage body of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It argues that the Palestinian heritage movement or "heritage by NGOs" helps create and sustain not only icons and rituals of cultural nationalism but also a national infrastructure of heritage preservation and a set of national institutions alternative to those of the PA, like inventories, heritage units, master plans, and laws. In addition to preserving Palestinian identity and reclaiming Palestinian lands, West Bank organizations wish to ameliorate the living conditions of historic districts' residents and villagers and so intervene in the spaces and habits of their everyday life. In so doing—and in the context of the PA's structural weakness—they experiment with a range of modes of planning and governance, and enact a form of resourceful statecraft from the margins of the state. 4Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo chapter abstractPlacing heritage initiatives in the context of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank, Chapter 4 discusses the peculiar history of post-Oslo museums; if the Palestinian Authority has failed to create a major national museum—as a key institution of national representation—also due to a fundamental lack of objects and museum collections, Palestinian artists and cultural producers have instead experimented with different museum formats, creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile, thus producing creative national institutions in transnational spaces. These alternative museums walk a tightrope between establishing authority (as institutionality, as rules and regulations, as an authoritative museum voice) and challenging such authority to promote radical, democratic practices. Conclusion: Cultural Governmentality and Activist Statehood chapter abstractThe conclusion opens with an examination of the Islamic Movement and Palestinian activist preservation in Israel targeting the remains of the Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 when the Israeli state was established. It compares this heritage work with the work of Palestinian NGOs in the West Bank, which have moved toward development and institution building, or a kind of activist statehood. The conclusion then makes an argument for the relevance of new forms of cultural governmentality and heritage-led development well beyond Palestine.

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Book SynopsisThere are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed. In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.Trade Review"With stunning analytic precision, intellectual grace, and captivating ethnography, Ayşe Parla takes on key debates about precarity and hope. If the migrant is the quintessential figure of our anxious times, this magnificent book is the essential guide to thinking more politically and profoundly about her predicament." -- Lila Abu-Lughod * Columbia University *"Boldness is required in writing a book on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of hope. It is Ayşe Parla's remarkable achievement to have developed in such context an insightful critique of this affective relation to the world. Her fine-grained ethnography offers a profound reflection on ethnonational communities and their imagined futures." -- Didier Fassin * Institute for Advanced Study *"One leaves this book with a profound understanding of hope as a tool of governmentality, a way of being in the world, and a political act. Ayşe Parla shows us how deeply connected law, politics, and emotions are in the precarious lives of migrants." -- Esra Özyürek * London School of Economics and Political Science *"Ayşe Parla's study is truly original and thought-provoking in its focus on the Bulgaristanlı immigrants, a group both welcomed as 'Turkish kin' and marked as different at the same time....Precarious Hope is a welcome and indeed, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the hopes for belonging that migrants have and how they manage the precariousness of legal recognition." -- Nikos Christofis * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *"It is Parla's insightful, grounded treatment of the unequal distribution of hope that represents the most productive through line inPrecarious Hope, one that might enrich often unproductive discussions surrounding hope and activism in unequal societies." -- Brian Van Wyck * H-Migration *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Shielding Hope chapter abstractThe introduction maps the contours of Turkey's migration regime, highlighting its peculiarities in terms of minimal regulation, its excessive reliance on circulars and exceptions, and its religious and racialized criteria for who qualifies as a migrant. It provides a historical overview of migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey since the twentieth century to situate the predicament of the post-1990 labor migrants. It thus presents the ways in which the deep-seated alliance between religious identity (Sunni-Islam) and ethnoracial identity (Turkishness) have defined the legal and affective structures of belonging in Turkey, which in turn, constitute the structural conditions of possibility on which the hope of contemporary Bulgaristanlı migrants rests. The chapter also outlines the theoretical approach taken to hope as a collective structure of feeling that is simultaneously conducive to perseverance and complicit in exclusionary acts. 1The Historical Production of Hope chapter abstractThis chapter probes the cultural significance and legal ramifications of the category of soydaş (racial kin) claimed by the Bulgaristanlı. It locates the status of being soydaş within the hierarchy of otherness produced by Turkey's citizenship regime. Presenting a historical account of migration policy toward soydaş since the founding of the Turkish nation-state, it explains the ebb and flow in the privileges granted to soydaş through a constellation of factors that include ethnonational appropriation, transpolitical instrumentalization, and labor market exploitation. The chapter demonstrates how the status of soydaş both enables legal and cultural access and also reinstates a distance from unmarked belonging. Such strategic but uneasy appropriations of identification as soydaş provide a window onto the hegemonic grammar of racialized citizenship in Turkey not from the point of view of those who are most marginalized but from the point of view of the relatively privileged. 2Entitled Hope chapter abstractThis chapter explores the political and affective economy of hope. It demonstrates how the hope for legalization is differentially distributed and embodied across different migrant groups. This chapter develops the notion of "entitled hope" to characterize the hope cultivated by the Bulgaristanlı migrants. Rather than hoping against the odds, entitled hope veers closer to expectation and draws on a different lineage of thinking about hope that locates its kernel in rationality and attainability. In its emphasis on hope as "structured expectation," this chapter presents ethnographic accounts of the expressions and performances of hope that Bulgaristanlı migrants enact and take for granted in their encounters with the law. Finally, even as this chapter attends to the affective aspects of the differential distribution of hope, it argues against an ontological or epistemological gap between affect and emotion. 3Precarious Hope chapter abstractIf the notion of entitled hope is intended to highlight expectation and likelihood, the notion of precarious hope that is elaborated in chapter 3 aims to capture the uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants. The chapter presents thick descriptions of precarity experienced by Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, and work in the exploitative market of domestic labor. Heeding the ever-present tension between privilege and precarity in the experiences of Bulgaristanlı migrants who are neither entirely exposed nor entirely protected in their legal and economic status, this chapter also attempts to demarcate the concept of precarity from vulnerability. 4Nostalgia as Hope chapter abstractAlthough ethnic affinity provides a certain protection from the marginalization and harassment routinely faced by other undocumented migrant women in Turkey, the Bulgaristanlı women's morality, too, can quickly become suspect if they are perceived as straying too far from expected gendered norms of dress, demeanor, or work habits. Bulgaristanlı women, in turn, counter the resentment of the class- and gender-based marginalization they suffer through recourse to post-communist nostalgia. Rather than reducing post-communist nostalgia to a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, chapter 4 explores the ways in which Bulgaristanlı migrants utilize post-communist nostalgia as a resource to manage their uneasy reception in Turkey. Considering the temporalities of hope in their full range, the chapter also suggests that any residual attachments to the communist past are manufactured into hopes for a more secure future. Conclusion: Troubling Hope chapter abstractThe concluding chapter brings together the theoretical grounds and the ethnographic terrain covered in the book to posit hope as a criticizable category of analysis and experience. It challenges neat distinctions between goal-oriented hope and open-ended hope by foregrounding the struggles of migrants who hope for the reasonably expected rather than desire the wildly unexpected. It discusses the troubling implications for migrant activism of associating hope only with possibility at the expense of probability. The conclusion reiterates why it is not only crisis-laden hope that carries significance. Hope that is emboldened by a sense of entitlement but that nonetheless remains precarious speaks to a larger predicament in which increasing numbers of migrants and citizens grapple with a relentless anxiety that is barely held in balance by the production and collective cultivation of hope within structures of inequality. A Note on Method, or Hopeful Waiting in Lines chapter abstractThis short chapter describes the scope, duration, and sites of fieldwork as well as the different ethnographic methods deployed. It also discusses questions of categorization, positionality, and the relationship between ethnography and epistemology, especially as it pertains to research on emotions.

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Book SynopsisFew places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair—a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment—which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In this book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond.Trade Review"Richly ethnographic, this study of an environmental movement in Bangladesh takes a fresh and contemporary look at the role of the crowd in democratic politics, distinguishing it from the citizen and the people. Focusing on such everyday phenomena as money, ID cards, accidents, and social media, Nusrat Chowdhury provides unusual glimpses into emotions such as hope, despair, opportunism, and fear that animate crowds assembled for political action." -- Partha Chatterjee * Columbia University *"Theorists of democracy and public life have long been unsettled by the unstable energy of popular assemblies—their capacity both to destroy and create, to betray authority and imagine it anew. Chowdhury's bold, compelling analysis, in contrast, puts the paradoxical power of the street at the center of Bangladeshi history: the spontaneous crowd, she shows, is the very embodiment of popular sovereignty, conjuring the volatile fervor and the 'imperceptible politics' that fuel mass democracy, not only in South Asia, but way beyond." -- Jean Comaroff * Harvard University *"Chowdhury's fascinating ethnography of popular protest in Bangladesh will resonate far beyond her home discipline of anthropology. Paradoxes of the Popular makes an essential contribution to the study of crowd politics in the international contexts of modern mass democracy." -- Jason Frank, Robert J. Katz Chair of Government * Cornell University *"[Paradoxes of the Popular] introduces readers to a novel theoretical terrain, and notions such as the 'imperceptible politics' of mass protests and the act of 'seeing like a crowd' force a reappraisal of anthropological approaches to 'public' life and space. In an era of rising populism, Chowdhury's ethnography has much to offer scholars interested in mass democracy and its inherent paradoxes in South Asia and beyond. Highly recommended." -- E. R. Swenson * CHOICE *"[A] especially rich ethnography of the political....Paradoxes of the Popular shows how mass feelings (from fear and despair to joy and possibility) become political, and how the political (from notions of democracy to demagoguery) is conceptualized in the everyday. The book will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students interested in contemporary Bangladesh, South Asian democracies, and political anthropology more generally." -- Rashmi Sadana * Political and Legal Aanthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the idea of "paradox" to make sense of the contingencies that make up Bangladesh's political modernity as well as the constitutive paradoxes of popular sovereignty. I introduce the Bangla term janata as a vernacular iteration of the concept of the crowd of social and political theory. Drawing on literary representations and scholarly work, the chapter shows why the crowd is the ethnographic object and analytical locus of the book. It sets the theoretical and conceptual stage for locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass politics. 1Picture-Thinking chapter abstractIn chapter 1, I analyze a set of public texts in circulation during a state of emergency—letters published in newspapers, a national identification card, a controversial photograph. Doing so has two ends: First, the chapter expands on the impasse that South Asian democracies often experience when confronting the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. In this logic, a repressive and undemocratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified as a way to protect the masses from their own nature. Second, the chapter expounds on the presumed distinctions between a reading public versus unruly crowds. The letters written by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning "guru of micro credit," remind us how the distinction between the stranger/citizen and an embodied crowd was mobilized at this time so as to usher in a novel era in politics. 2Seeing Like a Crowd chapter abstractAgainst the backdrop of the transparency fetish of the emergency, Phulbari's protest culture presents an alternative politics of seeing—what I describe as "seeing like a crowd." By identifying the significance of money in aesthetic productions and political acts, I show how the preoccupation with money differed from the nationwide drive against corruption. The chapter focuses first on a painting by a Phulbari artist. I argue that its message contrasts with the viciously apolitical desire for efficiency and good governance in a globally recognized language of neoliberal transparency. I then present the recollections of a socially marginalized woman who became the face of grassroots mobilization. I situate the looting and burning of money by the crowds within the larger context of the national political crisis. These popular strategies were a form of a transparency-making enterprise, if only with different political effect than the anticorruption agenda of the state. 3Accidental Politics chapter abstractChapter 3 is an ethnographic account of the accidental, the contingent, and the imperceptible nature of crowd politics. To understand the political possibilities of accidents and to assess their ethnographic significance, in this chapter I approach accidents both literally and conceptually. Can accidents be political? What kinds of politics take shape in the wake of an accident? And what are the ethico-political possibilities that are made available, or are foreclosed, within various discourses of the accidental? Anthropological perspectives on accidents, I argue in this chapter, rescue the concept from its usual modernist and technicist moorings while opening up spaces of radical contingencies that are enframed in local logics of culture and politics. 4Crowds and Collaborators chapter abstractCollaboration, in the sense of working for the enemy and benefiting from it, has given rise to a particular kind of crowd politics. From the vantage point of most protesters, a collaborator (dalal) was a figure that straddled the boundaries of the community and whatever stood beyond it. A dalal was by definition a local, though his ties to the foreign were exposed through suspicion, gossip, jokes, and assaults. Chapter 4 examines this culture of accusation of collaboration in order to illuminate the entangled effects of aggressive resource extraction, collective sovereignty, and popular and state-initiated attempts at settling the score with the nation's past. Following Walter Benjamin's writing on the "intriguer" and scholarly interest in the "neighbor," I submit that the dalal is a third type that disturbs the duality of friend and enemy. This ambivalence produces a culture of doubt and suspicion that demands certainty, often through violence. 5The Body of the Crowd chapter abstractChapter 5 is located in post-emergency Bangladesh. Its primary sites are spaces of politics and activism that are both emergent and historically poignant. I explore a particular fascination with the body and its relationship to crowd politics in the context of protests against the International Crimes Tribunal. The chapter comments on the proliferation of technologies that has impacted social and political communication. Increased surveillance in public spaces indicates more rigorous efforts to control spaces and bodies, illustrated by two events I analyze: an exposé of public sexual harassment and a viral video of a public lynching. On the one hand, I argue, secular and religious crowds, in their desires to be seen and heard, often end up mirroring each other. On the other hand, individual social media users often act collectively, performing the excess and volatility associated with crowds. Conclusion chapter abstractIn August 2017, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division released the text of a verdict that scrapped the sixteenth constitutional amendment. Passed in 2014, the amendment gave Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges for misconduct or incapacity. After it went public, Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha faced the wrath of politicians and party loyalists. "No nation, no country is made of or by one person," Sinha wrote in a judgment partly aimed at salvaging the collectivity that played a formative role in achieving national independence. This single line was excerpted and disparate meanings were tagged onto it in order to cast Sinha as disloyal. The fact that his relatively straightforward commitment to a normative assumption of liberal democracy was enough to cost him his job reveals a heightened role of paranoia in Bangladeshi politics. Indeed, it has raised anew the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and political representation in Bangladesh.

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Book SynopsisIn Mexican American communities in the central United States, the modern tradition of playing fastpitch softball has been passed from generation to generation. This ethnic sporting practice is kept alive through annual tournaments, the longest-running of which were founded in the 1940s, when softball was a ubiquitous form of recreation, and the so-called "Mexican American generation" born to immigrant parents was coming of age. Carrying on with fastpitch into the second or third generation of players even as wider interest in the sport has waned, these historically Mexican American tournaments now function as reunions that allow people to maintain ties to a shared past, and to remember the decades of segregation when Mexican Americans' citizenship was unfairly questioned. In this multi-sited ethnography, Ben Chappell conveys the importance of fastpitch in the ordinary yearly life of Mexican American communities from Kansas City to Houston. Traveling to tournaments, he interviews players and fans, strikes up conversations in the bleachers, takes in the atmosphere in the heat of competition, and combs through local and personal archives. Recognizing fastpitch as a practice of cultural citizenship, Chappell situates the sport within a history marked by migration, marginalization, solidarity, and struggle, through which Mexican Americans have navigated complex negotiations of cultural, national, and local identities.Trade Review"Ben Chappell'sMexican American Fastpitch is among the best ethnographies about Mexican Americans. Documenting the rich story of a community that has been too often overlooked in terms of vernacular tradition and geographic location, he pushes anthropologists and Chicanx Studies scholars to reconsider our academic notions of 'culture' and 'ethnic/racial' identity and performance. Chappell's evocative description made me a fan of a sport that I previously knew little about."—Michael L. Trujillo, University of New Mexico"Fast-pitch softball provides a social space unique to Mexican Americans. It supplies elements vital to the community: a place where traditions, language, and culture thrive. It is a vehicle for leyendas who have inspired generations. Ben Chappell's work informs us that local sport is a powerful tool for community uplift and solidarity."—Jorge Iber, Texas Tech UniversityTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction presents fastpitch softball as a sport that has been historically of interest to Mexican Americans, who have used it as a cultural resource to navigate their history and identity in the United States. A tradition of playing softball in Mexican American communities is an example of sport as cultural poetics on the vernacular scale. 1Mexican Questions chapter abstractThis chapter develops the historical frame for fastpitch as part of a long saga of Mexican people's contested belonging in the United States. This history examines the expansion of the United States by military conquest and the attendant racialization of Mexicans for purposes of Anglo domination. It includes over a century of Mexicans making their home in the center of what is now the United States, including Kansas, and effectively creating the region I call mid-América through travel and interaction with the southern borderlands, mainly Texas. Mexican American fastpitch emerged close in time to famous moments in political mobilization for civil rights and equality. Against this backdrop, athletic clubs and tournaments were among the vernacular organizations through which people have negotiated questions of belonging and identity. 2Hecho in America con Mexican Parts chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on softball as a national pastime in the early twentieth-century United States and the segregated everyday life of barrio communities as the ground on which Mexican American fastpitch teams and tournaments emerged. Recognizing how fastpitch is deeply embedded in social relationships is key to understanding the enduring interest and commitment to the sport that are evident in Mexican mid-América. Within that social base, I suggest that softball provided Mexican American communities with a source of both competition and camaraderie. 3Home Teams: Making Place for Mexican Tournaments chapter abstractThis chapter digs into specific tournaments, playing fields where they took place, and the teams that hosted them in order to represent the process of building a racial tradition of sport. As Mexican American communities did this, they negotiated a shifting balance between tournaments as barrio institutions invested in particular people and relationships and as a staging ground for those interested in bringing their athletic capabilities to a broader field of competition. The relative merits and limitations of remaining identified as a "Mexican tournament" as opposed to "opening up" in different ways remain debatable, even as the boundaries established under segregation crumble and fade. This remains true for the identity of tournaments across changing circumstances, as well as for the people personally and collectively invested in them. 4Ballplayers in Barrio Life chapter abstractThis chapter examines the "ballplayer" identity that playing fastpitch produced in barrio communities. As a kind of discipline of self-making, being a ballplayer provided Mexican Americans with a resource to counter racist constructions of Mexicanness. Part of what made the prospect of being a ballplayer a path to prestige was that it offered a means of performing valorized and legible versions of masculinity. This process produced local legends who distinguished themselves on the field. But many former players maintain that a more important outcome was the camaraderie among ballplayers and their communities, fostering enduring relationships that were ultimately more valuable even than victory in the game. 5Men and Women in Gendered Fastpitch chapter abstractThis chapter further develops the implications of the fact that modern sport is socially gendered, including softball itself in particularly complicated ways. Recognizing that fastpitch has been celebrated as a Mexican American tradition mostly as an activity of men, contrary to the mainstream of fastpitch today, I highlight some of the women who have participated in this tradition and claim it as theirs. As the position of softball in the gender-divided field of sport has changed over the past century, I argue that the social base of Mexican American fastpitch has made it a resource that can be shared across generations. 6Between the Lines: Softball as Utopian Form chapter abstractThis chapter draws on scholarship that treats sport as a symbolic or narrative idiom to unpack how softball is articulated with Mexican American experience. I consider the narratives specific to softball and baseball in terms of the appeal they might hold in a Mexican American context. These include enactments of individual-collective relationships, opportunity, and meritocracy that are part of the formal structure of the game. Reading these narrative forms against the ongoing political dynamics of Mexican identity in the United States shows the particular relation of softball to the larger social formation. Despite the fact that softball and baseball have at times played an ideological role to support unequal social relations, sport functions differently for Mexican Americans, when the demarcated space of the playing field takes on utopian meanings in the ways that it contrasts with social life. Conclusion: Patriotic, But We Love Our Culture Too chapter abstractThe conclusion examines the view expressed by people involved in Mexican American fastpitch that their sport of choice is their "culture," understanding that term to signal a legitimate difference from a mainstream national identity. This discussion underscores that the particular appeal of fastpitch for its devotees is embedded in the ongoing dynamics of Mexican American history and experience. Indeed, maintaining a particular tradition of playing the game is a way to materialize and recognize people's relation to that history. Participants mark this relationship by calling it culture.

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Book SynopsisAn inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran's citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.Trade Review"In this beautifully written and extraordinarily rich book, Narges Bajoghli demonstrates a deep anxiety within the Iranian regime about how to transmit the ideology of the Revolution forty years on. With Iran Reframed, we come to understand the contradictions and frustrations behind the regime's justifications of its past, present, and imagined future."—Sherine F. Hamdy, author of Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt"Iran Reframed is incomparable. A must-read on Iran's media landscape and paramount for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it really is. Gripping and provocative."—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran"Iran Reframed offers marvelously original insight into one of the world's most misunderstood countries. Narges Bajoghli reflects on the success and failure of revolutions, the meaning of ideology, youth and aging, and the ways politics seeks to address deep human longings."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"[A] lively book that offers great insight into the mindset and approach of the officials who try to keep the Islamic Revolution, and the regime it produced, alive by producing promotional material, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq War, and rap-filled music videos extolling the nation and its heroes. Highly recommended."—R. P. Mathee, CHOICE"[Bajoghli] skilfully breaks the myth of singular Iranian political Islam through an engaging storytelling style that encourages readers' dialogic imagination rather than presumed categories."—Younes Saramifar, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies"Iran Reframed is an important book not just in the study of post-revolutionary Iranian culture and media, but post-revolutionary Iran at large. It is groundbreaking in identifying and presenting in a concise volume important processes that have taken place within the Islamic Republic's revolutionary project and its dynamic mediascape—especially since the 2009 protests."—Nahid Siamdoust, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Iran Reframed is a courageous journey into the contradictions within the ideological apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran....Bajoghli's book is essential reading for anyone interested in media warfare in the twenty-first century and understanding the nuances of Iranian politics."—Alexander L. Fattal, American Anthropologist"Empathetic and provocative at the same time, this is a compelling book for anyone who wants to understand Iran as it exists today."—Adil Bhat, Dawn"[Iran Reframed] offers a deep insight into Iran's state media apparatus....for anyone wanting to better understand the overarching social dynamics in Iran, this book is recommended reading."—Daniel Walter, QantaraTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Generational Changes 2. Cracks in the Official Story 3. Insiders, Outsiders, and Belonging 4. New Strategies 5. Producing Nationalism 6. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe Pakistan Army is a uniquely powerful and influential institution, with vast landholdings and resources. It has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death? Taking ritual commemorations of fallen soldiers as one critical site of study, Rashid argues that these "spectacles of mourning" are careful manipulations of affect, gendered and structured by the military to reinforce its omnipotence in the lives of its subjects. Grounding her study in the famed martial district of Chakwal, Rashid finds affect similarly deployed in recruitment and training practices, as well as management of death and compensation to families. She contends that understanding these affective technologies is crucial to challenging the appeal of the military institution globally.Trade Review"This absorbing and troubling book grapples with the puzzle of how the Pakistani military can hold the devotion and loyalty of so many citizens while promising them endless wars, death, and impairment. Rashid's thoughtful and at times harrowing account draws on sensitive ethnography with families of martyrs and unprecedented access to military ceremonies to weave a persuasive argument about the power of martyrdom and ritualistic mourning as technologies of rule."—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London"This is a unique contribution to critical studies of contemporary militarism as a global phenomenon, while simultaneously casting light on an institution that is not well understood outside its own national context. Ethnographic studies of military organizations are extremely rare due to the excessive secrecy of the defense sector, but Maria Rashid is able to demonstrate why and how gender is so central to this web of institutional and ideological power. This highly original study shows that we can learn about the appeal of military service by engaging with those who stand to lose the most from its allure: the women whose sons and husbands die in uniform."—Vron Ware, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Kingston University"This book is the only text on the Pakistan army that ethnographically focuses on the lives (and deaths) of non-commissioned soldiers and not of senior commissioned officers. By sharing with us the voices of next-of-kin of martyred soldiers, especially women, it weaves a nuanced argument that shows the affective dissonance between women's feelings of regret and anger about their lost sons and husbands and the public affirmation of their sacrifice. It hence explores the gap between the everyday experiences of families that mourn their dead sons in rural Pakistan and the idealized image of the martyr that saturates nationalist representations. Maria Rashid, by brilliantly using tropes of paradox and ambivalence in this excellent book, tells us a story that interplays between nationalism, sacrifice, and masculinity in contemporary Pakistan. Further, unlike many renditions on the Pakistani military, this exceptional text does not focus on the coercive aspect of the army; rather, it enables us to understand the persuasive powers through which this potentially hegemonic entity seeks to create consensus in an effort to produce ideological conformity."—Kamran Asdar Ali, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin"A good read for those who want to understand militarism in Pakistan as well as why the military has become the centerpiece of Pakistani society for decades."—Shuja Nawaz, The Friday Times"[A] must-read for all, especially those who once believed in the narrative of militarism and the sanctity of military deaths but were confused when the layers of this social construct began to peel off."—Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu, Strife"Rashid's book is a sobering reminder that military dominance over civilians is unlikely to change in Pakistan in the foreseeable future."—Rana Banerji, The Indian Express"Psychologist Maria Rashid has produced an extraordinary survey in which she seeks to demonstrate the Pakistan military has used death in combat, particularly the concept of martyrdom, as a tool to extend its domination over the country's political and civil society."—Arnold Zeitlin, South Asia Journal"Every story [I've encountered] demonstrated a dangerous doubt at the very heart of the military; a sign that this powerful institution—which likes to present itself as homogenous, disciplined, heroic and united—is more broken than the generals would have us believe. Maria Rashid's new book,Dying To Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, is a powerful intervention in studies of Pakistani militarism for precisely this reason."—Mahvish Amad, Jamhoor"A compelling account of how micro-level developments fit with the broader pursuit of the Pakistan Army's agenda and narrative, Dying to Serve should be compulsory reading for students and scholars of the army, politics and nationalism at the grassroots level."—Dr. Azma Faiz, Dawn"Dying to Serveboth broadens the anthropology of militarism's geographic focus, which has largely been the United States, and deepens anthropological understandings of militarism as a cultural system through Rashid's rigorous analysis of its gendered and affective dimensions."—Kristin V. Monroe, American Ethnologist"Rashid's book is a remarkable study, providing a social lens through which to see and understand the layered complexities of the relationship between the army, its 'immediate' subjects (families of deceased soldiers) and the nation at large. The book has also opened up space for further research on pacifist, cultural, feminist and post-colonial themes in the context of the Pakistani military."—Faiza Farid, International Affairs"[Dying to Serve] provides a fresh contribution to the study of militarization in Pakistan by drawing upon a psychosocial approach and by focusing on aspects of subjectivity and intimacy in investigating the role played by gender and families in the constitution of the Pakistan Army. The book will certainly prompt fresh discussions and debates in thinking about the Pakistan Army in relationship to kinship, particularly given that so much of the existing scholarship is either focused on [the War on Terror] through the perspective of foreign policy, global geopolitics and military strategy, or where the Pakistan Army is discussed as an important actor in domestic politics and in the country's economy."—Sanaullah Khan, Journal of South Asian Development"The Pakistan Army...has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death?"—Nadia H. Barsoum, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies"One of the most important contributions ofDying to Serveis elucidating the materialist grounds on which militarism stands, undergirded by a historical colonial political economy that is reworked for contemporary Pakistani militarism."—Zahra Khalid, Security Dialogue"Over the course of the last decade, scholarship on the Pakistan Army has proliferated; however, Rashid's Dying to Serve stands out because she has done what others have been unable to do: conduct research among and on the enlisted ranks of the Pakistan Army and their families, with a particular focus on the district of Chakwal. That Rashid identified these men as a site of important empirical work is to her commendation; that she devised a suitable research methodology to conduct the work is remarkable."—C. Christine Farr, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisContemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy—but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care—a healing labor—that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.Trade Review"This is an intelligent and insightful study of Japanese female sex workers who provide iyashi or 'healing care' to Japan's depleted male workers. Koch makes a compelling and provocative case for the productive role of sex work in the Japanese gendered economy. It is both marginalized and necessary, caught in a gray area between legality and illegality, and dependent on the perception that it is done by amateurs. Yet, these characteristics shape the risks sex workers face and undermine their claims to labor rights. In contrast to anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution activists, they do not consider themselves as exploited and coerced."—Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh"Exceptional sensibility and true originality characterize Gabriele Koch's Healing Labor, which has sex workers tell their stories on their own terms while bringing to life the globally most pertinent debates about labor, care, and sexual commerce. An elegantly written, pathbreaking book that carries its theoretical sophistication and great erudition lightly."—Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara"One of the pleasures of Gabriele Koch's new book...is how its erudition is mixed with an anthropologist's ear on the ground."—Nicolas Gattig, The Japan Times"[Rather] than simply use her interviews as interesting details to supplement an analysis that lies elsewhere, a problem present in many ethnographies, [Koch] grounds her argument about the Japanese economy firmly in the methodology of anthropology....Koch strikes the perfect balance between detail and analysis. Highly recommended."—M. J. Wert, CHOICE"Koch's well-organized and fluently written book will not only enlighten anthropologists with an interest in gender issues, the sex industry, labor relations, and women's rights, but will also provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the Japanese economic system and workplace. It should certainly be recommended reading for anyone planning to work in Japan."—Brigitte Steger, The Journal of Japanese Studies"[Healing Labor] is an incisive exploration of sex work as both a form of gendered work and care that is helpful to scholars of Japan in particular, and East Asia more generally; scholars interested in health, caregiving, and labor or economics regardless of geographic focus; and scholars interested in sex and sexuality, gender, and social justice."—Pamela Runestad, H-Japan"Koch's well-informed and eloquent work provides an outstanding example of an ethnography that remains close to the voices of her interlocutors, but never loses sight of the larger structural issues of the environment within which they eke out a living. It opens up a whole range of important questions concerning the sex industry in Japan and beyond... Future researchers will be well counseled to take Koch's book as a starting point in their own inquiries. With its stringent analysis and clarity of voice, it is well suited for a range of courses and, in my experience, a great hit with undergraduate and post-graduate students alike."—Fabio Gygi, Monumenta Nipponica"[T]his book demonstrates a conceptual advance for this area of study via its introduction of the key term 'healing labor,' to explain the above-noted fundamental contradictions of sex work and the social values they are embedded within in Japan."—Kaoru Aoyama, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sex in Gray Spaces 2. First-Timers Welcome! 3. Stigma and the Moral Economy 4. Healing Customers 5. Victims All 6. Risk and Rights Epilogue

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Book SynopsisFaith in Rights explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. It argues that Christianity is deeply entangled in the texture of the United Nations and shapes the methods and areas of work of Christian NGOs. To capture these entanglements, Amélie Barras analyzesthrough interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysisthe everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN

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Book SynopsisWaste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.Trade Review"There are so many reasons to read this book: it's brilliantly written, theoretically innovative, and politically necessary. Waste Siege is not only one of the most original accounts of waste to date, it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the ongoing occupation of the West Bank from the perspective of ordinary Palestinians."—Joshua Reno, author of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill"Waste Siege is an original and innovative account of living with the inundation of debris and toxicity in Palestine. Taking the reader on a journey through landfills and rubbish markets, encounters with bags of bread left hanging on the sides of dumpsters, and the movement of sewage across political barriers, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins brilliantly excavates the ambient politics of waste and its management."—Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics"[An] insightful, penetrating account of life under six decades of military occupation for the nearly three million Palestinians....In this well-written, intelligent account based on firsthand ethnographic fieldwork, the author displays a keen understanding of both waste ecology and contemporary life in occupied Palestine. Highly recommended."—G. M. Massey, CHOICE"Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance."—Kareem Rabie, PoLAR"Waste Siege is a welcome addition to the sparse literature about the environment, waste, and infrastructure in Palestine and the Middle East more broadly.[An] important work."—Basma Fahoum, Arab Studies Quarterly"By tracing the flows and forces of waste siege, this text enables a more refined understanding of the socio-political worlds forged with, under, and against occupation....In Stamatopoulou-Robbins's ethnography, environment, occupation, and everyday life are grasped in a single frame."—Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Benjamin Kaplan Weinger, Cultural Geographies"Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste."—Sharon Stephens Book Prize Committee"Stamatopoulou-Robbins provides a visceral and theoretically sophisticated guide to the disposability, toxicity, and ethical dilemmas that Palestinians confront in the West Bank today.Grounded in the anthropology of waste, the state, the environment, and infrastructure,Waste Siegeis a theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, beautifully written exploration of the 'kind of living we do in the constantly changing ruins we have made.'"—Andy Clarno,Journal for Palestine Studies"Waste Siege is a captivating book on the impact of the global inundation of waste, and waste infrastructure, on the lives of Palestinians. In a sense, Stamatopoulou-Robbins carves out the constellation surrounding waste, and in a bigger picture, a global economy of inundation... This book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in the lives of Palestinians under occupation from a refreshing perspective on the nation, and the nation-state. It is a wonderful analysis of Palestinian statehood and the ensuing debate on the Authority's success as a governing body."—Christina Bouri, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy"Stamatopoulou-Robbins's interviews are a particular strength of Waste Siege. Some of her interlocutors are the men of the rabish and the consumers of second-hand goods who tell a story about garbage intertwined with the issues of class and views of the other, all set within the sprawling networks of flea markets."—Lauren Banko, International Journal of Islamic Architecture"Waste Siegeis a brilliant and insightful ethnography into the West Bank's inundation of waste dumped from Israel, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian cities. Stamatopoulou-Robbins does not just focus on what the Israeli military does to the Palestinians, but the role Palestinian political parties, bureaucrats, humanitarian NGOs, and the international community play in the slow degradation of Palestinian life through waste."—Tina Guirguis, Society and SpaceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Compression: How to Make Time at an Occupied Landfill 2. Inundated: Wanting Used Colonial Goods 3. Accumulation: Toxicity and Blame in a Phantom State 4. Gifted: Unwanted Bread and Its Stranger Obligations 5. Leakage: Sewage and Doublethink in a "Shared Environment" Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFood in Cuba follows Cuban families as they struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in Cuba's faltering, post-Soviet welfare state by specifically looking at the social and emotional dimensions of shifts in access to food. Based on extensive fieldwork with families in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city, Hanna Garth examines Cuban families' attempts to acquire and assemble "a decent meal," unraveling the layers of household dynamics, community interactions, and individual reflections on everyday life in today's Cuba. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the subsequent loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship. Although trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food in Cuba, many Cubans report that they continue to live with food shortages and economic hardship. Garth tells the stories of families that face the daily challenge of acquiring not only enough food, but food that meets local and personal cultural standards. She ultimately argues that these ongoing struggles produce what the Cuban families describe as "a change in character," and that for some, this shifting concept of self and sense of social relation leads to a transformation in society. Food in Cuba shows how the practices of acquisition and the politics of adequacy are intricately linked to the local moral stances on what it means to be a good person, family member, community member, and ultimately, a good Cuban.Trade Review"Garth's in-depth and intimate ethnography portrays the shortcomings in Cuba's welfare system, and the profound consequences for the way people eat and think of themselves as Cuban. Presenting the stories of highly resourceful individuals and communities, Garth shows us that the Cuban experience and post-Soviet lives cannot be decoupled from everyday food practices."—Megan A. Carney, author of The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders"In her rich ethnography of food 'insecurity' in a place where no one starves, Hanna Garth traces the daily practices of food acquisition and the effects of inadequacy on identity. Garth depicts the experience of dependence upon a faltering socialist infrastructure, recording a longing for what was before, discontent with the seemingly changeless present, and a hope for future possibilities."—Nancy J. Burke, author of Health Travels: Cuban Health(care) On and Off the Island"Garth offers a literary masterclass in how the analysis of food can help us understand social relations while the analysis of social relations can help us understand food."—Emily Yates-Doerr, Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition"This is an ethnography rich with thick description about the politics of adequacy as seen through the lens of household food acquisition....Food in Cuba opens our eyes to all that people go through to acquire the foods they desire."—Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, Food, Culture & Society"Garth accessibly addresses important theoretical and political debates while anchoring every insight in rich ethnographic detail. She achieves a sympathetic and nuanced portrait of people who struggle more than they should for the basic elements of life while still engaging in complex social critique and political analysis and acts of solidarity, as well as, against the odds, finding ways to flourish."—Alyshia Gálvez, American Anthropology"[Food in Cuba] expands our understanding of food security, showing that it must mean more than simply access to sufficient nutrients for survival.By turning our attention to food acquisition, Garth's ethnography raises new questions about the kind of systems that people rely upon to produce enough or sufficient food."—Maggie Dickinson, PoLAR"[Food in Cuba] presents a complex picture of the tension between the socialist state and Cuban women....Garth successfully employs experiences from her fieldwork to the reader's benefit, expertly conveying the emotional highs and depressive lows that different individuals feel as they battle every day to produce a decent meal. Recommended."—S. L. Kwosek, CHOICE"As Santiagueros insist, alimentary dignity is an essential ingredient of mental health and well-being. Garth beautifully demonstrates how such notions of health deserve both analytical rigor and political weight in discussions of the body, the self, and the state in marginalized Caribbean communities."—Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, Medical Anthropology Quarterly"Food in Cuba is a thought-provoking ethnography that should appeal to multiple audiences, including policy makers, health professionals, and scholars interested in Cuba, for its critical perspective on narrow definitions of food security and for its valuable perspective on how chronic food shortages impact mental health and social dynamics on the island."—Adriana Premat, Transforming Anthropology"Garth's study of marginalized Santiagueros and their 'ingestive practices', portrays a particular kind of living, involving intimate socialities and intimate performances, where one is constantly negotiating the fine line of acting ethical and losing one's Cubanidad. It is an important part of a larger body of work in anthropology that portrays the urban precariat making do in the grey zone."—Daina Cheyenne Harvey, UrbanitiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: In Pursuit of Adequacy 1. La Lucha 2. Antes 3. Virtuous Womanhood 4. Community 5. Breakdown Conclusion: The Politics of Adequacy

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Book SynopsisContemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy—but whose work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork with adult Japanese women in Tokyo's sex industry, Healing Labor explores the relationship between how sex workers think about what sex is and what it does and the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves. Gabriele Koch reveals how Japanese sex workers regard sex as a deeply feminized care—a healing labor—that is both necessary and significant for the well-being and productivity of men. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, Koch compellingly illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.Trade Review"This is an intelligent and insightful study of Japanese female sex workers who provide iyashi or 'healing care' to Japan's depleted male workers. Koch makes a compelling and provocative case for the productive role of sex work in the Japanese gendered economy. It is both marginalized and necessary, caught in a gray area between legality and illegality, and dependent on the perception that it is done by amateurs. Yet, these characteristics shape the risks sex workers face and undermine their claims to labor rights. In contrast to anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution activists, they do not consider themselves as exploited and coerced."—Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh"Exceptional sensibility and true originality characterize Gabriele Koch's Healing Labor, which has sex workers tell their stories on their own terms while bringing to life the globally most pertinent debates about labor, care, and sexual commerce. An elegantly written, pathbreaking book that carries its theoretical sophistication and great erudition lightly."—Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara"One of the pleasures of Gabriele Koch's new book...is how its erudition is mixed with an anthropologist's ear on the ground."—Nicolas Gattig, The Japan Times"[Rather] than simply use her interviews as interesting details to supplement an analysis that lies elsewhere, a problem present in many ethnographies, [Koch] grounds her argument about the Japanese economy firmly in the methodology of anthropology....Koch strikes the perfect balance between detail and analysis. Highly recommended."—M. J. Wert, CHOICE"Koch's well-organized and fluently written book will not only enlighten anthropologists with an interest in gender issues, the sex industry, labor relations, and women's rights, but will also provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the Japanese economic system and workplace. It should certainly be recommended reading for anyone planning to work in Japan."—Brigitte Steger, The Journal of Japanese Studies"[Healing Labor] is an incisive exploration of sex work as both a form of gendered work and care that is helpful to scholars of Japan in particular, and East Asia more generally; scholars interested in health, caregiving, and labor or economics regardless of geographic focus; and scholars interested in sex and sexuality, gender, and social justice."—Pamela Runestad, H-Japan"Koch's well-informed and eloquent work provides an outstanding example of an ethnography that remains close to the voices of her interlocutors, but never loses sight of the larger structural issues of the environment within which they eke out a living. It opens up a whole range of important questions concerning the sex industry in Japan and beyond... Future researchers will be well counseled to take Koch's book as a starting point in their own inquiries. With its stringent analysis and clarity of voice, it is well suited for a range of courses and, in my experience, a great hit with undergraduate and post-graduate students alike."—Fabio Gygi, Monumenta Nipponica"[T]his book demonstrates a conceptual advance for this area of study via its introduction of the key term 'healing labor,' to explain the above-noted fundamental contradictions of sex work and the social values they are embedded within in Japan."—Kaoru Aoyama, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sex in Gray Spaces 2. First-Timers Welcome! 3. Stigma and the Moral Economy 4. Healing Customers 5. Victims All 6. Risk and Rights Epilogue

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Book SynopsisCourt of Injustice reveals how immigration lawyers work to achieve just results for their clients in a system that has long denigrated the rights of those they serve. J.C. Salyer specifically investigates immigration enforcement in New York City, following individual migrants, their lawyers, and the NGOs that serve them into the immigration courtrooms that decide their cases. This book is an account of the effects of the implementation of U.S. immigration law and policy. Salyer engages directly with the specific laws and procedures that mandate harsh and inhumane outcomes for migrants and their families. Combining anthropological and legal analysis, Salyer demonstrates the economic, historical, political, and social elements that go into constructing inequity under law for millions of non-citizens who live and work in the United States. Drawing on both ethnographic research conducted in New York City and on the author's knowledge and experience as a practicing immigration lawyer at a non-profit organization, this book provides unique insight into the workings and effects of U.S. immigration law. Court of Injustice provides an up-close view of the experiences of immigration lawyers at non-profit organizations, in law school clinics, and in private practice to reveal limitations and possibilities available to non-citizens under U.S. immigration law. In this way, this book provides a new perspective on the study of migration by focusing specifically on the laws, courts, and people involved in U.S. immigration law. Trade Review"This book does such a powerful job of recounting the sad, complicated and disempowering history of immigration laws. It clarifies not just for academics but for everyone that the denial of due process is central to how the legal system responds to immigrants. But what I love about this work is the humanity that J.C. Salyer brings with it. In the end we see that we are all these immigrants and refugees. They are our future and our past and every single one of us is called upon now to see this and act." -- Maria Hinojosa * Latino USA *"Court of Injustice identifies the real structural and procedural problems for noncitizens facing removal from the United States. Salyer's unique perspective on legal services for immigration clients reveals the inequities inherent in the court system and how enforcement policies often preordain outcomes. Policymakers should play close attention to this book." -- Bill Ong Hing * University of San Francisco *"Salyer combines vast legal knowledge with deft anthropological analysis to produce a comprehensive and engaging account of today's immigration system. Highlighting the lawyers navigating a treacherous legal system, this book is a unique, essential, urgent read for anyone who cares about immigration and immigrants today." -- Cecilia Menjívar, University of California * Los Angeles *"Court of Injustice brings a critical ethnographic lens to understanding the reproduction of inequality, xenophobia and racism in U.S. immigration. Salyer dismantles the fictions of 'rule of law' and 'national security' to reveal an arbitrary and punitive federal system decades in the making, and how local governments, lawyers, and civil society are fighting back." -- Shannon Gleeson * Cornell University *"Salyer's focus on disparities across jurisdictions and among individual immigration judges, and particularly the unique role of the NYIFUP as a countervailing force, highlights how local contexts deeply shape immigrants' experiences of justice or lack thereof. This firsthand, detailed account of how the U.S. immigration legal system creates inequality is an important read for sociologists interested in immigration, criminal justice reform, and law and society." -- Ariela Schachter * American Journal of Sociology *"Court of Injustice impressively combines legal and anthropological expertise, contrasting the nuance of law and practice with the on-the-ground experiences of individuals working within the system. There is much to deconstruct in the realm of immigration law, but by interrogating the every day experiences of lawyers, we are able to catch a glimpse of effective forms of resistance, such as the program in New York City, absent legislative reform. By understanding the intricacies of the practice of immigration law, Salyer offers his readers insight into both the challenges and complexities of practicing within this system, and the possibilities for liberatory change." -- Anita Maddali * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Paradoxes of U.S. Immigration Law and Deportation chapter abstractBy introducing the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration, this chapter explores the broader nature and history of anti-immigrant policies and the deprivation of the rights and interests of immigrants. It introduces the main arguments of the book, which are that immigration law fears migrants in a manner that is so overbroad that it punishes, detains, and deports immigrants who bear little resemblance to the stated fears used to justify the laws and that these practices go unchecked by the courts, which defer to the political branches of government under the plenary power doctrine. Finally, the introduction argues that we can learn a lot about the potential for resistance and reform by understanding how lawyers advocating for their clients in immigration courts are sometimes able to achieve just results for their clients even within this unfair system. 1Migrants, Criminal Aliens, and Folk Devils chapter abstractThis chapter uses the ethnographic example of a young man named Omar to illustrate how history, political and economic changes, and race are intertwined in the production of sweeping immigration laws aimed at the perceived dangers of criminal aliens and explores how the 1996 amendments to immigration laws were a manifestation of a neoliberal ideology that constructed "aliens and citizens as different kinds of persons" (Greenhouse 2013, 104). The chapter shows how a key aspect of these changes was removing discretion to make individualized judgments from immigration judges and how the restoration of this discretion is necessary to reach just results. 2A Social History of the Development of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter addresses how the contemporary position of migrants relates to the historical development of U.S. immigration law. The chapter explores how more than a century of immigration legislation and judicial interpretation created both substantive and procedural limits on the protection of migrants' rights. In particular, the chapter shows that the trend has been for perceived threats to be projected in the form of an abstract alien, who embodies those dangers, but for the laws that are passed to be so broad that they affect actual individuals who do not present those threats. 3The Role of Lawyers and Judges in U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter draws on participant observation and interviews to examine current immigration law and focuses, in part, on areas in which immigration judges still retain some discretion: asylum cases and cancellation-of-removal cases. The chapter explores how, even within the relatively rigid system of laws that make up current immigration law, immigration lawyers are able to retain and exploit some flexibility to achieve favorable outcomes for the individuals they assist. 4Law Without Recognition: Excluded Equities and Judges Without Discretion chapter abstractThis chapter explores the particular provisions of contemporary immigration law and the effects they have on individuals. Drawing on participant observation and the experiences of immigration lawyers who were interviewed, the chapter illustrates areas where current immigration law is inflexible and fails to account for individual circumstances and equities and focuses on examples that illustrate both the possibility of a more humane immigration law and the process by which that possibility has been lost under current law. 5The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project: A Revolution Such as Lawyers Would Mount chapter abstractThis chapter provides a detailed account of NYIFUP, which is the first government-funded assigned counsel system for indigent detained migrants facing deportation. The chapter shows how NYIFUP is able to not merely improve access to counsel for individual clients but also use its institutional structure to make broader challenges to existing laws and practices and to systematically document abuse, mistreatment, and injustice suffered by migrants in detention and in removal. Conclusion: The Limitations and Possibilities of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter concludes the book by arguing that one of the main failings of the current immigration system is its refusal to recognize individual equities, such as family relationships, hardships, and social participation and contributions. By examining the Supreme Court's rationale in Trump v. Hawaii, this chapter analyzes how the socio-legal position of migrants is conceptualized. The chapter argues that although immigration law is not itself the sole or main cause of (or solution to) issues of inequality and injustice that relate to migration, its current formalistic and inflexible nature should not be allowed to reduce complex individual, historic, political, and economic events and relationships to narrow legal categories that limit the ability to provide justice to people in precarious positions not of their own making. The chapter ends by recommending areas for reform.

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Book SynopsisDigital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core activity of the twenty-first century. Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models from media studies and political economy, Digital Pirates reveals how the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps between texts—in this case, digital content. Dent's analysis includes his fieldwork in and around São Paulo with pirates, musicians, filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policymakers, politicians, activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of "digital textuality," this book offers crucial insights into the qualities of today's mediascape as well as the particularized political and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how twenty-first century capitalism generates piracy and its enforcement simultaneously, while producing fraught consumer experiences in Latin America and beyond.Trade Review"Digital Pirates is an insightful and often beautiful exploration of digitization as a dissolving agent for older cultural forms, a catalyst for new ones, and a context for reconsolidating the boundaries that define markets, institutions, laws, and publics. Alex Dent moves fluidly between theoretical and empirical registers to weave a rich account of lived experience in Brazil that illuminates global cultural change." -- Joe Karaganis * Columbia University *"Smart, sly, and generatively disconcerting, Digital Pirates is an ethnographically textured and theoretically rambunctious charting of emerging mediascapes. Dent provides a complex and challenging account of contemporary Brazil and a principled exploration of the unpredictable resonances at the contested confluence of media, technology, regulatory regimes, and creativity. And he does so with piratical panache." -- Donald L. Brenneis * University of California, Santa Cruz *

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

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisA strike pattern is a signature of violence carved into the land—bomb craters or fragments of explosives left behind, forgotten. In Strike Patterns, poet and anthropologist Leah Zani journeys to a Lao river community where people live alongside such relics of a secret war. With sensitive and arresting prose, Zani reveals the layered realities that settle atop one another in Laos—from its French colonial history to today's authoritarian state—all blown open by the war. This excavation of postwar life's balance between the mundane, the terrifying, and the extraordinary propels Zani to confront her own explosive past. From 1964 to 1973, the United States carried out a covert air war against Laos. Frequently overshadowed by the war with Vietnam, the Secret War was the longest and most intense air war in history. As Zani uncovers this hidden legacy, she finds herself immersed in the lives of her hosts: Chantha, a daughter of war refugees who grapples with her place in a future Laos of imagined prosperity; Channarong, a bomb technician whose Thai origins allow him to stand apart from the battlefields he clears; and Bounmi, a young man who has inherited his bomb expertise from his father but now struggles to imagine a similar future for his unborn son. Wandering through their lives are the restless ghosts of kin and strangers. Today, much of Laos remains contaminated with dangerous leftover explosives. Despite its obscurity, the Secret War has become a shadow model for modern counterinsurgency. Investigating these shadows of war, Zani spends time with silk weavers and rice farmers, bomb clearance crews and black market war scrap traders, ritual healers and survivors of explosions. Combining her fieldnotes with poetry, fiction, and memoir she reflects on the power of building new lives in the ruins.Trade Review"Strike Patterns is a powerful and poetic observation of the remains of war. The book offers a poignant perspective on what scholarship and experience can yield in the hands of a writer unafraid of the boundaries between disciplines and across genres."—Kao Kalia Yang, author of Somewhere in the Unknown World"In fields of still-live explosives, the U.S. bombing of Laos has not stopped. Through a series of vivid meditations, Zani brings us to their horrors, where children play with cluster bombs, and some prostheses are judged too 'advanced' for Laotians. The stories ring with the kind of truth that can only be brought to light through artistry."—Anna Tsing, co-editor of Feral Atlas"Strike Patterns joins the best of anthropology of war books by centering the research in stories, and by acknowledging that while violence can transform societies, anthropology has an equal responsibility to shift patterns."—Roxanne Varzi, UC Irvine"Fifty years after the Vietnam War tore a hole in Laotian society, the bombing continues to rupture rural lives. Strike Patterns brings precisely this insight to bear on the politics and village relationships in Laos, showing how unexploded bombs became crucial roadblocks to post-conflict recovery, transforming the lives, economic opportunities, and social structures of those living in old theatres of war."—Erin Lin, Pacific AffairsTable of Contents1. 1 2. 2 3. 3 4. 4 5. 5 6. 6 7. 7 8. 8 9. 9 10. 10

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Book SynopsisThe Pakistan Army is a uniquely powerful and influential institution, with vast landholdings and resources. It has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death? Taking ritual commemorations of fallen soldiers as one critical site of study, Rashid argues that these "spectacles of mourning" are careful manipulations of affect, gendered and structured by the military to reinforce its omnipotence in the lives of its subjects. Grounding her study in the famed martial district of Chakwal, Rashid finds affect similarly deployed in recruitment and training practices, as well as management of death and compensation to families. She contends that understanding these affective technologies is crucial to challenging the appeal of the military institution globally.Trade Review"This absorbing and troubling book grapples with the puzzle of how the Pakistani military can hold the devotion and loyalty of so many citizens while promising them endless wars, death, and impairment. Rashid's thoughtful and at times harrowing account draws on sensitive ethnography with families of martyrs and unprecedented access to military ceremonies to weave a persuasive argument about the power of martyrdom and ritualistic mourning as technologies of rule."—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London"This is a unique contribution to critical studies of contemporary militarism as a global phenomenon, while simultaneously casting light on an institution that is not well understood outside its own national context. Ethnographic studies of military organizations are extremely rare due to the excessive secrecy of the defense sector, but Maria Rashid is able to demonstrate why and how gender is so central to this web of institutional and ideological power. This highly original study shows that we can learn about the appeal of military service by engaging with those who stand to lose the most from its allure: the women whose sons and husbands die in uniform."—Vron Ware, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Kingston University"This book is the only text on the Pakistan army that ethnographically focuses on the lives (and deaths) of non-commissioned soldiers and not of senior commissioned officers. By sharing with us the voices of next-of-kin of martyred soldiers, especially women, it weaves a nuanced argument that shows the affective dissonance between women's feelings of regret and anger about their lost sons and husbands and the public affirmation of their sacrifice. It hence explores the gap between the everyday experiences of families that mourn their dead sons in rural Pakistan and the idealized image of the martyr that saturates nationalist representations. Maria Rashid, by brilliantly using tropes of paradox and ambivalence in this excellent book, tells us a story that interplays between nationalism, sacrifice, and masculinity in contemporary Pakistan. Further, unlike many renditions on the Pakistani military, this exceptional text does not focus on the coercive aspect of the army; rather, it enables us to understand the persuasive powers through which this potentially hegemonic entity seeks to create consensus in an effort to produce ideological conformity."—Kamran Asdar Ali, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin"A good read for those who want to understand militarism in Pakistan as well as why the military has become the centerpiece of Pakistani society for decades."—Shuja Nawaz, The Friday Times"[A] must-read for all, especially those who once believed in the narrative of militarism and the sanctity of military deaths but were confused when the layers of this social construct began to peel off."—Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu, Strife"Rashid's book is a sobering reminder that military dominance over civilians is unlikely to change in Pakistan in the foreseeable future."—Rana Banerji, The Indian Express"Psychologist Maria Rashid has produced an extraordinary survey in which she seeks to demonstrate the Pakistan military has used death in combat, particularly the concept of martyrdom, as a tool to extend its domination over the country's political and civil society."—Arnold Zeitlin, South Asia Journal"Every story [I've encountered] demonstrated a dangerous doubt at the very heart of the military; a sign that this powerful institution—which likes to present itself as homogenous, disciplined, heroic and united—is more broken than the generals would have us believe. Maria Rashid's new book,Dying To Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, is a powerful intervention in studies of Pakistani militarism for precisely this reason."—Mahvish Amad, Jamhoor"A compelling account of how micro-level developments fit with the broader pursuit of the Pakistan Army's agenda and narrative, Dying to Serve should be compulsory reading for students and scholars of the army, politics and nationalism at the grassroots level."—Dr. Azma Faiz, Dawn"Dying to Serveboth broadens the anthropology of militarism's geographic focus, which has largely been the United States, and deepens anthropological understandings of militarism as a cultural system through Rashid's rigorous analysis of its gendered and affective dimensions."—Kristin V. Monroe, American Ethnologist"Rashid's book is a remarkable study, providing a social lens through which to see and understand the layered complexities of the relationship between the army, its 'immediate' subjects (families of deceased soldiers) and the nation at large. The book has also opened up space for further research on pacifist, cultural, feminist and post-colonial themes in the context of the Pakistani military."—Faiza Farid, International Affairs"[Dying to Serve] provides a fresh contribution to the study of militarization in Pakistan by drawing upon a psychosocial approach and by focusing on aspects of subjectivity and intimacy in investigating the role played by gender and families in the constitution of the Pakistan Army. The book will certainly prompt fresh discussions and debates in thinking about the Pakistan Army in relationship to kinship, particularly given that so much of the existing scholarship is either focused on [the War on Terror] through the perspective of foreign policy, global geopolitics and military strategy, or where the Pakistan Army is discussed as an important actor in domestic politics and in the country's economy."—Sanaullah Khan, Journal of South Asian Development"The Pakistan Army...has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab, where men have served in the army for generations. These men, their wives and mothers, and the military culture surrounding them are the focus of Maria Rashid's Dying to Serve, which innovatively and sensitively addresses the question: how does the military thrive when so much of its work results in injury, debility, and death?"—Nadia H. Barsoum, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies"One of the most important contributions ofDying to Serveis elucidating the materialist grounds on which militarism stands, undergirded by a historical colonial political economy that is reworked for contemporary Pakistani militarism."—Zahra Khalid, Security Dialogue"Over the course of the last decade, scholarship on the Pakistan Army has proliferated; however, Rashid's Dying to Serve stands out because she has done what others have been unable to do: conduct research among and on the enlisted ranks of the Pakistan Army and their families, with a particular focus on the district of Chakwal. That Rashid identified these men as a site of important empirical work is to her commendation; that she devised a suitable research methodology to conduct the work is remarkable."—C. Christine Farr, Pacific Affairs

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisCourt of Injustice reveals how immigration lawyers work to achieve just results for their clients in a system that has long denigrated the rights of those they serve. J.C. Salyer specifically investigates immigration enforcement in New York City, following individual migrants, their lawyers, and the NGOs that serve them into the immigration courtrooms that decide their cases. This book is an account of the effects of the implementation of U.S. immigration law and policy. Salyer engages directly with the specific laws and procedures that mandate harsh and inhumane outcomes for migrants and their families. Combining anthropological and legal analysis, Salyer demonstrates the economic, historical, political, and social elements that go into constructing inequity under law for millions of non-citizens who live and work in the United States. Drawing on both ethnographic research conducted in New York City and on the author's knowledge and experience as a practicing immigration lawyer at a non-profit organization, this book provides unique insight into the workings and effects of U.S. immigration law. Court of Injustice provides an up-close view of the experiences of immigration lawyers at non-profit organizations, in law school clinics, and in private practice to reveal limitations and possibilities available to non-citizens under U.S. immigration law. In this way, this book provides a new perspective on the study of migration by focusing specifically on the laws, courts, and people involved in U.S. immigration law. Trade Review"This book does such a powerful job of recounting the sad, complicated and disempowering history of immigration laws. It clarifies not just for academics but for everyone that the denial of due process is central to how the legal system responds to immigrants. But what I love about this work is the humanity that J.C. Salyer brings with it. In the end we see that we are all these immigrants and refugees. They are our future and our past and every single one of us is called upon now to see this and act." -- Maria Hinojosa * Latino USA *"Court of Injustice identifies the real structural and procedural problems for noncitizens facing removal from the United States. Salyer's unique perspective on legal services for immigration clients reveals the inequities inherent in the court system and how enforcement policies often preordain outcomes. Policymakers should play close attention to this book." -- Bill Ong Hing * University of San Francisco *"Salyer combines vast legal knowledge with deft anthropological analysis to produce a comprehensive and engaging account of today's immigration system. Highlighting the lawyers navigating a treacherous legal system, this book is a unique, essential, urgent read for anyone who cares about immigration and immigrants today." -- Cecilia Menjívar, University of California * Los Angeles *"Court of Injustice brings a critical ethnographic lens to understanding the reproduction of inequality, xenophobia and racism in U.S. immigration. Salyer dismantles the fictions of 'rule of law' and 'national security' to reveal an arbitrary and punitive federal system decades in the making, and how local governments, lawyers, and civil society are fighting back." -- Shannon Gleeson * Cornell University *"Salyer's focus on disparities across jurisdictions and among individual immigration judges, and particularly the unique role of the NYIFUP as a countervailing force, highlights how local contexts deeply shape immigrants' experiences of justice or lack thereof. This firsthand, detailed account of how the U.S. immigration legal system creates inequality is an important read for sociologists interested in immigration, criminal justice reform, and law and society." -- Ariela Schachter * American Journal of Sociology *"Court of Injustice impressively combines legal and anthropological expertise, contrasting the nuance of law and practice with the on-the-ground experiences of individuals working within the system. There is much to deconstruct in the realm of immigration law, but by interrogating the every day experiences of lawyers, we are able to catch a glimpse of effective forms of resistance, such as the program in New York City, absent legislative reform. By understanding the intricacies of the practice of immigration law, Salyer offers his readers insight into both the challenges and complexities of practicing within this system, and the possibilities for liberatory change." -- Anita Maddali * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Paradoxes of U.S. Immigration Law and Deportation chapter abstractBy introducing the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration, this chapter explores the broader nature and history of anti-immigrant policies and the deprivation of the rights and interests of immigrants. It introduces the main arguments of the book, which are that immigration law fears migrants in a manner that is so overbroad that it punishes, detains, and deports immigrants who bear little resemblance to the stated fears used to justify the laws and that these practices go unchecked by the courts, which defer to the political branches of government under the plenary power doctrine. Finally, the introduction argues that we can learn a lot about the potential for resistance and reform by understanding how lawyers advocating for their clients in immigration courts are sometimes able to achieve just results for their clients even within this unfair system. 1Migrants, Criminal Aliens, and Folk Devils chapter abstractThis chapter uses the ethnographic example of a young man named Omar to illustrate how history, political and economic changes, and race are intertwined in the production of sweeping immigration laws aimed at the perceived dangers of criminal aliens and explores how the 1996 amendments to immigration laws were a manifestation of a neoliberal ideology that constructed "aliens and citizens as different kinds of persons" (Greenhouse 2013, 104). The chapter shows how a key aspect of these changes was removing discretion to make individualized judgments from immigration judges and how the restoration of this discretion is necessary to reach just results. 2A Social History of the Development of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter addresses how the contemporary position of migrants relates to the historical development of U.S. immigration law. The chapter explores how more than a century of immigration legislation and judicial interpretation created both substantive and procedural limits on the protection of migrants' rights. In particular, the chapter shows that the trend has been for perceived threats to be projected in the form of an abstract alien, who embodies those dangers, but for the laws that are passed to be so broad that they affect actual individuals who do not present those threats. 3The Role of Lawyers and Judges in U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter draws on participant observation and interviews to examine current immigration law and focuses, in part, on areas in which immigration judges still retain some discretion: asylum cases and cancellation-of-removal cases. The chapter explores how, even within the relatively rigid system of laws that make up current immigration law, immigration lawyers are able to retain and exploit some flexibility to achieve favorable outcomes for the individuals they assist. 4Law Without Recognition: Excluded Equities and Judges Without Discretion chapter abstractThis chapter explores the particular provisions of contemporary immigration law and the effects they have on individuals. Drawing on participant observation and the experiences of immigration lawyers who were interviewed, the chapter illustrates areas where current immigration law is inflexible and fails to account for individual circumstances and equities and focuses on examples that illustrate both the possibility of a more humane immigration law and the process by which that possibility has been lost under current law. 5The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project: A Revolution Such as Lawyers Would Mount chapter abstractThis chapter provides a detailed account of NYIFUP, which is the first government-funded assigned counsel system for indigent detained migrants facing deportation. The chapter shows how NYIFUP is able to not merely improve access to counsel for individual clients but also use its institutional structure to make broader challenges to existing laws and practices and to systematically document abuse, mistreatment, and injustice suffered by migrants in detention and in removal. Conclusion: The Limitations and Possibilities of U.S. Immigration Law chapter abstractThis chapter concludes the book by arguing that one of the main failings of the current immigration system is its refusal to recognize individual equities, such as family relationships, hardships, and social participation and contributions. By examining the Supreme Court's rationale in Trump v. Hawaii, this chapter analyzes how the socio-legal position of migrants is conceptualized. The chapter argues that although immigration law is not itself the sole or main cause of (or solution to) issues of inequality and injustice that relate to migration, its current formalistic and inflexible nature should not be allowed to reduce complex individual, historic, political, and economic events and relationships to narrow legal categories that limit the ability to provide justice to people in precarious positions not of their own making. The chapter ends by recommending areas for reform.

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book investigates the emergence and evolution of the organ trade across North Africa and Europe. Seán Columb illuminates the voices and perspectives of organ sellers and brokers to demonstrate how crime and immigration controls produce circumstances where the business of selling organs has become a feature of economic survival. Drawing on the experiences of African migrants, Trading Life brings together five years of fieldwork charting the development of the organ trade from an informal economic activity into a structured criminal network operating within and between Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, and Europe. Ground-level analysis provides new insight into the operation of organ trading networks and the impact of current legal and policy measures in response to the organ trade. Columb reveals how investing financial and administrative resources into law enforcement and border securitization at the expense of social services has led to the convergence of illicit smuggling and organ trading networks and the development of organized crime. Trading Life delivers a powerful and grounded analysis of how economic pressures and the demands of survival force people into exploitative arrangements, like selling a kidney, that they would otherwise avoid. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, organized crime, and exploitation.Trade Review"Trading Life vividly and persuasively shows that anti-trafficking law and policy directed at suppressing the organ trade in Cairo has precisely the opposite effect, predictably resulting in greater brutality and exploitation of the most vulnerable. A compelling and powerful look at how law generates violence." -- Audrey Macklin * University of Toronto *"Trading Life is a real exploration that finally gives victims a voice and allows an understanding of the mechanisms and conditions leading them to sell their organs. One of the most concrete books on organ trafficking." -- Agnès Noël * Le Monde *"This is a timely, scholarly study, based on rich and at times risky fieldwork. It will be of great interest to the general public, as well as scholars in criminology, law and society, and public policy." -- Federico Varese * Oxford University *"Columb has succeeded in writing a book that is accessible and understandable for a broad audience, including law -and policy makers, scholars, teachers and students with an interest in migration issues, exploitation, trafficking, smuggling and illicit networks. It is also insightful for those aiming to understand what happens to a market once it becomes illegal. Scientifically, Columb has provided essential building blocks that help to advance knowledge of the organ trade, both empirically and theoretically. His insights have opened up new methods of approach, demonstrating the need to incorporate corporate crime perspectives, crimmigation, and legal/state-induced forms of exploitation to the study of the organ trade. Columb's book should be a core resource for anyone studying this crime." -- Frederike Ambagtsheer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Excavating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe introductory chapter provides contextual background on the organ trade and outlines the key themes and arguments in the book. The current legal and policy response to the organ trade is critically examined at the international level. This analysis leads to an explanation of how law and policy produce and construct vulnerability to exploitation in organ markets. Egypt is introduced as the main research site, where in-depth narrative interviews were carried out with organ sellers, brokers, and transplant professionals. 2The Illegal Trade in Organs chapter abstractChapter 2 examines how an illegal market in organs emerged in the Egyptian-Sudanese context. Contrary to popular opinion, the organ trade is not a direct consequence of a global shortage in organs. Rather, the trade in organs is causally related to the transfer of transplant capabilities to the global South. Accordingly, the commercial expansion of the transplant industry is linked to the emergence of organ trading as an economic activity. The organ trade is thus better understood as an informal economy activity as opposed to a human trafficking offense. 3Organ Trading Networks chapter abstractThe findings in Chapter 3 reflect personal encounters with Sudanese (North and South) nationals who sold or arranged the sale of kidneys. Their accounts provide unique insights into the organization and activities of organ trading networks in Cairo and the political and social arrangements that compel people to consider selling a kidney. 4Disqualified Bodies chapter abstractChapter 4 examines the background conditions and legal structures that underpin exploitative relations in organ markets. Although some of the study respondents were physically coerced into organ removal, it is exploitation experienced at the structural level that ultimately pushes people into organ sale. In this regard, the oppressive processes of exploitation that position migrant populations as organ sellers in Cairo are explored through the social and legal context in which migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have sold a kidney. The wider implications of legal measures established in response to reports of organ trafficking are considered. 5Exodus chapter abstractChapter 5 engages with the narratives of African migrants who attempted to make the journey to Europe using irregular routes. Unable to finance the cost of travel, people smugglers (referred to as samsara by the respondents) encouraged them to sell a kidney to raise the necessary capital. The experiences of the Sudanese, Eritrean, and Ethiopian migrants interviewed in Cairo are used to examine the impact of crime and immigration controls on informal market dynamics and to explore the convergence of smuggling and organ trading networks in Cairo's informal economy. 6Organ(ized) Crime chapter abstractChapter 6 explores how changes to the regulatory environment influenced the level of physical violence involved in the organ trade and the organizational structure of a criminal group operating within and between Khartoum, Sudan, and Cairo, Egypt. The criminal organization described in this chapter should not be taken as representative of the organ trade as a whole, as it exists in Egypt or elsewhere. It does, however, signal a need for policy change to prevent the development of more pernicious forms of organized crime. 7Regulating the Organ Trade chapter abstractThe adverse effects of crime and immigration policies suggest that more far-reaching legal reforms are needed with regard to the organ trade and to other forms of exploitation nominally defined as trafficking offenses. In this final chapter alternative regulatory approaches beyond criminal sanction are explored.

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisDigital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core activity of the twenty-first century. Combining the tools of linguistic and cultural anthropology with models from media studies and political economy, Digital Pirates reveals how the dynamics of IP and piracy serve as strategies for managing the gaps between texts—in this case, digital content. Dent's analysis includes his fieldwork in and around São Paulo with pirates, musicians, filmmakers, police, salesmen, technicians, policymakers, politicians, activists, and consumers. Rather than argue for rigid positions, he suggests that Brazilians are pulled in multiple directions according to the injunctions of international governance, localized pleasure, magical consumption, and economic efficiency. Through its novel theorization of "digital textuality," this book offers crucial insights into the qualities of today's mediascape as well as the particularized political and cultural norms that govern it. The book also shows how twenty-first century capitalism generates piracy and its enforcement simultaneously, while producing fraught consumer experiences in Latin America and beyond.Trade Review"Digital Pirates is an insightful and often beautiful exploration of digitization as a dissolving agent for older cultural forms, a catalyst for new ones, and a context for reconsolidating the boundaries that define markets, institutions, laws, and publics. Alex Dent moves fluidly between theoretical and empirical registers to weave a rich account of lived experience in Brazil that illuminates global cultural change." -- Joe Karaganis * Columbia University *"Smart, sly, and generatively disconcerting, Digital Pirates is an ethnographically textured and theoretically rambunctious charting of emerging mediascapes. Dent provides a complex and challenging account of contemporary Brazil and a principled exploration of the unpredictable resonances at the contested confluence of media, technology, regulatory regimes, and creativity. And he does so with piratical panache." -- Donald L. Brenneis * University of California, Santa Cruz *

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Book SynopsisThe Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights—as discourse, law, and practice—shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.Trade Review"Returning the 'human' to human rights, The Subject of Human Rights is a path-breaking, multi-disciplinary exploration of selfhood and subjecthood. An indispensable rethinking of the field of contemporary human rights studies."—James Loeffler, University of Virginia"This book challenges familiar paradigms for theorizing and contesting the universality of the subject of human rights. The authors extend our critical gaze to the subjectivities shaped by human rights values, to those who implement them, and to us all as addressees of the call to live our lives accordingly."—Dianne Otto, Melbourne Law School"Celermajer and Lefebvre bring together an impressive interdisciplinary cast of cutting-edge thinkers to interrogate the subject of human rights. This thoughtful book offers refreshing perspectives on current human rights debates and points to numerous intriguing alternative futures for the human rights project."—William Paul Simmons, University of Arizona"In The Subject of Human Rights, a diverse group of outstanding scholars reflect on the meaning of the "human" in human rights, shedding light on the current status and direction of the field. An essential contribution to the literature."—Ruti Teitel, New York Law SchoolTable of ContentsIntroduction: Bringing the Subject of Human Rights into Focus —Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre 1. The Relational Self As the Subject of Human Rights —Jennifer Nedelsky 2. The Misbegotten Monad: Anthropology, Human Rights, Belonging —Mark Goodale 3. "Are Women Animals?": The Rise and Rise of (Animal) Rights —Joanna Bourke 4. Indigenous Peoples As the Subject of Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer and Michael Dodson 5. "Escaped": Gendered Precarity and Human Rights Recognition —Wendy S. Hesford 6. Training Subjects for Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer 7. Who Deserves Inalienable Rights?: The Subjectivity of Violent State Officials and the Implications for Human Rights Protection —Rachel Wahl 8. Human Rights As Therapy: The Healing Paradigms of Transitional Justice —Ronald Niezen 9. Cinematic Aesthetics and the Subjects of Human Rights: On Eliane Caffé's Era o Hotel Cambridge —Andrew C. Rajca 10. Human Rights As Spiritual Exercises —Alexandre Lefebvre 11. The Child Subject of Human Rights —Linde Lindkvist 12. The Secular Subject of Human Rights —Jenna Reinbold 13. The Subject of Human Rights: An Interview with Samuel Moyn —Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisThe Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights—as discourse, law, and practice—shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.Trade Review"Returning the 'human' to human rights, The Subject of Human Rights is a path-breaking, multi-disciplinary exploration of selfhood and subjecthood. An indispensable rethinking of the field of contemporary human rights studies."—James Loeffler, University of Virginia"This book challenges familiar paradigms for theorizing and contesting the universality of the subject of human rights. The authors extend our critical gaze to the subjectivities shaped by human rights values, to those who implement them, and to us all as addressees of the call to live our lives accordingly."—Dianne Otto, Melbourne Law School"Celermajer and Lefebvre bring together an impressive interdisciplinary cast of cutting-edge thinkers to interrogate the subject of human rights. This thoughtful book offers refreshing perspectives on current human rights debates and points to numerous intriguing alternative futures for the human rights project."—William Paul Simmons, University of Arizona"In The Subject of Human Rights, a diverse group of outstanding scholars reflect on the meaning of the "human" in human rights, shedding light on the current status and direction of the field. An essential contribution to the literature."—Ruti Teitel, New York Law SchoolTable of ContentsIntroduction: Bringing the Subject of Human Rights into Focus —Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre 1. The Relational Self As the Subject of Human Rights —Jennifer Nedelsky 2. The Misbegotten Monad: Anthropology, Human Rights, Belonging —Mark Goodale 3. "Are Women Animals?": The Rise and Rise of (Animal) Rights —Joanna Bourke 4. Indigenous Peoples As the Subject of Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer and Michael Dodson 5. "Escaped": Gendered Precarity and Human Rights Recognition —Wendy S. Hesford 6. Training Subjects for Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer 7. Who Deserves Inalienable Rights?: The Subjectivity of Violent State Officials and the Implications for Human Rights Protection —Rachel Wahl 8. Human Rights As Therapy: The Healing Paradigms of Transitional Justice —Ronald Niezen 9. Cinematic Aesthetics and the Subjects of Human Rights: On Eliane Caffé's Era o Hotel Cambridge —Andrew C. Rajca 10. Human Rights As Spiritual Exercises —Alexandre Lefebvre 11. The Child Subject of Human Rights —Linde Lindkvist 12. The Secular Subject of Human Rights —Jenna Reinbold 13. The Subject of Human Rights: An Interview with Samuel Moyn —Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre

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

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Book SynopsisWhat if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Nobody's People depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world—including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource.Trade Review"It's difficult to overemphasize the effect of this narrative: the brio with which it is written, the verve of its characters, the author's intellectual panache. This scintillating re-reading of hierarchy, most poignant where it has supposedly been banished, picks apart one of anthropology's greatest conundrums and poses profound questions for evaluations based on social equivalence." -- Marilyn Strathern * University of Cambridge *"Moving away from the ideas of ineffability and stasis that attach to understandings of caste, Piliavsky puts forward a courageous, refreshingly original position on hierarchy." -- Dilip Menon * University of Witwatersrand *"An extraordinary work. A major rethinking of the social productivity of hierarchical relations, this is ethnographically grounded anthropological theorizing at its best. It should fundamentally transform contemporary conversations about the nature of social life." -- Joel Robbins * University of Cambridge *"By exploring the politics of everyday patronage, this compelling study of a 'caste of thieves' addresses one of the most important debates in the sociology of South Asia." -- Filippo Osella, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies * Sussex University *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts0Prologue chapter abstractIn 1991 a hamlet in southern Rajasthan, where the author conducted her research, was nearly razed by a pogrom. Decades later, its perpetrators felt no regret or remorse for the violence. Their victims were Kanjars, a caste of professional thieves and the most marginal local community. Parsing out the moral logic of the pogrom, Piliavsky argues that Kanjars are untouchable among the untouchables not because they are ritually most polluted, but because they are socially least attached. Asymmetrical ties with patrons are essential to the local calculus of people's worth, making hierarchical norms central to the logic of social ambitions. Challenging the egalo-normative commitments of writings on social mobility and aspiration in South Asia, and engaging critically the work of Louis Dumont, the prologue introduces the book's central argument: that hierarchy—as opposed to inequality—can drive social ambition, recognition, and hope. 1Hierarchy as Hope chapter abstractMany in India look to hierarchy as a social good that helps them pursue better lives. Social scientists, conversely, tend to see in hierarchy a system of oppressive stasis. In a wide-ranging reflection on social theory, chapter 1 outlines how its egalo-normative bearings and the old Christian idea of hierarchy as a "pyramid" have produced a caricature of hierarchy as a motionless whole, making it impossible to see why people the world over value it. It argues that hierarchies of all kinds always involve a logic of mutual responsibility structured by difference. Expressed in the idiom of patronal or parent-child relations, these norms do not imply or produce stasis; rather, they are inherently asymmetric, unstable, and dynamic. Outlining how hierarchical norms play out in patronal relations in Rajasthan, Piliavsky challenges the hoary contrast between "holism" and individualism, and outlines a vision of hierarchical individuality. 2The Lords of Begun chapter abstractChapter 2 reveals Begun, a market town, whose layout and history reflect major hierarchical principles. The town is organized concentrically around a citadel—the home of the local hereditary lord, the Rao—according to degrees of intimacy to the royal family, not by degrees of ritual purity and pollution. The highest ranking castes, with homes in the town center, are the Rao's closest, most experienced servants, while those lower and farther out have been more loosely employed by others. Developing an old argument about "centrality" as the organizing principle of caste, this chapter shows that the town and its social hierarchy were traditionally organized like a family, where the Rao was styled as a "father" and his servants as "children." The respective obligations to care for one's servants and to serve one's master are framed in this familial moral idiom that is pivotal to the broader logic of hierarchy. 3The People Who Were Not There chapter abstractWhile relations with Kanjars are denied in polite company, local aristocrats, farmers, and policemen engage them as watchmen, thieves for hire, and dispute negotiators. As such, Kanjars enter the innermost domains of life, while being denied public recognition. Both beneficiaries and victims of their invisibility, they profit from being employed as "secret agents," while ultimately losing out on the recognition that only openly recognized bonds with patrons afford. While running an often lucrative trade, Kanjars remain reputationally offstage—invisible, masterless, unattached—and so, in the eyes of others, lack a proper, cogent self, and thus any social value. For them, the moral significance of patronal attachments is really and truly a matter of life and death. The moral and social outsider can be disposed of casually, with no moral consequence or qualms. 4The Perils of Masterless People chapter abstractThe history of people who have come to be known as Kanjars is a story of a long and frustrated search for patrons, who would care for them and imparting on the community the existentially crucial belonging they long for. Tracing Kanjar history to the 16th century, when the name "Kanjar" first applied to itinerant entertainers at the Mughal court in Delhi, the chapter follows the story of North India's "vagrant" communities engaged as bards, spies, prostitutes and watchmen-cum-thieves for centuries and until this day. "Kanjar," a name of disrepute (today synonymous with "whore," "bastard," or "pimp"), stuck to communities that failed to attach themselves securely to reputable masters, while those succeeding in doing so had acquired more attractive monikers and position in life. While showing the enduring moral significance of asymmetrical bonds, this history also demonstrates the extraordinary historical lability of caste. 5How to Make and Eat a Goddess in Nine Days chapter abstractOnce a year Kanjars, like other Hindus, stage the festival of Navaratri, the nine days during which they celebrate their patron goddesses. For Kanjars, however, the festival carries special significance. As a people who lack suitable ties with human patrons, Kanjars valorize their attachments to goddesses, seeing them as the chief source of their collective self. Through the microcosm of the ritual process, and the minutiae of the exchange that takes place in its course, the chapter demonstrates the existential significance of patron-servant ties and the mutual constitution that these involve. Here, while the goddesses are manufactured by their Kanjar servants, Kanjars quite literally eat the goddesses, and so take on their substance, or khandān. The same logic of mutual constitution guides relations with human patrons. 6Who and Whose chapter abstractA masterless, unattached people in the eyes of others, Kanjars do have human patrons, who play a decisive role in ranking inside the community. The Kanjar caste is divided into those who work as bards, watchmen or thieves, and prostitutes. The segments of the caste are ranked, it is argued, not through moral judgments of their occupation, but on the basis of how tightly their work ties them to particular, precisely specified patrons. The more narrowly specified are these ties, the better the segment's standing. Kanjars involved in prostitution entertain an unrestricted array of patrons and so rank lowest of all, while the thieves with (actual or remembered) bonds to jajmāns among Rajputs, farmers, and the police rank the highest. What matters for social integrity is the integrity of social bonds. Here to be is to belong. 7The New Lords of Begun chapter abstractThis chapter takes readers into the thick of the electoral politics of Begun. Following two Kanjars, the Rao of Begun, and other political players during the 2008 state election campaign, the chapter shows how the hierarchical principles described in Begun shape the democratic process: orienting political strategies, inflecting voters' judgment, and structuring the rise and fall of political fortunes. The expectation to care for one's people, which lies at the heart of hierarchy as a moral logic of responsibility, gives rise to pervasive disappointment and gives meaning to a distinctive local sense of "corruption," as a failure of relations, rather than a failure of public office. Hierarchy emerges as the chief normative frame of local democracy. 8Every Man a King chapter abstractUnderstood as a moral logic of mutually beholden relations, hierarchy is not confined to provincial India. It is the basic idiom, it is argued here, of social ambition and hope, anywhere in the world where these are valued. While assertively egalitarian societies (mostly small-scale communities) curb personal ambitions, hierarchy—or difference that makes a difference—is fundamental to one's ability to improve one's life. In contemporary metropolitan imaginations, where equality is now (formally) the topmost sacrosanct value, hierarchical norms have not been supplanted, they have been transvalued. People have not been leveled, but have been leveled up through the hierarchical idioms of "respect" and "dignity," which have become the pivotal tropes of current global egalitarianism. Hierarchy is thus not only important in rural North India, but remains a powerful structuring force within stridently egalitarian moralities, the "egalitarian" social settings, which make, in Huey Long's words, "every man a king."

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

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Book SynopsisFollowing the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.Trade Review"Drawing on her long-term collaboration with indigenous people, M. Bianet Castellanos eloquently critiques the dispossession of Maya in Cancún and illuminates their resistance. Her passion for revealing and dismantling the racial and gender hierarchies embedded in neoliberal projects is compelling. A nuanced contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism." -- Patricia Zavella * University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism *"In this compelling and timely work, M. Bianet Castellanos has given us a powerful indictment of neoliberalism's perpetuation of the settler project of Indigenous dispossession. She also effectively demonstrates how Indigenous peoples develop strategies of resistance to new technologies of domination like racialized debt, and in the process craft new forms of urban Indigeneity." -- Shannon Speed * University of California, Los Angeles *"A fascinating and highly readable study of how Indigenous Maya experience twenty-first-century rounds of dispossession and esclavitud—this time born of debt tied to housing financing. Focusing upon mortgage-based access to social interest housing in modern-day Cancún, M. Bianet Castellanos' account foregrounds Indigenous voices as they struggle to become homeowners." -- Peter M. Ward * University of Texas at Austin *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Indigenous Cancún chapter abstractThe central argument of this book is that as Indigenous migrants move to cities, they are no longer treated as Indigenous and instead become deracialized subjects who are disciplined through neoliberal instruments of debt, like mortgage finance and credit cards, leading to greater economic precarity and a loss of autonomy from the state. Through an ethnography of Maya migrants living in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest growing cities, I show that Maya migrants' struggles to own a home reveal the colonial and settler colonial structures underpinning the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. As they grapple with predatory lending and foreclosure, Maya families cultivate strategies of resistance, from "waiting out" the state to demanding recognition as Indigenous peoples in urban centers. Through these maneuvers, Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that counters a discourse of urban malaise and articulates dignity with democracy. 1Before Housing Reform: The Gendering of Urban Property chapter abstractChapter one maps out the history of land policies in Cancún and how they have been shaped by ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. By excluding migrants who were unmarried and childless from affordable housing and land programs, the state defined citizenship narrowly and encouraged migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wished to become citizens of this new urban space. In response, Maya women mobilized their status as wives and mothers to lobby for land. 2Promoting Housing Reform: Debt as Patrimony chapter abstractChapter two examines the transformation of Mexico's land distribution policies and property rights through a discursive analysis of the ideologies central to government campaigns promoting "dignified" housing. Analyzing news articles, government campaign documents, and one Maya family's response to these campaigns, I examine the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies used to make housing attractive and to align debt with national ideals. The language of patrimony and suburban domesticity is intended to soften the retreat of the state from land redistribution, and makes palatable and desirable the process of going into debt on a much larger scale than previously possible. 3After Housing Reform: Credit as the New Frontier chapter abstractChapter three analyzes Indigenous migrants' willingness to take on debt. Prior to 2000, Maya aspired to own, but without debt. Homeownership has increased Maya migrants access to credit, making them the "new frontier" of capitalism. But it has concomitantly increased their economic risk. It considers how credit and risk take on a gendered and "moral valence." For male migrants, going into debt to purchase a home is a risky venture that ignores lessons learned from Indigenous experiences with debt servitude. Yet for female migrants, owning a concrete block home has become a sign of progress and security from natural disasters. To tease out this moral, cultural, and gendered dilemma, I examine migrants' experiences with microfinance and credit cards. 4Foreclosure: Waiting Out the State chapter abstractChapter four centers on one Maya family's experience with foreclosure. How do Indigenous peoples cope with this loss and how does it (re)structure their attachments to place, land and nation? Even as housing reform becomes a form of discipline to produce new types of citizens and construct new narratives of progress, debt delinquency, and insecurity, I show how migrants' resistance strategies, from foot dragging to legal suits to postponing foreclosure, are transformed into a process of "waiting out" the state and capital. In so doing, Maya migrants sidestep the bureaucratic measures created to regulate the poor and convert consent into provocative acts of obstruction and defiance. 5Eviction: Invoking Indigenous Resistance chapter abstractChapter five examines the case of Maya migrants who reject social housing and instead opt to live in the squatter settlement of Colonia Mario Villanueva. Social housing, Maya migrants argue, entails great risk (due to mortgage debt) and is rife with social atomization. In contrast, life in Colonia Mario Villanueva is organized around the principles of Indigenous communal land practices. It is centered around the colonia's legal battle to avoid eviction, which was led by Maya women. These women relied on strategies of resistance derived from Indigenous land struggles. Colonias are perfect places to cultivate political subordination, but in the case of Mario Villanueva, they also become spaces of insubordination. Epilogue: A Cautionary Tale of Indebtedness chapter abstractThe book concludes by assessing how Indigenous migrants have fared under housing reform. Galvanized by the parallels between their ancestors' struggle with esclavitud and their own land and housing struggles, Maya migrants demand to be engaged as Indigenous and accorded the rights to land and self-determination. Migrants urge us to engage with a more expansive conception of territoriality, one that is not limited to the land boundaries of rural communities but is broad enough to recognize the peninsula's sacred Maya geography and to encompass Indigenous diasporas in urban centers. Through this articulation, they offer a more dynamic interpretation of Indigenous rights that aims to combat settler tactics of elimination through assimilation and dispossession. In so doing, Maya migrants are forging a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that moves beyond a colonial politics of recognition.

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