Social and cultural anthropology Books

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 SynopsisIn 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become "viral" through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a "best practice," one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.Trade Review"Through innovative research in Ethiopia and beyond, Marit Tolo Østebø exposes the hidden dimensions of how policy models gain traction and with what consequences. Village Gone Viral follows the global circuits of a 'model' African village and the impact on its place of origin to offer original insights, well-written and relevant to wide audiences." -- Victoria Bernal * University of California, Irvine *"With this lively and engaging book, Marit Tolo Østebø not only provides a convincing and compelling account from a 'model village' in contemporary Ethiopia. She also enriches the anthropology of development with new theoretical tools and updates it with concepts appropriate for the Internet age. Highly recommended." -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen * University of Oslo *"Marit Tolo Østebø's engaged, excellently researched, and accessible Village Gone Viral stands out for its detailed examination of how circulating policy models are translated into everyday village life. Wherever in the world readers are, they will quickly feel familiar with what goes on in the seemingly remote village of Awra Amba." -- Richard Rottenburg * Wits University *"This thoughtful study is a distinctive addition to the theoretically complex literature on the anthropology of policy...Village Gone Viralgains depth and relevancy by acknowledging the importance of recognizing actions of inequality, exclusion, and injustice as evidence of flaws in an ideal social model, which can detrimentally impact any international application. Recommended." -- R. B. Ridinger * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a vignette that illustrates the traveling nature of policy models. This is followed by an outline of the book's overall argument and objectives and a brief synopsis of how models, in various forms, increasingly are used as policy instruments and in efforts aimed at generating social and behavioral change. I then introduce viral assemblage, a theoretical and analytical concept that can help us make sense of how ideas and models travel in an increasingly transnational and digital world. Finally, I move to a methodological section where, in addition to situating myself in the field, I discuss how the concept of viral assemblage can also help us make sense of the methods, processes, and products that we, as anthropologists, engage in and create. 1The Village chapter abstractIn Chapter 1, I first outline key characteristics of the Awra Amba community and its history, as commonly conveyed and globally known. I then transition to an ethnographic vignette that draws on one of my first visits to the community. In addition to introducing some of the ambivalences, paradoxes, and silences that spurred me to explore beyond and behind the official narrative, this account illustrates some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas I have faced while researching Awra Amba. The chapter ends with a discussion of these ambiguities. 2Ethiopia—The Real Wakanda? chapter abstractIn Chapter 2, I situate Awra Amba in a broader historical and political context. As I detail how development and gender-related policies have evolved in and been implemented in Ethiopia, I pay particular attention to the prominent role that models, in various forms, have played in shaping the political ideologies and policies of the various Ethiopian regimes. The current government has positioned itself as an independent developmental state, setting conditions for donor involvement. Nevertheless, I show how Ethiopia's development policies have been, and continue to be, influenced by global currents and policies. This is clearly reflected in the way that gender and women's rights issues are framed in the Ethiopian context. 3The Emergence of a Traveling Model chapter abstractBy situating Awra Amba within the broader model village paradigm and in relation to a nearby expert-initiated model village, Chapter 3 deconstructs the different parts that constitute the Awra Amba model and the various ways models come into being. I draw on Clifford Geertz's distinction between models for and models of and Richard Rottenburg's concept of traveling models to show how multiple models emerge in the Awra Amba case. I suggest that the power of the traveling model—its capacity to go viral—is conditioned on the existence of a representative model, which is produced and performed at a specific place or location and reflects the ideologies and emotional sentiments of its interacting audience, who picks it up and facilitates its circulation. In other words, the model for and a corresponding model of enable and produce the traveling model. 4Alayhim—A Potential Disruption chapter abstractWith a particular focus on Awra Amba's contested history, Chapter 4 further explores the dynamics of model making. I argue that model making within the global policy world, similar to that in fields such as science and economics, can best be understood as a process of idealization—of ordering a complex assemblage. This is a process in which actors who benefit from the model and its status as an ideal type accentuate certain desirable elements of a perceived reality, while erasing or silencing elements that create unwanted complexity. In the Awra Amba case, the disruptive elements are most clearly captured in its partly hidden past—in the community's historical and ideological links to a Sufi community known as Alayhim. I end the chapter with an analysis of why Alayhim, just like a virus, represents a threatening and potentially disruptive element. 5Modes of Transmission chapter abstractIn Chapter 5, I discuss the vehicles and infrastructure—the multiple pathways and the networks of actors and vectors—that have facilitated the spread of the Awra Amba model as a transnational model for gender equality and sustainable development. To use an epidemiological term, we can think of this as the traveling model's modes of transmission. While the Awra Amba case illustrates that the exchange of ideas between conventional policy actors during policy tours, workshops, and seminars remains important in terms of facilitating a model's virality, it also points to the importance of looking beyond conventional policy actors and infrastructure. The constant emergence of new actors, partnerships, and technologies in our increasingly globalized and digitalized world has radically changed the ways policy ideas and models come into being and then travel. 6Going Viral chapter abstractWhy do some models go viral, while others do not? What is it that has compelled the various vectors and carriers in the Awra Amba assemblage to pick up and spread the community's stories and values? These are the questions I explore in Chapter 6, where I expand current academic conversations on policy mobility and traveling models, examining stories told by people who have been "infected" by Awra Amba and as a result are transmitting and circulating the model. These stories reveal that affect and desire play a key role in fueling a model's virality. This is an aspect that the existing literature on policy mobility and traveling models has overlooked. 7Conditional Virality chapter abstractWith an empirical focus on Lyfta and the company's flagship product, The Awra Amba Experience, Chapter 7 sheds light on how emotions and empathy both fuel and limit Awra Amba's virality. Driven by a passion to foster global citizenship and empathy and to counter the negative and stereotypical images that dominate mainstream media, Lyfta's producers very consciously draw on the logics of affect in the creation and marketing of their product. Yet, the stories they have produced rely on and reify the stereotypes they intend to challenge. While it is often assumed that empathy is key to greater social justice, the commercialization of The Awra Amba Experience, along with the "othering" that underpins Lyfta's documentaries, produce exclusionary practices. This shows that empathy not only is insufficient for understanding power structures but it can also sustain and create them. 8Being a Model chapter abstractHow "authentic" are the official Awra Amba narratives? Is Awra Amba a place where gender equality is real? Chapter 8 sheds light on the effects that being chosen or identified as a model have on the model itself. I show how becoming a model has led to increased recognition, benefits, and preferential treatment for the community, contributing to infrastructural and economic improvements. Yet, it is also clear that the model status comes at a price: obligations, responsibilities, and pressures to engage in representational and performative strategies aimed at maintaining, controlling, and stabilizing the Awra Amba narrative. The community's status as a model limits the possibility of questioning and challenging inequalities and injustices, shaping a community that only partly reflects the idealized model for a just, gender-equal, and peaceful society depicted in common representations of Awra Amba. Conclusion: Infected chapter abstractThe Conclusion opens with an ethnographic, self-reflective vignette that describes how I myself, eventually, became "infected" with the Awra Amba virus. By linking my fascination with Lyfta's products—particularly The Awra Amba Experience—to a pedagogical model I use in the classroom, I show how this infection was conditioned on and linked to my own identity and desires as an educator. Finally, I return to the meta-normative concerns that animate my work, drawing out the lessons to be learned from this case study and the relevance of viral assemblage for a context-sensitive, critical anthropology of traveling models.

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Book SynopsisIn 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become "viral" through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a "best practice," one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.Trade Review"Through innovative research in Ethiopia and beyond, Marit Tolo Østebø exposes the hidden dimensions of how policy models gain traction and with what consequences. Village Gone Viral follows the global circuits of a 'model' African village and the impact on its place of origin to offer original insights, well-written and relevant to wide audiences." -- Victoria Bernal * University of California, Irvine *"With this lively and engaging book, Marit Tolo Østebø not only provides a convincing and compelling account from a 'model village' in contemporary Ethiopia. She also enriches the anthropology of development with new theoretical tools and updates it with concepts appropriate for the Internet age. Highly recommended." -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen * University of Oslo *"Marit Tolo Østebø's engaged, excellently researched, and accessible Village Gone Viral stands out for its detailed examination of how circulating policy models are translated into everyday village life. Wherever in the world readers are, they will quickly feel familiar with what goes on in the seemingly remote village of Awra Amba." -- Richard Rottenburg * Wits University *"This thoughtful study is a distinctive addition to the theoretically complex literature on the anthropology of policy...Village Gone Viralgains depth and relevancy by acknowledging the importance of recognizing actions of inequality, exclusion, and injustice as evidence of flaws in an ideal social model, which can detrimentally impact any international application. Recommended." -- R. B. Ridinger * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a vignette that illustrates the traveling nature of policy models. This is followed by an outline of the book's overall argument and objectives and a brief synopsis of how models, in various forms, increasingly are used as policy instruments and in efforts aimed at generating social and behavioral change. I then introduce viral assemblage, a theoretical and analytical concept that can help us make sense of how ideas and models travel in an increasingly transnational and digital world. Finally, I move to a methodological section where, in addition to situating myself in the field, I discuss how the concept of viral assemblage can also help us make sense of the methods, processes, and products that we, as anthropologists, engage in and create. 1The Village chapter abstractIn Chapter 1, I first outline key characteristics of the Awra Amba community and its history, as commonly conveyed and globally known. I then transition to an ethnographic vignette that draws on one of my first visits to the community. In addition to introducing some of the ambivalences, paradoxes, and silences that spurred me to explore beyond and behind the official narrative, this account illustrates some of the methodological and ethical dilemmas I have faced while researching Awra Amba. The chapter ends with a discussion of these ambiguities. 2Ethiopia—The Real Wakanda? chapter abstractIn Chapter 2, I situate Awra Amba in a broader historical and political context. As I detail how development and gender-related policies have evolved in and been implemented in Ethiopia, I pay particular attention to the prominent role that models, in various forms, have played in shaping the political ideologies and policies of the various Ethiopian regimes. The current government has positioned itself as an independent developmental state, setting conditions for donor involvement. Nevertheless, I show how Ethiopia's development policies have been, and continue to be, influenced by global currents and policies. This is clearly reflected in the way that gender and women's rights issues are framed in the Ethiopian context. 3The Emergence of a Traveling Model chapter abstractBy situating Awra Amba within the broader model village paradigm and in relation to a nearby expert-initiated model village, Chapter 3 deconstructs the different parts that constitute the Awra Amba model and the various ways models come into being. I draw on Clifford Geertz's distinction between models for and models of and Richard Rottenburg's concept of traveling models to show how multiple models emerge in the Awra Amba case. I suggest that the power of the traveling model—its capacity to go viral—is conditioned on the existence of a representative model, which is produced and performed at a specific place or location and reflects the ideologies and emotional sentiments of its interacting audience, who picks it up and facilitates its circulation. In other words, the model for and a corresponding model of enable and produce the traveling model. 4Alayhim—A Potential Disruption chapter abstractWith a particular focus on Awra Amba's contested history, Chapter 4 further explores the dynamics of model making. I argue that model making within the global policy world, similar to that in fields such as science and economics, can best be understood as a process of idealization—of ordering a complex assemblage. This is a process in which actors who benefit from the model and its status as an ideal type accentuate certain desirable elements of a perceived reality, while erasing or silencing elements that create unwanted complexity. In the Awra Amba case, the disruptive elements are most clearly captured in its partly hidden past—in the community's historical and ideological links to a Sufi community known as Alayhim. I end the chapter with an analysis of why Alayhim, just like a virus, represents a threatening and potentially disruptive element. 5Modes of Transmission chapter abstractIn Chapter 5, I discuss the vehicles and infrastructure—the multiple pathways and the networks of actors and vectors—that have facilitated the spread of the Awra Amba model as a transnational model for gender equality and sustainable development. To use an epidemiological term, we can think of this as the traveling model's modes of transmission. While the Awra Amba case illustrates that the exchange of ideas between conventional policy actors during policy tours, workshops, and seminars remains important in terms of facilitating a model's virality, it also points to the importance of looking beyond conventional policy actors and infrastructure. The constant emergence of new actors, partnerships, and technologies in our increasingly globalized and digitalized world has radically changed the ways policy ideas and models come into being and then travel. 6Going Viral chapter abstractWhy do some models go viral, while others do not? What is it that has compelled the various vectors and carriers in the Awra Amba assemblage to pick up and spread the community's stories and values? These are the questions I explore in Chapter 6, where I expand current academic conversations on policy mobility and traveling models, examining stories told by people who have been "infected" by Awra Amba and as a result are transmitting and circulating the model. These stories reveal that affect and desire play a key role in fueling a model's virality. This is an aspect that the existing literature on policy mobility and traveling models has overlooked. 7Conditional Virality chapter abstractWith an empirical focus on Lyfta and the company's flagship product, The Awra Amba Experience, Chapter 7 sheds light on how emotions and empathy both fuel and limit Awra Amba's virality. Driven by a passion to foster global citizenship and empathy and to counter the negative and stereotypical images that dominate mainstream media, Lyfta's producers very consciously draw on the logics of affect in the creation and marketing of their product. Yet, the stories they have produced rely on and reify the stereotypes they intend to challenge. While it is often assumed that empathy is key to greater social justice, the commercialization of The Awra Amba Experience, along with the "othering" that underpins Lyfta's documentaries, produce exclusionary practices. This shows that empathy not only is insufficient for understanding power structures but it can also sustain and create them. 8Being a Model chapter abstractHow "authentic" are the official Awra Amba narratives? Is Awra Amba a place where gender equality is real? Chapter 8 sheds light on the effects that being chosen or identified as a model have on the model itself. I show how becoming a model has led to increased recognition, benefits, and preferential treatment for the community, contributing to infrastructural and economic improvements. Yet, it is also clear that the model status comes at a price: obligations, responsibilities, and pressures to engage in representational and performative strategies aimed at maintaining, controlling, and stabilizing the Awra Amba narrative. The community's status as a model limits the possibility of questioning and challenging inequalities and injustices, shaping a community that only partly reflects the idealized model for a just, gender-equal, and peaceful society depicted in common representations of Awra Amba. Conclusion: Infected chapter abstractThe Conclusion opens with an ethnographic, self-reflective vignette that describes how I myself, eventually, became "infected" with the Awra Amba virus. By linking my fascination with Lyfta's products—particularly The Awra Amba Experience—to a pedagogical model I use in the classroom, I show how this infection was conditioned on and linked to my own identity and desires as an educator. Finally, I return to the meta-normative concerns that animate my work, drawing out the lessons to be learned from this case study and the relevance of viral assemblage for a context-sensitive, critical anthropology of traveling models.

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Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"

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Book SynopsisMexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.Trade Review"This engrossing ethnography shows legal abortion in Mexico City to be a much-needed expansion of healthcare—and a site where norms of 'good' and 'responsible' womanhood are perpetuated rather than challenged. By sharing patients, staff, and activist experiences of this conundrum with nuance and care, Singer enables readers to think in new ways about what reproductive justice might truly mean."—Emily Wentzell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of Iowa"Elyse Ona Singer's beautiful, riveting account takes us inside Mexico's reckoning with reproductive rights. Her moving, honest stories from Mexico City abortion clinics show staff and patients acting with humility, humanity, and a healthy dose of ethical ambivalence. Lawful Sins is a brilliant, timely ethnography, offering insights into the tangled relations between Church and state as each strives to control reproductive lives and bodies."—Lynn M. Morgan, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College"In lucid and lively prose, Elyse Ona Singer tells a surprising story about abortion in Mexico. Yes, in Mexico City abortion is now legal. But the women who seek it refuse to live as autonomous rights bearers. Instead, they reckon with abortion only in relation to others: their families and God. Crucial reading for anyone engaged in debates about contemporary personhood, autonomy and reproductive governance."—Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan"Elyse Ona Singer provides an antidote to rigid U.S. abortion discourse by inviting the reader to delve into Mexico's abortion climate—characterized as it is by its endless shades of gray and nuance. ... despite being an 'outsider' in her research, Singer paints a vivid and moving account that indicates a deep respect for and desire to understand both Mexico and its people."—Andréa Becker, Gender & Society"An incredibly timely book,Lawful Sinsis an important intervention in hemispheric and indeed global debates about women and reproduction. Highly recommended."—B. A. Lucero, CHOICE"At such a turbulent time for abortion access in the Americas, Singer's book offers a chance for reflection and deeper understanding of the many issues at stake....Lawful Sins invites the reader to think beyond rights and engage instead with justice-oriented frameworks."—Lucía Guerra Reyes, American Ethnologist"A central contribution of Singer's book is the clear window it provides into the everyday goings-on inside Mexico City's ILE clinics. The reader gets a vivid sense of clinicians' and patients' experiences at clinics, as well as the infrastructural problems that make abortion difficult to provide and to access, including resource shortages, long wait times, limited appointments, and challenging commutes."—Natalie L. Kimball, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Past Is Never Dead ... : Reproductive Governance in Modern Mexico 2. The Right to Sin: Abortion Rights in the Shadow of the Church 3. Being (a) Patient: The Making of Public Abortion 4. Abortion as Social Labor: Protection and Responsibility in Public Abortion Care 5. At the Limit of Rights: Abortion in the Extralegal Sphere Conclusion

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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 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 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 SynopsisThroughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.Trade Review"A brilliant demonstration of how speech genres can shape history, Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern traces the emergence of political oratory in South India, calling new publics into being and driving the rise of the Tamil modern. Bernard Bate's new book is a foundational, richly documented contribution to the study of comparative modernities, South Asian history, and political anthropology, securing his legacy as a worthy heir to Weber and Durkheim in the elucidation of modern social and political formations."—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington"This book—assembled by a remarkable group of his colleagues—is a tribute to Bate's monumental effort to place Tamil oratory in its civilizational, genealogical, and comparative context. Bate's argument about Protestant sermonizing as the key to the birth of the modern political subject in Tamil country is a major breakthrough in the study of the linkage of modern politics to poetics and religious oratory."—Arjun Appadurai, New York University"Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern succeeds as the work of an academic community that is motivated by the desire to see that their friend and colleague's research receives the academic reception they believe is its due. It also stands as a monument to the scholarship of an original and gifted anthropologist... It is now for other scholars to take up the trail that Bate has blazed."—L. Michael Ratnapalan, Situations

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Book SynopsisWhat should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.Trade Review"A major ethnographic study, Supercorporate offers a rare glimpse into the social world within a corporation where far more than economic production takes place. Readers will be struck by the book's far-reaching implications for comprehending the conflicts between hierarchy and democracy."—Greg Urban, University of Pennsylvania"Prentice's revelatory book unveils the HR practices of a Korean conglomerate as it shifts from overwork and forced conviviality to carrying out meritocratic ideals. This organization in transition reflects its society at large. A must-read for both researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative endeavors across or within corporations."—Katherine Chen, The City College of New York, CUNY"Prentice has written an interesting and useful account of both changes in the corporate work environment in neoliberal South Korea and the continuities in its corporate organizational forms. Hierarchies are not necessarily simply flattened out: they have been morphin in ways shaped by both the profit motive and social expectations."—Vladimir Tikhonov, Asian Studies Review"Supercorporate delivers on its promises. The book clarifies the nuances involved in incentivizing employees through balancing opportunities for distinction and participation amid hierarchical infrastructures. It is in those office programs where 'post-hierarchy' South Korea could be found. Supercorporate thus offers a timely ethnography of South Korean office life and its multifaceted hierarchies."—Olga Fedorenko, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. A New Tower 2. Infrastructures of Distinction 3. Old Spirits of Capitalism 4. Surveying Sangdo 5. Interrupting Democracy 6. Virtual Escapes Conclusion: Hidden Distinctions Methodological Appendix

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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 SynopsisOn any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability. Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.Trade Review"Original, lucidly written, and theoretically rigorous, this rich ethnography tells us how to find the state in a quite unexpected place: the bakery. An outstanding book."—John Chalcraft, London School of Economics, author of Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East"The exciting States of Subsistence not only challenges how we think about state power in Jordan, but offers a nuanced reading of the literature on state power and an original theoretical approach. José Ciro Martínez provides a roadmap for examining quotidian practices of state power in democracies and non-democracies alike."—Jillian Schwedler, author of Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent"Beautifully written, rich in ethnographic detail, States of Subsistence examines the constitution of the state at a novel site: the bakery. Drawing on remarkable access to the inner workings of both bakeries and government bureaucracy, José Ciro Martínez offers a nuanced account of how subsidized bread figures in people's everyday lives and encounters with the state."—Jessica Barnes, author of Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt"Jose Ciro Martinez's brilliant new book,States of Subsistence, largely sets aside those dominant questions of bread riots, food security, regime survival and economic reforms to craft a uniquely important and absolutely fascinating look into the political meaning of the lived experience of subsidized bread in Jordan."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"In this fascinating book, [Martínez] reveals the extent to which the bread subsidy is intimately woven into the economic, social, and political life of the kingdom."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"Centering the perspectives of Jordanians with intimate knowledge of bread and baking, Martínez demonstrates the analytical payoff of taking cultures of consumption and culinary knowledge seriously."—Anny Gaul, Current History"Martínez sees the consumption and production of bread as a microcosm for how Jordanians coexist with authoritarian power. There is no other book about the politics of subsidizing bread in Jordan, certainly none that bestows such a memorable conclusion."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information Project"I have long waited for this kind of book, an embodied political economy of a staple food such as bread, and how it literally—rather than just symbolically—sustains a nation. Martinez's evocative ethnography of bread and political stability in Jordan is a prime example of how minute attention to everyday food practices can yield deep analytical insights into the workings of a state."—Katharina Graf, Gastronomica"This splendid ethnographic study addresses one of political science's most glaring lacunae. Few things weigh more heavily than food upon both citizens and governments alike. Yet few other concepts are as understudied as this one, particularly by political scientists working on the Middle East.... To make sense of this uncertain future, observers of Jordan should consider how politics and food became wedded to one another in the first place. States of Subsistence is a magnificent place to start."—Sean Yom, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. A New Style of Administration 2. Sensing the State 3. Statecraft 4. Echoes, Absences, and Reach 5. Tactics at the Bakery 6. Leavened Apprehensions Conclusion

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Book SynopsisHow do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating connection between state administration and public sentiment. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called "Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity. Trade Review"Administering Affect leaves no ethnographic stone unturned. It is artfully organized and compellingly written. Its scholarship is meticulous and masterfully synthetic. Its conceptual contributions are original and wide-ranging. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the impulsions and compulsions of the contemporary dynamics of soft power."—James Faubion, Rice University"This is a bracing read: original, evocative, beautifully organized, and deeply persuasive. It's a rare piece of work, clearly situated in disciplinary debates and practices while offering far wider and equally substantive contributions."—David Leheny, Waseda University"With this long-awaited monograph, White proves himself a major contributor to research on media culture, affect, and governmental policy. With startling access and insights, White examines the deeply personal work of male bureaucrats—less as efficient automatons and more as highly fallible humans—crafting national anxieties with the paintbrush of girl-cute in Japan."—Christine Yano, University of Hawai'i at Manoa"White gives a unique, ethnographic case study of the efforts by the Japanese government to promote 'Pop-Culture Japan' as a means of reducing the anxieties caused by increased international competitiveness and regional tensions in East Asia. Based on extraordinary access to those in the Japanese government responsible for planning and implementing this program, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Japan Foundation, the book features detailed analysis of and insights into the 'Cool Japan' branding campaigns, the young female 'Ambassadors of Cute,' and the promotion of anime, all designed by mostly male Japanese bureaucrats to foster appreciation of Japanese culture and reduce political anxieties....Recommended."—M. D. Ericson, CHOICE"White's work underscores that in furthering our understandings of Japanese society as a whole, we cannot be beholden to dominant narratives and groups. We must recognize the diversity of experience and practice that state narratives often elide and obfuscate."—John Ostermiller, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisOn any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability. Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.Trade Review"Original, lucidly written, and theoretically rigorous, this rich ethnography tells us how to find the state in a quite unexpected place: the bakery. An outstanding book."—John Chalcraft, London School of Economics, author of Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East"The exciting States of Subsistence not only challenges how we think about state power in Jordan, but offers a nuanced reading of the literature on state power and an original theoretical approach. José Ciro Martínez provides a roadmap for examining quotidian practices of state power in democracies and non-democracies alike."—Jillian Schwedler, author of Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent"Beautifully written, rich in ethnographic detail, States of Subsistence examines the constitution of the state at a novel site: the bakery. Drawing on remarkable access to the inner workings of both bakeries and government bureaucracy, José Ciro Martínez offers a nuanced account of how subsidized bread figures in people's everyday lives and encounters with the state."—Jessica Barnes, author of Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt"Jose Ciro Martinez's brilliant new book,States of Subsistence, largely sets aside those dominant questions of bread riots, food security, regime survival and economic reforms to craft a uniquely important and absolutely fascinating look into the political meaning of the lived experience of subsidized bread in Jordan."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"In this fascinating book, [Martínez] reveals the extent to which the bread subsidy is intimately woven into the economic, social, and political life of the kingdom."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"Centering the perspectives of Jordanians with intimate knowledge of bread and baking, Martínez demonstrates the analytical payoff of taking cultures of consumption and culinary knowledge seriously."—Anny Gaul, Current History"Martínez sees the consumption and production of bread as a microcosm for how Jordanians coexist with authoritarian power. There is no other book about the politics of subsidizing bread in Jordan, certainly none that bestows such a memorable conclusion."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information Project"I have long waited for this kind of book, an embodied political economy of a staple food such as bread, and how it literally—rather than just symbolically—sustains a nation. Martinez's evocative ethnography of bread and political stability in Jordan is a prime example of how minute attention to everyday food practices can yield deep analytical insights into the workings of a state."—Katharina Graf, Gastronomica"This splendid ethnographic study addresses one of political science's most glaring lacunae. Few things weigh more heavily than food upon both citizens and governments alike. Yet few other concepts are as understudied as this one, particularly by political scientists working on the Middle East.... To make sense of this uncertain future, observers of Jordan should consider how politics and food became wedded to one another in the first place. States of Subsistence is a magnificent place to start."—Sean Yom, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. A New Style of Administration 2. Sensing the State 3. Statecraft 4. Echoes, Absences, and Reach 5. Tactics at the Bakery 6. Leavened Apprehensions Conclusion

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Book SynopsisPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.Trade Review"Crossing a Line tells a story of connection and fragmentation, of joy and grief, and of Palestine and its impossible geographies. With a penetrating ethnographic eye and elegant prose, Amahl Bishara gives us an account of Palestinian political expression across barriers that should be widely read."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University"This riveting and remarkable book transforms our understanding of the fragility and perseverance of Palestinian collectivities separated by the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. Amahl Bishara's eloquent ethnography examines political and expressive relationships between communities affected differentially by 1948 and by 1967, and in the diaspora."—Lisa Lowe, Yale University"In this deeply engaged ethnography, Amahl Bishara traces the varying modes and expressions of embodied protest among Palestinians fragmented across Israel's colonial geography. Offering a sensitive reading of Palestinian peoplehood and political difference, Crossing a Line brings social movement theory into critical engagement with settler colonial and native studies." —Rema Hammami, Birzeit University"This critical examination of Palestinian life in Israel and under occupation is accessible to a wide audience and deeply revealing of the relationship between place, people, and politics. Recommended."—P. Rowe, CHOICE"The very structure of occupation promotes atomization, which severely undermines the Palestinian cause. Bridging the divide among Palestinians, as Bishara and many others seek to do, is a necessary step in the way to a freer Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Crossing a Line serves as a reminder for those committed to anti-imperialism to look beyond the corporate window-dressing version of sovereignty, to unearth alternative and emergent projects for liberation that are more firmly rooted in lived experience."—Leila Kawar, Against the Current"Bishara's ethnographic research, stretching over nearly two decades, has produced a meticulous study of Israel's continuing domination and steady appropriation through multiple forms of fragmentation, immobilisation, ghettoisation and violence.... Crossing a Line is an extraordinarily multi-layered and nuanced book in which she probes the particulars of the Palestinian experience and relates them to broader contexts of colonisation, dispossession, racism and violence within the USA and elsewhere."—Nancy Murray, Race and Class"Bishara's ultimate gift to the reader is a comprehensive story of Palestinian life. To the Palestinian reader, it grows faith in our cause and fortitude. To others, it is an invitation to witness...: not in the hope of an immediate departures, but to stay with us long enough to learn how to traverse the colonial situation—the thing that makes reality unlivable—and find life again in the company of the joys and pains of others."—Eman Ghanayem, Public BooksTable of ContentsPrologue Introduction Passage 1: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Haifa Beach 1. The Shifting Ground of Palestine Passage 2: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Northern Galilee 2. Protesting the War on Gaza Together, Apart Passage 3: Passage: Bethlehem to Lubiya 3. The Momentum of Commemoration Passage 4: Passage: Jaffa to Aida Refugee Camp 4. A Juxtaposition of Palestinian Places Passage 5: Passage: Jerusalem to Nablus 5. Territory and Mourning on Social Media Passage 6: Passage: Bethlehem to Jerusalem 6. Bonds of Care: Prison and the Green Line Passage 7: Driving North Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.Trade Review"This engrossing ethnography shows legal abortion in Mexico City to be a much-needed expansion of healthcare—and a site where norms of 'good' and 'responsible' womanhood are perpetuated rather than challenged. By sharing patients, staff, and activist experiences of this conundrum with nuance and care, Singer enables readers to think in new ways about what reproductive justice might truly mean."—Emily Wentzell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of Iowa"Elyse Ona Singer's beautiful, riveting account takes us inside Mexico's reckoning with reproductive rights. Her moving, honest stories from Mexico City abortion clinics show staff and patients acting with humility, humanity, and a healthy dose of ethical ambivalence. Lawful Sins is a brilliant, timely ethnography, offering insights into the tangled relations between Church and state as each strives to control reproductive lives and bodies."—Lynn M. Morgan, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College"In lucid and lively prose, Elyse Ona Singer tells a surprising story about abortion in Mexico. Yes, in Mexico City abortion is now legal. But the women who seek it refuse to live as autonomous rights bearers. Instead, they reckon with abortion only in relation to others: their families and God. Crucial reading for anyone engaged in debates about contemporary personhood, autonomy and reproductive governance."—Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan"Elyse Ona Singer provides an antidote to rigid U.S. abortion discourse by inviting the reader to delve into Mexico's abortion climate—characterized as it is by its endless shades of gray and nuance. ... despite being an 'outsider' in her research, Singer paints a vivid and moving account that indicates a deep respect for and desire to understand both Mexico and its people."—Andréa Becker, Gender & Society"An incredibly timely book,Lawful Sinsis an important intervention in hemispheric and indeed global debates about women and reproduction. Highly recommended."—B. A. Lucero, CHOICE"At such a turbulent time for abortion access in the Americas, Singer's book offers a chance for reflection and deeper understanding of the many issues at stake....Lawful Sins invites the reader to think beyond rights and engage instead with justice-oriented frameworks."—Lucía Guerra Reyes, American Ethnologist"A central contribution of Singer's book is the clear window it provides into the everyday goings-on inside Mexico City's ILE clinics. The reader gets a vivid sense of clinicians' and patients' experiences at clinics, as well as the infrastructural problems that make abortion difficult to provide and to access, including resource shortages, long wait times, limited appointments, and challenging commutes."—Natalie L. Kimball, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Past Is Never Dead ... : Reproductive Governance in Modern Mexico 2. The Right to Sin: Abortion Rights in the Shadow of the Church 3. Being (a) Patient: The Making of Public Abortion 4. Abortion as Social Labor: Protection and Responsibility in Public Abortion Care 5. At the Limit of Rights: Abortion in the Extralegal Sphere Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"

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Book SynopsisWhat should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.Trade Review"A major ethnographic study, Supercorporate offers a rare glimpse into the social world within a corporation where far more than economic production takes place. Readers will be struck by the book's far-reaching implications for comprehending the conflicts between hierarchy and democracy."—Greg Urban, University of Pennsylvania"Prentice's revelatory book unveils the HR practices of a Korean conglomerate as it shifts from overwork and forced conviviality to carrying out meritocratic ideals. This organization in transition reflects its society at large. A must-read for both researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative endeavors across or within corporations."—Katherine Chen, The City College of New York, CUNY"Prentice has written an interesting and useful account of both changes in the corporate work environment in neoliberal South Korea and the continuities in its corporate organizational forms. Hierarchies are not necessarily simply flattened out: they have been morphin in ways shaped by both the profit motive and social expectations."—Vladimir Tikhonov, Asian Studies Review"Supercorporate delivers on its promises. The book clarifies the nuances involved in incentivizing employees through balancing opportunities for distinction and participation amid hierarchical infrastructures. It is in those office programs where 'post-hierarchy' South Korea could be found. Supercorporate thus offers a timely ethnography of South Korean office life and its multifaceted hierarchies."—Olga Fedorenko, Pacific AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. A New Tower 2. Infrastructures of Distinction 3. Old Spirits of Capitalism 4. Surveying Sangdo 5. Interrupting Democracy 6. Virtual Escapes Conclusion: Hidden Distinctions Methodological Appendix

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Book SynopsisPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.Trade Review"Crossing a Line tells a story of connection and fragmentation, of joy and grief, and of Palestine and its impossible geographies. With a penetrating ethnographic eye and elegant prose, Amahl Bishara gives us an account of Palestinian political expression across barriers that should be widely read."—Ilana Feldman, George Washington University"This riveting and remarkable book transforms our understanding of the fragility and perseverance of Palestinian collectivities separated by the violence of Israeli settler colonialism. Amahl Bishara's eloquent ethnography examines political and expressive relationships between communities affected differentially by 1948 and by 1967, and in the diaspora."—Lisa Lowe, Yale University"In this deeply engaged ethnography, Amahl Bishara traces the varying modes and expressions of embodied protest among Palestinians fragmented across Israel's colonial geography. Offering a sensitive reading of Palestinian peoplehood and political difference, Crossing a Line brings social movement theory into critical engagement with settler colonial and native studies." —Rema Hammami, Birzeit University"This critical examination of Palestinian life in Israel and under occupation is accessible to a wide audience and deeply revealing of the relationship between place, people, and politics. Recommended."—P. Rowe, CHOICE"The very structure of occupation promotes atomization, which severely undermines the Palestinian cause. Bridging the divide among Palestinians, as Bishara and many others seek to do, is a necessary step in the way to a freer Palestine."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Crossing a Line serves as a reminder for those committed to anti-imperialism to look beyond the corporate window-dressing version of sovereignty, to unearth alternative and emergent projects for liberation that are more firmly rooted in lived experience."—Leila Kawar, Against the Current"Bishara's ethnographic research, stretching over nearly two decades, has produced a meticulous study of Israel's continuing domination and steady appropriation through multiple forms of fragmentation, immobilisation, ghettoisation and violence.... Crossing a Line is an extraordinarily multi-layered and nuanced book in which she probes the particulars of the Palestinian experience and relates them to broader contexts of colonisation, dispossession, racism and violence within the USA and elsewhere."—Nancy Murray, Race and Class"Bishara's ultimate gift to the reader is a comprehensive story of Palestinian life. To the Palestinian reader, it grows faith in our cause and fortitude. To others, it is an invitation to witness...: not in the hope of an immediate departures, but to stay with us long enough to learn how to traverse the colonial situation—the thing that makes reality unlivable—and find life again in the company of the joys and pains of others."—Eman Ghanayem, Public BooksTable of ContentsPrologue Introduction Passage 1: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Haifa Beach 1. The Shifting Ground of Palestine Passage 2: Passage: Aida Refugee Camp to the Northern Galilee 2. Protesting the War on Gaza Together, Apart Passage 3: Passage: Bethlehem to Lubiya 3. The Momentum of Commemoration Passage 4: Passage: Jaffa to Aida Refugee Camp 4. A Juxtaposition of Palestinian Places Passage 5: Passage: Jerusalem to Nablus 5. Territory and Mourning on Social Media Passage 6: Passage: Bethlehem to Jerusalem 6. Bonds of Care: Prison and the Green Line Passage 7: Driving North Conclusion

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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 SynopsisHow do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating connection between state administration and public sentiment. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called "Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity. Trade Review"Administering Affect leaves no ethnographic stone unturned. It is artfully organized and compellingly written. Its scholarship is meticulous and masterfully synthetic. Its conceptual contributions are original and wide-ranging. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the impulsions and compulsions of the contemporary dynamics of soft power."—James Faubion, Rice University"This is a bracing read: original, evocative, beautifully organized, and deeply persuasive. It's a rare piece of work, clearly situated in disciplinary debates and practices while offering far wider and equally substantive contributions."—David Leheny, Waseda University"With this long-awaited monograph, White proves himself a major contributor to research on media culture, affect, and governmental policy. With startling access and insights, White examines the deeply personal work of male bureaucrats—less as efficient automatons and more as highly fallible humans—crafting national anxieties with the paintbrush of girl-cute in Japan."—Christine Yano, University of Hawai'i at Manoa"White gives a unique, ethnographic case study of the efforts by the Japanese government to promote 'Pop-Culture Japan' as a means of reducing the anxieties caused by increased international competitiveness and regional tensions in East Asia. Based on extraordinary access to those in the Japanese government responsible for planning and implementing this program, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Japan Foundation, the book features detailed analysis of and insights into the 'Cool Japan' branding campaigns, the young female 'Ambassadors of Cute,' and the promotion of anime, all designed by mostly male Japanese bureaucrats to foster appreciation of Japanese culture and reduce political anxieties....Recommended."—M. D. Ericson, CHOICE"White's work underscores that in furthering our understandings of Japanese society as a whole, we cannot be beholden to dominant narratives and groups. We must recognize the diversity of experience and practice that state narratives often elide and obfuscate."—John Ostermiller, Pacific Affairs

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Book SynopsisThe future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism. By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.Trade Review"In this careful and rich ethnography, Christopher Loperena offers an incisive study of the courageous activism by Garifuna land defenders aiming to enact alternative futures based on notions of mutuality, not appropriation."—Juliet Hooker, Brown University"The Ends of Paradise brilliantly analyzes the racial logics of on-going settler capitalist extractivism while showing the beauty and strength of the Garifuna struggle. Christopher Loperena provides a grounded look at the contemporary dilemmas facing Black and Indigenous peoples throughout much of the world."—Shannon Speed, UCLA"An illuminating analysis of Garifuna activism. Crucial for understanding how extraction, race, and activism are unfolding around the world, The Ends of Paradise is a must read."—Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon"Loperena provides a microhistory of individuals and organizations, sometimes in competition, navigating the pressures of land access and control, economic development, and cultural identity.... Recommended."—J. M. Rosenthal, CHOICE"The Ends of Paradise is a powerful history of the present, one that captures and participates in the struggle of a Black Indigenous people to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy in the face of development projects that are marketed as sustainable ecotourism."—Kevin Coleman, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Imagining Black Indigenous Futures chapter abstractThe introduction establishes how Black and Indigenous struggles for territorial autonomy in Honduras interact with larger social and economic forces, including the global resurgence of resource extraction that is slowly eroding the customary rights of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Although the government of Honduras has presented tourism as a sustainable alternative to extractive industries, this chapter argues that tourism is an extractivist enterprise premised on environmental dispossession and racial violence against rural communities of color. It also shows how Garifuna—a Black Indigenous people of African, Arawak, and Carib descent—fight back against the extractivist mandate of the Honduran state and multinational capital on the Caribbean Coast. 1The Extractivist Logics of Progress chapter abstractChapter 1 traces the historical genealogy of extractivism in Honduras. From the banana enclaves of the early twentieth century to sumptuous coastal tourism resorts and the contemporary bid to establish semiautonomous charter cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country, the state has tried to enact various visions of progress. All these visions, though, are intimately tethered to extractivism, particularly racial extractivism. 2The Garifuna Coast: The Inclusionary Politics of Expulsion chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes how the tourism economy facilitates racialized extraction. The advent of multicultural rights unfolded alongside state programs designed to transform Garifuna people into subjects of development. But the inclusion of Black and Indigenous communities seems inseparable from the commodification of those communities; the government's policies all seem to render Garifuna lands and culture as tourism products. These policies are presented as a win-win for everyone, equally beneficial to Garifuna and working-class non-Indigenous Hondurans who remain stymied by poverty and the legacy of "underdevelopment." The only clear winner is not either one of these groups, but rather the mestizo elite. Garifuna resistance to government policies exposes the inner workings of supposedly inclusionary politics and how those efforts ultimately advance not inclusion, but racial and spatial expulsion. 3Tensions of Autonomous Blackness chapter abstractChapter 3 examines how statist development objectives seep into the lives of Garifuna in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Neoliberal economic paradigms emerged in tandem with morally saturated development discourses that tout poverty reduction, inclusion, and sustainability, and also imagine Garifuna as stakeholders with the capacity to benefit from and contribute productively to Honduras's tourism economy. Policies that promote participation in the tourism economy are entangled with contests over land and belonging. Conflicts over the fate of the community figure prominently in daily life, as community members—for and against government-sponsored development—reckon with the dispossession that inevitably come with development and debate how to negotiate with and when to protest against these forces. Garifuna land defense strategies are articulated through the practice of Black autonomy: an ethico-political proposal that refuses dominant narratives of progress and instead asserts a notion of autonomy as collective action and social good. 4Rescue the Land, Defend the Future chapter abstractChapter 4 theorizes the spatial and temporal dimensions of Garifuna political subjectivity through an analysis of the movement to recuperate or "rescue" communal lands from privatization. The chapter examines how Garifuna women lead the lucha (struggle) in defense of their territory with their bodies, and how that defense is bound up with gendered narratives of ancestrality and the praxis of territorial mothering. To live ancestrally is a way of being in relation with the land, which is crucial to Garifuna autonomy and a key feature of the struggle to contest the destination-making strategies of multinational capital on the Caribbean coast. 5The Limits of Indigeneity: Pueblo Garifuna v. Honduras chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the public hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Garifuna Community Triunfo de la Cruz and Its Members v. Honduras. During court proceedings, Honduras's deputy attorney general argued that Garifuna should not be considered an "original people" (indigenous to Honduras) and thus Garifuna claims to national territory were not legitimate. State officials not only undermined the possibility of Black Indigeneity but also exalted the rights of officially recognized Indigenous peoples to defend mestizo property rights in the zone. This politics of (mis)recognition tethers Indigenous subjectivity to the mestizo nation-building project and ideologies of whitening. It reinforces the perception that Black people are foreigners in Honduras. The court's judgment in favor of the community established an important legal precedent for the recognition of Black territorial rights but also served to buttress state sovereignty over natural resources deemed to be of "public use." Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion to this book begins with the violent murder of the Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. At the time of her death, Cáceres was leading a daring community uprising against the development of a large hydroelectric project slated to be built on the Gualcarque River in the Lenca community of Río Blanco. Her death marked the beginning of a new wave of repression against Indigenous and Black activists that reached its apex on July 18, 2020, with the kidnapping of four community leaders in Triunfo de la Cruz. This worrisome pattern demonstrates deep-seated racial animus toward Black and Indigenous peoples and the rights they fought so hard to obtain during the preceding decades. In spite of the devastating and racist violence they face, Black and Indigenous peoples continue to mobilize in defense of life. chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisDespite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support. Based on long-term ethnographic field research among multiple Sufi communities in different urban areas of Afghanistan, the book examines navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders over the past four decades to weather periods of instability and persecution, showing how they adapted to changing conditions in novel ways that crafted Sufism as a force in the civil sphere. This book offers a rare on-the-ground view into how Sufi leaders react to moments of transition within a highly insecure environment, and how humanity shines through the darkness during times of turmoil.Trade Review"An engaging, compelling, and beautifully-written ethnography that traverses the heterogeneous Sufi sociosphere of contemporary Afghanistan. Schmeding documents, in arresting detail and acute sensitivity, the dexterity of Sufi adepts in creating and maintaining civil communities amidst violence and ruptures. At once profound, riveting, and timely, the book is a vital contribution to the study of religion and civil society."—Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University"Sufi Civilities opens the door to a marvelous world of faith that lies hidden in plain sight. Schmeding's path breaking ethnographic account of diverse Sufi communities in contemporary Afghanistan is both new and exciting. Over the past half century they have outlasted every radical political regime that failed to appreciate just how deeply Sufism is embedded in Afghanistan's Islamic culture."—Thomas Barfield, Boston University"Afghan Sufis have been hidden from view by attention to mujahidin, Taliban, and al-Qaida. Through astute anthropological observation, Annika Schmeding shows how Sufis became important players in the contests for religious authority that emerged from the cultural whirligig of a NATO-supported Islamic Republic. This is a major contribution to the study of modern Afghanistan."—Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles

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Book SynopsisIn contemporary accounts of the Shining Path insurgency and Peru's internal war, the Upper Huallaga Valley has largely been overlooked—despite its former place as the country's main cocaine-producing region. From afar, the Upper Huallaga became a political and legal no-man's-land. Up close, vibrant networks of connection endured despite strict controls on human habitation and movement. This book asks what happens to such a place once prolonged conflict has ostensibly passed. How have ordinary encounters with land, territory, and law, and with the river that runs through them all, been altered in the aftermaths of war? Gathering stories and images to render the experiences of transportation workers who have ferried passengers and things across and along the river for decades, Richard Kernaghan elaborates a notion of legal topographies to understand how landscape interventions shape routes, craft territories, and muddle temporalities. Drawing on personal narratives and everyday practices of transit, this ethnography conveys how prior times of violence have silently accrued: in bridges and roads demolished, then rebuilt; in makeshift moorings that facilitate both licit and illegal trades; and above all through the river, a liquid barrier and current with unstable banks, whose intricate mesh of tributaries partitions terrains now laden with material traces and political effects of a recent yet far from finished past.Trade Review"This is a theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written book. In its lyrical style and its approach to letting stories, objects, and descriptions speak for themselves, the book situates itself with other stylistically innovative ethnographies that eschew a distinction between 'academic' and 'creative' writing. The work is fresh, individual, and makes critical contributions to scholarship on the aftermath of war and post-conflict spaces." —Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University"Crossing the Current illustrates how to do situated ethnography while building solid theory. With beautiful sweeping writing, Kernaghan calls on us to reimagine politics from a sensitive plane, and to rethink history as a plot of enduring connections." —Mario Rufer, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco

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Book SynopsisThe future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism. By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.Trade Review"In this careful and rich ethnography, Christopher Loperena offers an incisive study of the courageous activism by Garifuna land defenders aiming to enact alternative futures based on notions of mutuality, not appropriation."—Juliet Hooker, Brown University"The Ends of Paradise brilliantly analyzes the racial logics of on-going settler capitalist extractivism while showing the beauty and strength of the Garifuna struggle. Christopher Loperena provides a grounded look at the contemporary dilemmas facing Black and Indigenous peoples throughout much of the world."—Shannon Speed, UCLA"An illuminating analysis of Garifuna activism. Crucial for understanding how extraction, race, and activism are unfolding around the world, The Ends of Paradise is a must read."—Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon"Loperena provides a microhistory of individuals and organizations, sometimes in competition, navigating the pressures of land access and control, economic development, and cultural identity.... Recommended."—J. M. Rosenthal, CHOICE"The Ends of Paradise is a powerful history of the present, one that captures and participates in the struggle of a Black Indigenous people to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy in the face of development projects that are marketed as sustainable ecotourism."—Kevin Coleman, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Imagining Black Indigenous Futures chapter abstractThe introduction establishes how Black and Indigenous struggles for territorial autonomy in Honduras interact with larger social and economic forces, including the global resurgence of resource extraction that is slowly eroding the customary rights of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Although the government of Honduras has presented tourism as a sustainable alternative to extractive industries, this chapter argues that tourism is an extractivist enterprise premised on environmental dispossession and racial violence against rural communities of color. It also shows how Garifuna—a Black Indigenous people of African, Arawak, and Carib descent—fight back against the extractivist mandate of the Honduran state and multinational capital on the Caribbean Coast. 1The Extractivist Logics of Progress chapter abstractChapter 1 traces the historical genealogy of extractivism in Honduras. From the banana enclaves of the early twentieth century to sumptuous coastal tourism resorts and the contemporary bid to establish semiautonomous charter cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country, the state has tried to enact various visions of progress. All these visions, though, are intimately tethered to extractivism, particularly racial extractivism. 2The Garifuna Coast: The Inclusionary Politics of Expulsion chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes how the tourism economy facilitates racialized extraction. The advent of multicultural rights unfolded alongside state programs designed to transform Garifuna people into subjects of development. But the inclusion of Black and Indigenous communities seems inseparable from the commodification of those communities; the government's policies all seem to render Garifuna lands and culture as tourism products. These policies are presented as a win-win for everyone, equally beneficial to Garifuna and working-class non-Indigenous Hondurans who remain stymied by poverty and the legacy of "underdevelopment." The only clear winner is not either one of these groups, but rather the mestizo elite. Garifuna resistance to government policies exposes the inner workings of supposedly inclusionary politics and how those efforts ultimately advance not inclusion, but racial and spatial expulsion. 3Tensions of Autonomous Blackness chapter abstractChapter 3 examines how statist development objectives seep into the lives of Garifuna in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Neoliberal economic paradigms emerged in tandem with morally saturated development discourses that tout poverty reduction, inclusion, and sustainability, and also imagine Garifuna as stakeholders with the capacity to benefit from and contribute productively to Honduras's tourism economy. Policies that promote participation in the tourism economy are entangled with contests over land and belonging. Conflicts over the fate of the community figure prominently in daily life, as community members—for and against government-sponsored development—reckon with the dispossession that inevitably come with development and debate how to negotiate with and when to protest against these forces. Garifuna land defense strategies are articulated through the practice of Black autonomy: an ethico-political proposal that refuses dominant narratives of progress and instead asserts a notion of autonomy as collective action and social good. 4Rescue the Land, Defend the Future chapter abstractChapter 4 theorizes the spatial and temporal dimensions of Garifuna political subjectivity through an analysis of the movement to recuperate or "rescue" communal lands from privatization. The chapter examines how Garifuna women lead the lucha (struggle) in defense of their territory with their bodies, and how that defense is bound up with gendered narratives of ancestrality and the praxis of territorial mothering. To live ancestrally is a way of being in relation with the land, which is crucial to Garifuna autonomy and a key feature of the struggle to contest the destination-making strategies of multinational capital on the Caribbean coast. 5The Limits of Indigeneity: Pueblo Garifuna v. Honduras chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the public hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Garifuna Community Triunfo de la Cruz and Its Members v. Honduras. During court proceedings, Honduras's deputy attorney general argued that Garifuna should not be considered an "original people" (indigenous to Honduras) and thus Garifuna claims to national territory were not legitimate. State officials not only undermined the possibility of Black Indigeneity but also exalted the rights of officially recognized Indigenous peoples to defend mestizo property rights in the zone. This politics of (mis)recognition tethers Indigenous subjectivity to the mestizo nation-building project and ideologies of whitening. It reinforces the perception that Black people are foreigners in Honduras. The court's judgment in favor of the community established an important legal precedent for the recognition of Black territorial rights but also served to buttress state sovereignty over natural resources deemed to be of "public use." Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion to this book begins with the violent murder of the Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. At the time of her death, Cáceres was leading a daring community uprising against the development of a large hydroelectric project slated to be built on the Gualcarque River in the Lenca community of Río Blanco. Her death marked the beginning of a new wave of repression against Indigenous and Black activists that reached its apex on July 18, 2020, with the kidnapping of four community leaders in Triunfo de la Cruz. This worrisome pattern demonstrates deep-seated racial animus toward Black and Indigenous peoples and the rights they fought so hard to obtain during the preceding decades. In spite of the devastating and racist violence they face, Black and Indigenous peoples continue to mobilize in defense of life. chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.Trade Review"A thoroughly researched and highly innovative scholarship at the frontier of new political developments and Anthropocenic challenges. This book will push you to think about those dimensions usually clouded by refracting syllables. The Brahminical nationalist assumptions of dairy as strength and hominid centrism of the globe have received a thorough challenge by Narayanan. Much awaited credit is honored to fellow nonhuman animals who have participated in nation-building by sweat, blood, milk, skin, flesh, and soul for the believers. A successful project that manages to deliver the message with aplomb and sincerity. Narayanan has delivered a timely call to action."—Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters"Yamini Narayanan' Mother Cow, Mother India addresses the unsettling questions we have needed, but failed, to ask about connections among race, gender, religion, caste, and species, never losing sight of all the individuals involved. Her devastating critique of the Indian invocation of cow as "mother" exposes how, in the interests of nationalism and capitalism, the idea of mother, like the cow herself, is being continually exploited. Every gift a scholar needs to bring to such demanding and incisive work—compassion, courage, persistence, exhaustive research, and political acumen—Narayanan brings to this amazing and compelling book."—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"Mother Cow, Mother India is a highly sophisticated and empathetically engaged analysis of the cows, buffaloes, and their calves at the heart of India's cow protection politics. Narayanan skillfully elicits in the reader a deep sensitivity to the animals' whose lives, experiences, and deaths are caught up in the dairy and beef industries within a fraught landscape of human politics and violence. This work is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is truly the first of its kind – a great gift to the worlds of both animal studies and South Asia studies, not to mention the global animal advocacy movement."—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"Yamini Narayanan's exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy animal-agriculture system and how it is advanced and supported by Hindutva bovine politics is commendable."—Sagari R. Ramdas, The Wire"These analyses underscore the centrality of caste and communal politics to meat-eating practices in India, even while seeking to argue that there are other historical, political and socioeconomic factors involved."—Kaashif Hajee, The CaravanTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Dairy Politics and India's Milk Nationalisms 2. Breeding Bovine Caste 3. Milking 4. Gaushalas: Making India "Pure" Again 5. "Save Cow, Save India" 6. Trafficking 7. Slaughter 8. Envisioning Post-Dairy Futures

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Book SynopsisIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.Trade Review"A thoroughly researched and highly innovative scholarship at the frontier of new political developments and Anthropocenic challenges. This book will push you to think about those dimensions usually clouded by refracting syllables. The Brahminical nationalist assumptions of dairy as strength and hominid centrism of the globe have received a thorough challenge by Narayanan. Much awaited credit is honored to fellow nonhuman animals who have participated in nation-building by sweat, blood, milk, skin, flesh, and soul for the believers. A successful project that manages to deliver the message with aplomb and sincerity. Narayanan has delivered a timely call to action."—Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters"Yamini Narayanan' Mother Cow, Mother India addresses the unsettling questions we have needed, but failed, to ask about connections among race, gender, religion, caste, and species, never losing sight of all the individuals involved. Her devastating critique of the Indian invocation of cow as "mother" exposes how, in the interests of nationalism and capitalism, the idea of mother, like the cow herself, is being continually exploited. Every gift a scholar needs to bring to such demanding and incisive work—compassion, courage, persistence, exhaustive research, and political acumen—Narayanan brings to this amazing and compelling book."—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"Mother Cow, Mother India is a highly sophisticated and empathetically engaged analysis of the cows, buffaloes, and their calves at the heart of India's cow protection politics. Narayanan skillfully elicits in the reader a deep sensitivity to the animals' whose lives, experiences, and deaths are caught up in the dairy and beef industries within a fraught landscape of human politics and violence. This work is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is truly the first of its kind – a great gift to the worlds of both animal studies and South Asia studies, not to mention the global animal advocacy movement."—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"Yamini Narayanan's exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy animal-agriculture system and how it is advanced and supported by Hindutva bovine politics is commendable."—Sagari R. Ramdas, The Wire"These analyses underscore the centrality of caste and communal politics to meat-eating practices in India, even while seeking to argue that there are other historical, political and socioeconomic factors involved."—Kaashif Hajee, The CaravanTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Dairy Politics and India's Milk Nationalisms 2. Breeding Bovine Caste 3. Milking 4. Gaushalas: Making India "Pure" Again 5. "Save Cow, Save India" 6. Trafficking 7. Slaughter 8. Envisioning Post-Dairy Futures

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Book SynopsisThe United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.Trade Review"Elastic Empire is an utterly brilliant piece of research. Lisa Bhungalia fluently and beautifully uses theoretical elaborations of plasticity and malleability of empire to show the interconnections between the aid industry and settler colonial and imperial violence."—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies"Into the well-studied terrain of contemporary Palestine and Israel, Lisa Bhungalia has produced a book of stunning originality. Through wide-ranging and incisive analysis, she explains how ever more highly securitized models of foreign aid adversely affect Palestinians. Aid, she argues, is war by other means."—Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture"Elastic Empire offers a riveting portrait of the quiet administration of violence. Lisa Bhungalia maps US shadow wars carried out through the daily work of aid and state terror in Palestine. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the intimacies of US empire and the topological tentacles of counterterrorism law."—Alison Mountz, author of The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement ArchipelagoTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. War Through Law 2. Elastic Sovereignty 3. Work of the List 4. Afterlives and Reverberations 5. Asphyxiatory Violence Conclusion

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Book SynopsisOn November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.Trade Review"This book expertly and eloquently offers a close examination of how human and more-than-human relations are regenerated in the context of war and its aftermath. Lederach recovers and makes visible how campesino peacebuilding emerges from a distinct ecological imagination, and their efforts to achieve in praxis reparation and reconciliation."—María Clemencia Ramírez, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia"Lederach's scholarship is impeccable, deftly fusing Colombian and international scholarship on peacemaking, her own ethnographic insights, and the voices of montemariano peasants, who are not mere interlocutors, but co-thinkers and mentors. This beautifully written book is a powerful example of what collaborative ethnography can be."—Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University"This is a deeply human and humane book that builds a case for 'slow peace', or peace based on developing relationships over time in a particular place. Angela Lederach has crafted an excellent book that is full of sensitively observed details of how communities get on with life after conflict. The book ties together the themes of the environment, power, temporality and place. It is highly recommended."—Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University"This beautifully written book is a must read for academic and nonacademic readers interested in peace building processes at the grassroots level. Essential."—A. Arraras, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: To Defend Life: An Introduction One: From and For the Territory: The Campesino Struggle for Peace Two: The Earth Suffered, Too: The Death of the Avocado Forest and Multispecies Three: The Times of Slow Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Six: Voice and Votes: Building Territorial Peace Seven: Vigías of Hope: Slow Peace and the Ethics of Attention Coda: Coda

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Book SynopsisAt the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.Trade Review"Esra Özyürek has written a path-breaking and much needed book on the multifaceted, constitutive ways by which Turkish- and Arab-background migrants shaped German Holocaust memory and how it shaped their identity in return. Based on ethnographic research, this is a fundamental contribution that rewrites our understanding of the development of Holocaust memory in Germany"—Alon Confino, author of A World Without Jews"German Holocaust memory culture is often held up as a model for other nations to imitate. But, as Esra Özyürek shows in this provocative and ethnographically rich book, the story is much more complicated. Subcontractors of Guilt is a fascinating study of belonging and exclusion in post-Holocaust Germany and a must-read for all who are interested in contemporary Europe."—Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization"Subcontractors of Guilt is an essential intervention into contemporary German debates around migration, Muslim minorities, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust memory. By centering the perspectives of young German Muslims, Özyürek's insightful study offers an important corrective to narratives that too often fail to do so."—Fatima El-Tayeb, Yale University"This powerful, well-informed book would make a fine addition to any academic library. Recommended."—S. Anderson, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: German Holocaust Memory and the Redemptive Path toward Democracy 1. Rebelling against the Father, Democratizing the Family 2. Export-Import Theory of Muslim Antisemitism in Germany 3. Wrong Emotions / Wrong Empathy for the Holocaust 4. Subcontracting Guilt, Policing Victimhood 5. Visiting Auschwitz as Pilgrimage and as Shock Therapy Conclusion: Can Muslims Flip the Script of the German Memory Theater?

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Book SynopsisFor decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma's much-lauded decade-long "transition" from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism. How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of "rights" to guarantee their incursions against injustice? In this book, Elliott Prasse-Freeman documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called "democratic transition" from 2011-2021, but also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, Rights Refused shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.Trade Review"A combination analytical breadth, sparkling playfulness, ethnographic granularity, and deep sympathy for the heroic resistance of the Burmese democratic movement. Take a deep breath and dive in at the deep end; you'll be glad you did."—James C. Scott, Yale University"In this thoughtful exploration of the brutal political realities of present-day Myanmar, Elliott Prasse-Freeman unpacks the various understandings of human rights that both direct and bedevil attempts to instigate democratic reform. Noting that external observers have repeatedly misread Burmese conceptions of the very concept of rights, he offers an incisive corrective to such cultural tone-deafness with his nuanced analysis of Burmese activism and its often surprisingly diverse goals. His argument is a valuable lesson for all those who blithely assume that all meanings and values are inherently universal and thereby run the risk, in Prasse-Freeman's telling phrase, of "mocking the miserable.""—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University"Rights Refused is a theoretically ambitious and ethnographically rich study of social activism, refusal and resistance in Myanmar. Prasse-Freeman lucidly captures how activists in specific local contexts reconfigure human rights discourses to challenge oppressive state power, and his insightful analysis reshapes our understanding of rights are operating in the contemporary world."—Shannon Speed, University of California, Los Angeles"Rights Refused transcends the confines of a mere book; it serves as a vital expedition, inviting readers to engage in a profound journey of empathy and introspection. Prasse-Freeman's humanisation of the activists and individuals at the heart of the struggle invites readers to step into their shoes and comprehend the immense challenges they face."—Thanapat Chatinakrob, London School of Economics Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Variegated Violence 2. Living Refusal 3. Plow Protests 4. Cartoons, Curses, and the Corpus 5. Taking Rights, Seriously 6. Rights in Desperation Conclusion: Rights Erosion and Refusal beyond Burma

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Book SynopsisOver the last few decades, the decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms. Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival inquiry, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives.Trade Review"In a world in dire need of alternatives to a neoliberal model that declared we no longer have any, Mariya Ivancheva reminds us that the semiperiphery has always taught the world-system important lessons. The book is a powerful plea for a radical response to commodified higher education, for treading carefully among the contradictions inherent to revolutionary projects and against presentism."—Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg"The Alternative University underscores the way that the neoliberalization and marketisation of higher education is a truly global process. This extremely powerful and ethnographically documented account of the inner workings of an alternative university poses some searching questions about university autonomy, the historical role of student movements, and the subsequent role of leaders of those movements in both the academy and politics."—John Gledhill, University of ManchesterTable of Contents1. The Political Life of a Higher Education Policy 2. The Rise and Fall of Academic Autonomy: The University as a Historic Battlefield 3. Evaluation Matters: Teachers' Training at an Alternative University 4. The Children of the Revolution and the Matrisociality of the Benevolent State 5. Generation(s) of Protests at a Revolutionary University Conclusion Epilogue: De(colonial) Silences in the Hierarchy of Global Knowledge Production

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Book SynopsisOver the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present. Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.Trade Review"This book helps us understand the centrality of caste as a category and the processes of pollution/purity linked as they are to the labyrinths through which waste work is organized in Lahore. It is a path-breaking contribution to the fields of urban studies, informal labor practices and the production of social marginality in Pakistan. It will undoubtedly be a model for future research."—Kamran Asdar Ali, University of Texas, Austin"Life Beyond Waste is a deeply sensitive ethnography of Lahore's waste workers and traders, offering luminous insights on the entanglements of people, matter, and institutions that constitute the city's "waste infrastructure." The book is also distinctive for its historical analysis of how agrarian class and caste inequalities are reproduced in urban Pakistan. A model for urban anthropology and waste studies!"—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota"Butt shows waste infrastructure is about more than where pollution goes and who decides. Combining richly-detailed ethnography with in-depth history on the continuity between colonial governance and recent statecraft, he uncovers the diverse forms of labor that are necessary to reproduce urban life and inequality, whether in Pakistan or in wasted worlds beyond."—Joshua Reno, Binghamton University"How is hate channeled through waste work carried out by Christians as non-Muslims? How do powerlessness and anger touch the lives of those who work with waste materials? Butt's interventions on these critical questions bring to life a story of caste, waste work, and urban life that are not only in a state of flux and transformation but also a site of contestation and struggle."—Nausheen H. Anwar, The Developing EconomiesTable of ContentsPreface 1. Introduction 2. An Order for Urban Life 3. The Appearance of Things 4. Surplus and Its Excess 5. The Unevenness of Intimacy 6. The Possibility of Reproduction 7. Coda

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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 SynopsisFollowing the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, tsunamis engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located on Japan's Pacific Coast, leading to the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen since the Chernobyl crisis of 1986. Prior to this disaster, Japan had the third largest commercial nuclear program in the world, surpassed only by those in the United States and France—nuclear power significantly contributed to Japan's economic prosperity, and nearly 30% of Japan's electricity was generated by reactors dotted across the archipelago, from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu. This long period of institutional stasis was, however, punctuated by the crisis of March 11, which became a critical juncture for Japanese nuclear policymaking. As Akihiro Ogawa argues, the primary agent for this change is what he calls "antinuclear citizens"— a conscientious Japanese public who envision a sustainable life in a nuclear-free society. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research conducted across Japan—including antinuclear rallies, meetings with bureaucrats, and at renewable energy production sites—Ogawa presents an historical record of ordinary people's actions as they sought to survive and navigate a new reality post-Fukushima. Ultimately, Ogawa argues that effective sustainability efforts require collaborations that are grounded in civil society and challenge hegemonic ideology, efforts that reimagine societies and landscapes—especially those dominated by industrial capitalism—to help build a productive symbiosis between industry and sustainability.Trade Review"What does Japanese civil society really think about Japan's nuclear energy policy after 3/11? There are many suggestions to be learned from this Antinuclear Citizens' approach to Japan's nuclear energy policy and ambiguous civil society. This action narrative analysis by a leading scholar of Japanese civil society should be read by many scholars of Japan studies."—Yuichi Sekiya, University of Tokyo"Describing himself as an 'action-oriented social anthropologist', Akihiro Ogawa draws on the experience of what he calls 'anti-nuclear citizens' to show how civil society organisations provide new and effective forms of accountability, innovation and public governance in post-Fukushima Japan. In doing so, he casts an interesting light not only on contemporary Japanese society but also on how anthropologists can interact with their subject matter that may shock some of those who believe that non-involvement is the only way for ethnographers to retain an objective lens."—Roger Goodman, University of OxfordTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Japan's Nuclear Policy and Antinuclear Activism 2. Young Precariat at the Forefront 3. The Right to Evacuation 4. Community Power 5. Unethical Politics 6. State of Exception Epilogue: Fostering the Chernobyl Law in Japan Notes for Anthropology of Policy

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Book SynopsisAny tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a heady cocktail, something described by Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, as "blood and lightning." Faced with the client's anticipation of pain and excitement, the tattooer must carefully perform calm authority to obscure a world of preparation and vigilance. "Blood and lightning, my dude"—the mysterious and intoxicating effect of tattooing done right. Dustin Kiskaddon draws on his own apprenticeship with Matt and takes us behind the scenes into the complex world of professional tattooers. We join people who must routinely manage a messy and carnal type of work. Blood and Lightning brings us through the tattoo shop, where the smell of sterilizing agents, the hum of machines, and the sound of music spill out onto the back patio. It is here that Matt, along with his comrades, reviews the day's wins, bemoans its losses, and prepares for the future. Having tattooed more than five hundred people, Kiskaddon is able to freshly articulate the physical, mental, emotional, and moral life of tattooers. His captivating account explores the challenges they face on the job, including the crushing fear of making mistakes on someone else's body, the role of masculinity in evolving tattoo worlds, appropriate and inappropriate intimacy, and the task of navigating conversations about color and race. Ultimately, the stories in this book teach us about the roles our bodies play in the social world. Both mediums and objects of art, our bodies are purveyors of sociocultural significance, sites of capitalist negotiation, and vivid encapsulations of the human condition. Kiskaddon guides us through a strangely familiar world, inviting each of us to become a tattooer along the way. Trade Review"Blood and Lightning is a stellar and vivid depiction of an industry that has long been mythologized in popular culture. Kiskaddon's memoir offers a candid perspective on both the business and creative sides of tattooing. As it dives into a cultural rite of passage, Kiskaddon's work also excels as a character study."—Booklist"In Blood and Lightning, we don't just enter the silent and physical spaces within the world of tattooing, instead the spaces are lived, examined, and connected to our humanity. Kiskaddon shows how tattoos, like history and storytelling itself, can evolve depending on the body or the world they occupy."—Devin Katayama, Senior Produce for NPR's Throughline"Written in an easygoing style, Kiskaddon's narrative ends up as much a workplace memoir as an anthropological study, where the work being documented is both tattooing and ethnography itself, with frequent references to taking field notes and finding ways to get interviews (paying for a tattoo turns out to be the best way to get a tattoo artist to talk for two hours). It's a charming and thoughtful slice of life."—Publishers Weekly"Blood and Lightning is an illuminating peek behind the doors of a tattoo shop, digging into the realities, ethics, and philosophy of altering the bodies of strangers."—Ashley Holstrom, Foreword Reviews"Kiskaddon's sensuous ethnography takes us behind the scenes in the mecca of tattooing—Oakland, California. His richly detailed prose sings as he describes his apprenticeship: learning the right touch, both needle-to-skin and with other members of this 'cool' shop. More than any other ethnography I've read, this one breathes on the page: we inhale the sharp snap of isopropyl alcohol and the tang of sweat, while early Black Flag pumps out the speakers, thumping over the hum of machines, phone calls, and pain-filled exhalations of the clients. "—Jennifer C. Lena, author of Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts"In this book, Kiskaddon covers ground that few researchers have been willing to traverse. Moreover, he is a scholar/tattooist, a combination rarely seen in the serious literature about tattooing."—David C. Lane, author of The Other End of the Needle"Very thoughtful and knowledgeable; pulled me in right from the start."—Stephanie Tamez, Tattoo Artist and co-owner ofThis Time Tmrwprivate studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NYC"Blood and Lightning is a landmark study of the craft of tattooing that is consistently compelling and rewarding."—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

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Book SynopsisOn November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.Trade Review"This book expertly and eloquently offers a close examination of how human and more-than-human relations are regenerated in the context of war and its aftermath. Lederach recovers and makes visible how campesino peacebuilding emerges from a distinct ecological imagination, and their efforts to achieve in praxis reparation and reconciliation."—María Clemencia Ramírez, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia"Lederach's scholarship is impeccable, deftly fusing Colombian and international scholarship on peacemaking, her own ethnographic insights, and the voices of montemariano peasants, who are not mere interlocutors, but co-thinkers and mentors. This beautifully written book is a powerful example of what collaborative ethnography can be."—Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University"This is a deeply human and humane book that builds a case for 'slow peace', or peace based on developing relationships over time in a particular place. Angela Lederach has crafted an excellent book that is full of sensitively observed details of how communities get on with life after conflict. The book ties together the themes of the environment, power, temporality and place. It is highly recommended."—Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University"This beautifully written book is a must read for academic and nonacademic readers interested in peace building processes at the grassroots level. Essential."—A. Arraras, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: To Defend Life: An Introduction One: From and For the Territory: The Campesino Struggle for Peace Two: The Earth Suffered, Too: The Death of the Avocado Forest and Multispecies Three: The Times of Slow Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Four: Too Much Prisa: The Temporal Dynamics of Violence and Peace Six: Voice and Votes: Building Territorial Peace Seven: Vigías of Hope: Slow Peace and the Ethics of Attention Coda: Coda

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Book SynopsisWomen, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over two decades observing a credit market that specifically targets women in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu. They found that paying off debts required labor, frequently involved sexual transactions, and shaped women's bodies and subjectivities. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt that goes far beyond the Indian case, exposing the ways capitalism transforms womanhood and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.Trade Review"This book is pathbreaking in the most literal sense: it opens the way for more studies of women and debt as central features of capitalist economies. It gives insight into the ways in which the reproduction of capital depends on women's reproductive labor as household debt managers, but also into the ways in which they strategically navigate the system."—Joan W. Scott, Princeton University"With gripping evidence and theoretical acumen, Guerin, Kumar, and Venkatubramanian reframe our understandings of the debt economy. By foregrounding the deeply gendered labor of debt, The Indebted Woman launches a new research agenda. A book that transcends disciplinary boundaries and moves forward the analysis of intimate economies."—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy"The Indebted Woman is a compact account of the credit markets in South Arcot, and in particular their disproportionate effect on Dalit women.... Where the book shines is in its conscientious economic research, awakening readers to the lived experiences of Dalit women and their invisible and indispensable role in the South Indian economy."—Annelie Hyatt, Columbia Journal of Literary CriticismTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Intimacies and Measurement 2. Kinship Debt 3. The Sexual Division of Debt 4. Debt Work 5. Bodily Collateral 6. Debt and Love 7. Human Debts 8. What Does the Future Hold?

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