Cornell University Press 2019 Anthropology Catalog

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2019

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ANTHROPOLGY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS


Metropolitan Fetish African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art John Warne Monroe

From the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan. John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic category of “primitive art” was invented. John Warne Monroe is Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University. He is the author of Laboratories of Faith.

$45.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-3635-3 368 pages, 7 x 10, 117 b&w halftones, 1 map, 10 color plates

“While traditional African art continues to capture new audiences, John Monroe tells the fascinating story of how it all began. We meet the avant-garde visionaries who looked beyond the ethnographic, re-classifying African material culture as ‘Art.’ A book full of historical pioneers you will want to get to know. Highly recommended!”—Bruno Claessens, European Director of African Art, Christie’s “This is a profoundly important book. Elegantly written and lavishly illustrated, Metropolitan Fetish will establish itself as a landmark in the history of the reception of African art in the West.”—Christopher B. Steiner, author of African Art in Transit “Metropolitan Fetish is a truly excellent book: ambitious in reach, rich in detail, and masterfully narrated. By establishing the complex commercial, colonial, and intellectual networks that made possible the revaluation of African sculpture, Monroe transforms our understanding of the French infatuation with black culture as a key marker of imperial modernity.”— Alice L. Conklin, author of In the Museum of Man

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Food for All in Africa Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane, & K atrin Gl atzel

Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate for Africa, that recognizes the continent’s diverse environments and climates, and that takes into account its histories and cultures while benefiting rural smallholder farmers and their families. In this boldly optimistic book, Sir Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane, and Katrin Glatzel describe the key challenges faced by Africa’s smallholder farmers and present the concepts and practices of Sustainable Intensification (SI) as opportunities to sustainably transform Africa’s agriculture sector and the livelihoods of millions of smallholders. The way forward, they write, will be an agriculture sector deeply rooted within SI: producing more with less, using fertilizers and pesticides more prudently, adapting to climate change, improving natural capital, adopting new technologies, and building resilience at every stage of the agriculture value chain. Food for All in Africa envisions a virtuous circle generated through agricultural development rooted in SI that results in greater yields, healthier diets, improved livelihoods for farmers, and sustainable economic opportunities for the rural poor that in turn generate further investment. It describes the benefits of digital technologies for farmers and the challenges of transforming African agricultural policies and creating effective and inspiring leadership. Food for All in Africa demonstrates why we should take on the challenge and provides ideas and methods through which it can be met. Sir Gordon Conway is Professor of International Development at Imperial College London. He was previously Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department for International Development, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex. He is author of The Doubly Green Revolution and One Billion Hungry.

COMSTOCK PUBLISHING ASSOCIATES $24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4388-7 342 pages, 6 x 9, 3 b&w halftones, 1 b&w line drawing, 10 maps, 38 charts 2

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“Food for All in Africa is truly gripping and provides an easy-to-follow pictoral exposition that will facilitate access by policy makers. This work, synthesizing core findings from the decades of experience of the preeminent expert authors in the areas of sustainable agriculture, is both welcome and important.”—Steven Haggblade, Michigan State “Food for All in Africa is very impressive. Elegant and readable, it is a significant contribution to the discussion of food security in Africa.”—Sir Charles Godfray, University of Oxford

Ousmane Badiane is recipient of the Africa Food Prize (2015), a Distinguished Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists, and Director for Africa at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Katrin Glatzel is Program Head of the Malabo Montpellier Panel program at the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Africa Regional Office in Dakar, Senegal, and a Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London.


Hematologies The Political Life of Blood in India Jacob Copeman & Dwaipayan Banerjee

In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a “bloodscape of difference”: different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore the relation between blood’s utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow. Jacob Copeman is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Veins of Devotion. Dwaipayan Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Follow him on Twitter @dwai_banerjee.

“This book is unparalleled in its ability to show how the political absorbs the techno-scientific over various scales and temporalities in contemporary India. The authors take breath-taking risks with the plethora of objects and contexts they dwell on but manage to land on the ground each time. A splendid achievement.”—Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University “This book is an extraordinary exploration of the multitudes of meanings and uses of blood in northern India. A surprising and compelling account of interest to anyone who has ever bled, menstruated, or claims to be related to others by ‘blood.’”—Emily Martin, New York University “This revelatory book brings us a thoroughly political hematology, not only tracking economies of sacrifice, extraction, and spillage, but also thinking through blood as a medium for writing, for protest, and for the telling of historical time”—Stefan Helmreich, MIT

$42.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-4509-6 288 pages, 6 x 9, 9 b&w halftones

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Empire’s Mobius Strip Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention Stephanie Malia Hom

Italy’s current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Empire’s Mobius Strip investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state’s historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today’s refugee crisis. What is at stake in Empire’s Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Stephanie Malia Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy’s most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of “colonialism lite.” But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy’s colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village. Empire’s Mobius Strip brings into relief Italy’s shifting constellations of mobility and empire, giving them space to surface, submerge, stretch out across time, and fold back on themselves like a Mobius strip. It deftly shows that mobility forges lasting connections between colonial imperialism and neoliberal empire, establishing Italy as a key site for the study of imperial formations in Europe and the Mediterranean. Stephanie Malia Hom is Executive Director of the Acus Foundation. She is author of The Beautiful Country and tweets @ empirestrip.

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3990-3 270 pages, 6 x 9, 20 b&w halftones, 4 maps 4

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“A lyrical and important work that moves between the realms of reportage, historical analysis, and political reflection to illuminate the ongoing crisis of migration in Italy. In both form and content, the text is a hybrid: elegant in its simplicity and brilliant in its execution.”—Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan, author of History in Exile “Exploring the historical and contemporary treatment of undesirables by Italian authorities, Stephanie Malia Hom unearths the imperial formations buried beneath the rhetoric of the modern nation state. Her study of forced migration in the contemporary Mediterranean is perfectly timed and destined to become a classic of the transnational turn in Italian Studies.”—Claudio Fogu, University of California Santa Barbara, author of The Historic Imaginary


Empire’s Labor The Global Army That Supports U.S. Wars Adam Moore

In a dramatic unveiling of the little-known world of contracted military logistics, Adam Moore examines the lives of the global army of laborers who support US overseas wars. Empire’s Labor brings us the experience of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who perform jobs such as truck drivers and administrative assistants at bases located in warzones in the Middle East and Africa. He highlights the changes the US military has undergone since the Vietnam War, when the ratio of contractors to uniformed personnel was roughly 1:6. In Afghanistan it has been as high as 4:1. This growth in logistics contracting represents a fundamental change in how the US fights wars, with the military now dependent on a huge pool of contractors recruited from around the world. It also, Moore demonstrates, has social, economic, and political implications that extend well beyond the battlefields. Focusing on workers from the Philippines and Bosnia, two major sources of “third country national” (TCN) military labor, Moore explains the rise of large-scale logistics outsourcing since the end of the Cold War; describes the networks, infrastructures, and practices that span the spaces through which people, information, and goods circulate; and reveals the experiences of foreign workers, from the hidden dynamics of labor activism on bases, to the economic and social impacts these jobs have on their families and the communities they hail from. Through his extensive fieldwork and interviews, Moore gives voice to the agency and aspirations of the many thousands of foreigners who labor for the US military. Adam Moore is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Peacebuilding in Practice. Follow him on Twitter @Conf lictGeo.

$19.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4217-0 264 pages, 6 x 9, 3 b&w halftones, 6 maps, 3 charts

“Empire’s Labor is a beautifully written, essential book exposing the labor and labor exploitation underpinning the military industrial complex, US empire, and the corporations fueling permanent war.”—David Vine, Professor of Anthropology, American University, author of Base Nation ”Based in intensive on-the-ground research, this rich and remarkable book gives us a new way to understand the current everywhere war through the lens of the contract labor and migrations from poor countries that makes it possible. Acutely analyzed, Moore’s book will be a foundational text for understanding contemporary war and providing insight into labor’s pushback.”— Catherine Lutz, Brown University, author of The Empire of Bases “I can’t think of any book about America’s current global military conflicts that I’ve learned more from than Empire’s Labor. Moore combines geography, history, ethnography, and political science in a sophisticated and readable analysis about the role of everyday people from all over the world who support American military logistics.”—Jennifer Mittelstadt, Rutgers University

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Campus Counterspaces Black and Latinx Students’ Search for Community at Historically White Universities Micere Keels

Frustrated with the flood of news articles and opinion pieces that were skeptical of minority students’ “imagined” campus microaggressions, Micere Keels, a professor of comparative human development, set out to provide a detailed account of how racial-ethnic identity structures Black and Latinx students’ college transition experiences. Tracking a cohort of more than five hundred Black and Latinx students since they enrolled at five historically white colleges and universities in the fall of 2013 Campus Counterspaces finds that these students were not asking to be protected from new ideas. Instead, they relished exposure to new ideas, wanted to be intellectually challenged, and wanted to grow. However, Keels argues, they were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that enable radical growth. They wanted counterspaces where they could go beyond basic conversations about whether racism and discrimination still exist. They wanted time in counterspaces with likeminded others where they could simultaneously validate and challenge stereotypical representations of their marginalized identities and develop new counter narratives of those identities. In this critique of how universities have responded to the challenges these students face, Keels offers a way forward that goes beyond making diversity statements to taking diversity actions. Micere Keels is Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She is also the founding director of the Trauma Responsive Educational Practices project.

$19.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4790-8 240 pages, 6 x 9, 1 chart 6

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“This is an excellent book that offers a significant contribution to the existing literature. A sense of the trajectory of Latinx and Black students’ transitions is a new contribution that is needed in the field.”—Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of The Unchosen Me “The authors bring an important, specific focus to a number of populations that are often left less considered. . . . the interviews are moving, intimate, and reflect a crucial rapport and trust.”—Elizabeth Lee, Ohio University, author of Class and Campus Life “In this important book, Micere Keels amplifies the voices of Black and Latinx students and their search for identity-affirming community in the face of marginalizing forces on historically White campuses. It offers important insights and actionable recommendations to campus leaders who are serious about supporting the success of all of their students. Recommended reading!”—Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., Author of WhyAre All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race


Rituals of Care Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand Felicit y Aulino

End-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Felicity Aulino’s Rituals of Care speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased attention to care for the elderly, both personal and professional, Aulino challenges common presumptions about the universal nature of “caring.” The way she examines particular sets of emotional and practical ways of being with people, and their specific historical lineages, allows Aulino to show an inseparable link between forms of social organization and forms of care. Unlike most accounts of the quotidian concerns of providing care in a rapidly aging society, Rituals of Care brings attention to corporeal processes. Moving from vivid descriptions of the embodied routines at the heart of home caregiving to depictions of care practices in more general ways—care for one’s group, care of the polity—it develops the argument that religious, social, and political structures are embodied, through habituated action, in practices of providing for others. Under the watchful treatment of Aulino, care becomes a powerful foil for understanding recent political turmoil and structural change in Thailand, proving embodied practice to be a vital vantage point for phenomenological and political analyses alike. Felicity Aulino is a Five-College Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

$22.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3973-6 210 pages, 6 x 9

“Felicity Aulino’s Rituals of Care is evocative and engaging. It provides in-depth ethnographic descriptions and develops a theory of care, morality, and subjectivity that is clear and excellently discussed.”—Joanna Cook, University College London, author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism “Rituals of Care disturbs in all the right ways. It disturbs our sense of what a self is and what it means to care for someone in the last stretches of life. It disturbs us sensorially by placing bodily caring practices front and center, so we can no longer pretend such practices have no relevance for cultural history or theory.”— Lisa Stevenson, McGill University, author of Life Beside Itself “Rituals of Care shows us that the western understanding of what it means to care is not universal. It also show us that the way humans care become the underpinnings of the way they harm. Because of this, the book is a powerful and provocative text.”—Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

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Driving toward Modernity Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China Jun Zhang

In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation’s wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China’s great transformation. Jun Zhang is Assistant Professor of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong.

“Jun Zhang has written an excellent, lively ethnography of car consumption, driving, and parking in contemporary China that offers a significant contribution for understanding the booming car market and conflicts over urban space.”—Beth Notar, Trinity College, and author of<Displacing Desire “Driving toward Modernity is a timely and fascinating ethnography that is well-crafted and highly accessible. Rich in detail, it makes a welcome contribution to China Studies by shedding new light on an important domain—cars.”—Li Zhang, University of California, Davis, and author of Strangers in the City “Jun Zhang traces masterfully the contested evolution of the competing interests of state control, consumption regimes and freedom. Entangled with the destinies of a middle class craving to own and use cars, it reveals how the auto industry has long been at the centre of the state’s developmental agenda.”—Luigi Tomba, The University of Synedy, author of The Government Next Door

$23.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3840-1 240 pages, 6 x 9, 5 b&w halftones, 2 b&w line drawings, 3 charts 8

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Violence as Usual Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa Marie Muschalek

Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-themill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives. Marie A. Muschalek’s fascinating portrayal of the daily deeds of African and German men enrolled in the colonial police force called the Landespolizei is a historical anthropology of police practice and the normalization of imperial power. Replete with anecdotes of everyday experiences both of the policemen and of colonized people and settlers, Violence as Usual reexamines fundamental questions about the relationship between power and violence. Muschalek gives us a new perspective on violence beyond the solely destructive and the instrumental. She overcomes, too, the notion that modern states operate exclusively according to modes of rationalized functionality. Violence as Usual offers an unusual assessment of the history of rule in settler colonialism and an alternative to dominant narratives of an ostensibly weak colonial state. Marie A. Muschalek is Lecturer and Researcher in History at the University of Freiburg. She is co-founder of a public history project on German’s colonial past, which can be viewed online at kolonialismusimkasten.de.

“Violence as Usual greatly expands our understanding of colonial relations on the frontier—a well-crafted work of history.”— Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Flinders University, author of Liberal Imperialism in Germany “Marie Muschalek ingeniously exposes the rough grain of colonial everyday life with a spare, concentrated empiricism energized by innovative theoretical reflection. Looking at the diffused power of routine police violence in the post-genocide colony, she recasts thinking on big questions about the colonial state and colonial violence in Namibia and beyond. The compelling method, ambitious archive and strong interpretive sensibility make this a significant contribution.”—J.P. Short, author of Magic Lantern Empire

$49.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-4285-9 270 pages, 6 x 9, 12 b&w halftones, 1 map

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Sentiment, Reason, and Law Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan Jeffrey T. Martin

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an “anthropological fact,” bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant. Jeffrey T. Martin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Follow him on Twitter @jematica.

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4005-3 186 pages, 6 x 9 10

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“Through an ethnography of policing in a recently democratized state, Sentiment, Reason, and Law offers a deep, nuanced, and exhaustively researched analysis of policing as a fraught but integral aspect of any democracy. This book is intricate, grounded, and engaging.”—Anya Bernstein, University at Buffalo School of Law “Against the classical idea that the police are an apolitical law enforcement institution entitled to the legitimate use of force, Jeffrey Martin shows, through his lively ethnography of a Taiwanese precinct, that, deeply rooted in their illiberal national past, the police resort to affective solidarities and mediated compromises much more than to legal instruments and violent actions. His book thus provides a fascinating addition to contemporary theories of policing.”—Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, author of Enforcing Order


Street Sovereigns Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti Chelsey L . Kivl and

How do people improvise political communities in the face of state collapse—and at what cost? Street Sovereigns explores the risks and rewards taken by young men on the margins of urban Haiti who broker relations with politicians, state agents, and NGO workers in order secure representation, resources, and jobs for themselves and neighbors. Moving beyond mainstream analyses that understand these groups—known as baz (base)— as apolitical, criminal gangs, Chelsey Kivland argues that they more accurately express a novel mode of street politics that has resulted from the nexus of liberalizing orders of governance and development with longstanding practices of militant organizing in Haiti. Kivland demonstrates how the baz exemplifies an innovative and effective platform for intervening in the contemporary political order, while at the same time reproducing gendered and generational hierarchies and precipitating contests of leadership that exacerbate neighborhood insecurity. Still, through the continual effort to reconstitute a state that responds to the needs of the urban poor, this story offers a poignant lesson for political thought: one that counters prevailing conceptualizations of the state as that which should be flouted, escaped, or dismantled. The baz project reminds us that in the stead of a vitiated government and public sector the state resurfaces as the aspirational bedrock of the good society. “We make the state,” as baz leaders say.

“Street Sovereigns contains depth and complexity of analysis of the subject matter, as well as lyrical and at times poetic narrative.”—Robert Maguire, Former Director of GWU’s Latin America and Hemispheric Studies Program

Chelsey L. Kivland is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Follow her on Twitter @ChelseyKivland.

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4699-4 306 pages, 6 x 9, 22 b&w halftones, 1 b&w line drawing, 2 maps

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Spacious Minds Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism Sar a E. Lewis

Spacious Minds argues that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara E. Lewis’s research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should “bounce back” from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness. Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Minds shows how Tibetan Buddhism frames new possibilities for understanding resilience. Here, the social and religious landscape encourages those exposed to violence to see past events as impermanent and illusory, where debriefing, working-through, or processing past events only solidifies suffering and may even cause illness. Resilience in Dharamsala is understood as sems pa chen po, a vast and spacious mind that does not fixate on individual problems, but rather uses suffering as an opportunity to generate compassion for others in the endless cycle of samsara. A big mind view helps to see suffering in life as ordinary. And yet, an intriguing paradox occurs. As Lewis deftly demonstrates, Tibetans in exile have learned that human rights campaigns are predicated on the creation and circulation of the trauma narrative; in this way, Tibetan activists utilize foreign trauma discourse, not for psychological healing, but as a political device and act of agency. Sara E. Lewis is Associate Professor of Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology at Naropa University. Follow her on Twitter @DeathRebirthLab.

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1535-8 252 pages, 6 x 9, 3 b&w halftones, 1 map 12

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“The book makes a significant contribution in broadening our understanding of resilience from a cross-cultural perspective, and also in deepening our understanding of a significant facet of Tibetan Buddhist culture in a nuanced, respectful and non-tokenistic way.”—Gerald Roche, University of Melbourne “This beautifully written and important work poses a timely and thought-provoking question: If cultures can produce moral injury, can they also produce resilience? Lewis shows brilliantly that the Tibetan exile community, characterized both by adversity and cultural resources for transforming adversity, holds important lessons for our reflection. Highly recommended.”—Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Emory University “In the best tradition of anthropology, this book shows us that when suffering and distress are imaged differently—and when the nature of the mind is understood differently—trauma is not traumatizing, at least in the same way. This is a wise and thoughtful book.”—Tanya Luhrman, Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professor of Anthropology and Professor, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University


Rebel Politics A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands David Brenner

Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-inhand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-andfile, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on political sociology, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics.

“Rebel Politics is underpinned by years of extraordinary fieldwork, including unprecedented access to the leaders of some of Myanmar’s ethnic-minority rebel groups. It is a pathbreaking book, essential reading not only for Myanmar-watchers but also anyone interested in insurgencies and state formation.”—Lee Jones, Queen Mary University of London, author of Societies Under Siege

David Brenner is Lecturer in International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London. Follow him on Twitter @ DavBrenner.

SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS $24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4009-1 162 pages, 7 x 10, 8 b&w halftones, 2 maps

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Can Science and Technology Save China? edited by Susan Greenhalgh and Li Zhang

Can Science and Technology Save China? assesses the intimate connections between science and society in China, offering an in-depth look at how an array of sciences and technologies are being made, how they are interfacing with society, and with what effects. Focusing on critical domains of daily life, the chapters explore how scientists, technicians, surgeons, therapists, and other experts create practical knowledges and innovations, as well as how ordinary people take them up as they pursue the good life. Editors Greenhalgh and Zhang offer a rare, up-close view of the politics of Chinese science-making, showing how everyday logics, practices, and ethics of science, medicine, and technology are profoundly reshaping contemporary China. By foregrounding the notion of “governing through science,” and the contested role of science and technology as instruments of change, this timely book addresses important questions regarding what counts as science in China, what science and technology can do to transform China, as well as their limits and unintended consequences. Susan Greenhalgh is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society in the department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis.

$26.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4703-8 240 pages, 6 x 9, 10 b&w halftones 14

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“Some of the topics are incredibly original and demonstrate the vitality of this emerging field. This edited volume is a very important contribution to studies of China’s science and technology.”—Mei Zhan, University of California, Irvine “It not only will fill in the gap in the literature but also is a very unique scholarship that examines the science question—the role of science in the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation or the fulfillment of China dream—at the center of the study of contemporary Chinese society.”—Cong Cao, University of Nottingham Ningbo China


Take Back Our Future An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement edited by Ching Kwan Lee and Ming Sing

In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? Take Back Our Future argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China’s internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The contributors outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime’s turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, Take Back Our Future demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness. Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is author of The Specter of Global China.

“Take Back Our Future is an exceptionally strong and convincing edited volume that does an excellent job of situating the struggle in the literature on social movements and contributes to the development of theory.”—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine, coauthor of China in the 21st Century “Take Back Our Future is a wonderful collection of essays focused on 2014’s Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. This collection will likely become a definitive statement on one of the 21st century’s most spectacular moments of social unrest.”—Eli Friedman, Cornell University, author of Insurgency Trap

Ming Sing is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is author of Hong Kong’s Tortuous Democratization.

$26.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4092-3 270 pages, 6 x 9, 32 color photos, 4 charts

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FORTHCOMING

THE MAN IN THE DOG PARK

FAR FROM THE CALIPH’S GAZE

Coming Up Close to Homelessness

Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian

Cathy A. Small

Nicholas H. A. Evans

with Jason Kordosky and Ross Moore

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1569-3 May 2020

$22.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-4878-3 April 2020

ON AN EMPTY STOMACH

BEYOND EXCEPTION New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula

Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief

Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora

Tom Scott-Smith

$19.95 paperback 978-1-5017-5030-4 August 2020

$35.00 hardcover 978-1-5017-4865-3 April 2020

TRAVERSING

BLACK LIVES AND SPATIAL MATTERS Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis

Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic

Jodi Rios

Susanna Trnka

Police/Worlds

$44.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-4922-3 May 2020

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-5047-2 August 2020

MARRIAGE AND MARRIAGEABILITY The Practices of Matchmaking between Men from Japan and

INTERNATIONAL INTERVENTION AND THE PROBLEM OF LEGITIMACY

Women from Northeast China

Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Chigusa Yamaura

Andrew C. Gilbert

$39.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-5014-4 Juluy 2020

$49.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-5026-7 August 2020


FORTHCOMING

INTIMACY ACROSS THE FENCELINES

REMAINS OF SOCIALISM

Sex, Marriage, and the U.S. Military in Okinawa

Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Rebecca Forgash

Maya Nadkarni

$54.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-5040-3 August 2020

$28.95 paperback 978-1-5017-5018-2 July 2020

POLICING THE FRONTIER

TALES FROM ALBARADO

An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger

Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania

Mirco Göpfert

Smoki Musaraj

Police/Worlds

$25.95 paperback 978-1-5017-5034-2 August 2020

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4722-9 March 2020

THE FRONTIER EFFECT

MIXED MESSAGES Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia

State Formation and Violence in Colombia

Kathryn E. Graber

Teo Ballvé

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-5051-9 August 2020

Cornell Series on Land $27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4754-0 March 2020

TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR Social Enterprise and Disruptive Development in Bangladesh Julia Qermezi Huang $28.95 paperback 978-1-5017-4955-1 May 2020


Enlightenment and the Gasping City Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray Saskia Abr ahms-K avunenko

With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air pollution impresses itself on the urban environment as stagnation and blur. She explores how air pollution and related phenomena exist in dynamic tension with Buddhist ideas and practices concerning purification, revitalisation and enlightenment. By focusing on light, its intersections and its oppositions, she illuminates Buddhist practices and beliefs as they interact with the pressing urban issues of air pollution, post-socialist economic vacillations, urban development, nationalism, and climate change. Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko is a Teaching Fellow at New York University, Shanghai, and an Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

$26.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3765-7 252 pages, 6 x 9, 12 b&w halftones 18

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“Enlightenment and the Gasping City is the best book I have read on the revival of Buddhism—or even more broadly—of religion in contemporary Mongolia.”—Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University, and author of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road “Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko successfully captures core aspects of religious life in Mongolia at a key stage in its post-communist transition.”—Martin Mills, University of Aberdeen, and author of Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism


Narkomania Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine Jennifer J. Carroll

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll’s ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on “normal” citizens. Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of “good” citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public. Jennifer J. Carroll is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University.

“Narkomania is an innovative book that asks us to rethink everything we know about addiction and statebuilding. It is a poignant, occasionally furious look at how drug policies meant to help people who use drugs in fact do great violence to them.”—Elizabeth Dunn, Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of No Path Home “Narkomania makes a fascinating contribution to anthropologies of global and public health. Jennifer Carroll moves addiction studies from the clinic into local, regional, and national politics, and personal meanings. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in the embeddedness of addiction in politics and everyday life.”— Tomas Matza, University of Pittsburgh, and author of Shock Therapy “Narkomania is accessible, honest, eye-opening, and relevant. It revisits with new insight and great passion the complex and entwined worlds of drug addiction and treatment.”—Merrill Singer, University of Connecticut, and co-author of The Social Value of Drug Addicts

$25.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3692-6 252 pages, 6 x 9, 14 b&w halftones

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The Democracy Development Machine Neoliberalism, Radical Pessimism, and Authoritarian Populism in Mayan Guatemala Nichol as Copel and

Nicholas Copeland sheds new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings in The Democracy Development Machine. This historical ethnography examines how governmentalized spaces of democracy and development fell short, enabling and disfiguring an ethnic Mayan resurgence. In a passionate and politically engaged book, Copeland argues that the transition to democracy in Guatemalan Mayan communities has led to a troubling paradox. He finds that while liberal democracy is celebrated in most of the world as the ideal, it can subvert political desires and channel them into illiberal spaces. As a result, Copeland explores alternative ways of imagining liberal democracy and economic and social amelioration in a traumatized and highly unequal society as it strives to transition from war and authoritarian rule to open elections and free-market democracy. The Democracy Development Machine follows Guatemala’s transition, reflects on Mayan involvement in politics during and after the conflict, and provides novel ways to link democratic development with economic and political development. Nicholas Copeland is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at Virginia Tech. He is an H. F. Guggenheim Fellow and co-author of The World of Wal-Mart.

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3606-3 282 pages, 6 x 9, 6 b&w halftones, 1 map 20

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“The Democracy Development Machine is a fantastic book. It’s exactly what political ethnography should be—insightful, analytically rigorous, ethnographically rich, and provocative.”—Jennifer Burrell, Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, SUNY-Albany, and author of Maya After War

“Nicholas Copeland has written a powerful critique of grassroots democracy. Copeland captures the complicated ways local allegiances work in practice, shattering romantic notions of community cooperation. This reveals much about Guatemala’s troubled politics and enriches our understanding of the multifaceted, often unintended, effects of social action.”—Edward Fischer, Vanderbilt University


The Act of Living Street Life, Marginality, and Development in Urban Ethiopia Marco Di Nunzio

The Act of Living explores the relation between development and marginality in Ethiopia, one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Replete with richly depicted characters and multi-layered narratives on history, everyday life and visions of the future, Marco Di Nunzio’s ethnography of hustling and street life is an investigation of what is to live, hope and act in the face of the failing promises of development and change. Di Nunzio follows the life trajectories of two men, “Haile” and “Ibrahim,” as they grow up in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, enter street life to get by, and turn to the city’s expanding economies of work and entrepreneurship to search for a better life. Apparently favourable circumstances of development have not helped them achieve social improvement. As their condition of marginality endures, the two men embark in restless attempts to transform living into a site for hope and possibility. By narrating Haile and Ibrahim’s lives, The Act of Living explores how and why development continues to fail the poor, how marginality is understood and acted upon in a time of promise, and why poor people’s claims for open-endedness can lead to better and more just alternative futures. Tying together anthropology, African studies, political science, and urban studies, Di Nunzio takes readers on a bold exploration of the meaning of existence, hope, marginality, and street life. Marco Di Nunzio is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Africa at the University of Birmingham.

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3626-1 264 pages, 6 x 9, 8 b&w halftones

“[A]s a people-focused analysis of certain hardscrabble lives in Addis Ababa, The Act of Living is an interesting work of urban anthropology.”—Environment and Urbanization “In this masterwork of storytelling, political analysis, philosophical reflection, and street smarts, the tensions of living poor are rendered with all of their complexities and inventiveness. Rarely have the details about making a good life no matter the systematic constraints been depicted with such unflinching understanding and compassion.”—AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield, and author of For the City Yet to Come “This book is a tale of that exclusion and the struggle to overcome it. It is anchored on the lives of two archetypical characters who resort to street smartness (aradanet in Ethiopian parlance) not just to survive but rather to live and attain a modicum of dignity. It is a life that has within itself the potential of possibility and reversibility. This fascinating story forms an important backdrop to the change that the country is undergoing currently.”—Bahru Zewde, author of The Quest for Socialist Utopia

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Divorcing Traditions Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism K atherine Lemons

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women’s arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist’s authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls “spiritual healing”—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce’s contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism. Katherine Lemons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

$26.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3477-9 246 pages, 6 x 9 22

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“Katherine Lemons has written a powerful and compelling book that reshapes our understanding of secularism, Muslim law, and divorce in contemporary India.”—Rachel Sturman, Bowdoin College, and author of The Government of Social Life in Colonial India “Divorcing Traditions is groundbreaking. It is a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between religion and secularism in India—a splendid achievement.”—Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University “This ethnographically rich and analytically astute book examines how secularism, rather than separating law from religion, unsettles any hard distinction between those two domains. With brilliant insight, Katherine Lemons underscores the entanglement of political economy in kinship, religion, and law. Divorcing Traditions is an original intervention into the study of secularism, religion, and gender.”—Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz


Rethinking Diabetes Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV Emily Mendenhall foreword by Mark Nichter

In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and chronic mental distress produce diabetes. The life history narratives in the book show how deeply embedded these factors are in the ways diabetes is experienced and (re)produced among poor communities around the world. Rethinking Diabetes focuses on the stories of women living with diabetes near or below the poverty line in urban settings in the United States, India, South Africa, and Kenya. Mendenhall shows how women’s experiences of living with diabetes cannot be dissociated from their social responsibilities of caregiving, demanding family roles, expectations, and gendered experiences of violence that often displace their ability to care for themselves first. These case studies reveal the ways in which a global story of diabetes overlooks the unique social, political, and cultural factors that produce syndemic diabetes differently across contexts. From the case studies, Rethinking Diabetes clearly provides some important parallels for scholars to consider: significant social and economic inequalities, health systems that are a mix of public and private (with substandard provisions for low-income patients), and rising diabetes incidence and prevalence. At the same time, Mendenhall asks us to unpack how social, cultural, and epidemiological factors shape people’s experiences and why we need to take these differences seriously when we think about what drives diabetes and how it affects the lives of the poor. Emily Mendenhall is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Global Health at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

“An erudite work of original and seminal scholarship, Rethinking Diabetes is an extraordinary study that is especially and unreservedly recommended.”—Midwest Book Review “Emily Mendenhall’s rich case studies— introducing each chapter in Rethinking Diabetes—offer forceful illustrations of the interplay of social and biological worlds.”— MandersonLenore, The University of the Witwatersrand, and author of Surface Tensions “Emily Mendenhall critically explores how global health is confronting the rising prevalence of diabetes in the face of poverty, crippled health care systems, and HIV/AIDS. Her approach transcends epidemiological associations and paves the way for consideration of similar entanglements of disease, poverty, and local experience.”—Janet McGrath, Case Western Reserve University

$28.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3843-2 240 pages, 6 x 9, 4 b&w halftones, 5 charts

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Research as Development Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka Sall a Sariol a and Bob Simpson

In Research as Development, Salla Sariola and Bob Simpson show how international collaboration operates in a setting that is typically portrayed as “resource-poor” and “scientifically lagging.” Based on their long-term fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Sariola and Simpson bring into clear ethnographic focus the ways international scientific collaborations feature prominently in the pursuit of global health in which research operates “as” development and not merely “for” it. The authors follow the design, inception, and practice of two clinical trials: one a global health charity funded trial and the other a pharmaceutical industry-sponsored trial. Research as Development situates these two trials within their historical, political and cultural contexts and thus counters the idea that local actors are merely passive recipients of new technical and scientific rationalities. While social studies of clinical trials are beginning to be an established niche in academic writing, Research as Development helps fill important gaps in the literature through its examination of clinical research situated in cultures in low-income settings. Research as Development is noteworthy for the way it highlights the critical and creative role that local researchers play in establishing international collaborations and making them work into locally viable forms. The volume shows how these clinical and research interactions bring about changes in culture, technologies and expertise in Sri Lanka, contexts that have not previously been written about in any detail. Salla Sariola is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University of Helsinki, Finland, and is author of Gender and Sexuality and the coordinating editor of Science and Technology Studies. Bob Simpson is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Durham.

$48.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-3360-4 222 pages, 6 x 9 24

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“Research as Development illustrates how concepts taken for granted by ethics boards, biomedical researchers and even anthropologists—ethics, collaboration, research itself—are contingent and negotiated, constitute and constituted by research worlds and networks.”—Crystal Biruk, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Oberlin College, and author of Cooking Data “Research as Development, a dynamic contribution to the sub-field of the anthropology of clinical trials, offers an astute study of what it means to work together now that the global rise of bioethics has carved out a space for anthropologists.”—Ayo Wahlberg, Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, author of Good Quality


Architects Portraits of a Practice Thomas Yarrow

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow’s vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity. Architects rethinks “creativity,” demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made. Thomas Yarrow is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social life of expertise. He is particularly interested in everyday interactions through which professional knowledge is produced, the personal and ideological commitments that propel this work, and the routine ethical dilemmas that arise. For Architects, Yarrow turned his attention to the lives and work of ten architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop, an architectural firm in the Cotswolds, UK. Yarrow is also the author of Development Beyond Politics, and the co-author of Detachment, Differentiating Development, and Archaeology and Anthropology.

“Architects is an insightful anthropological study of architects at work. There are amazing ethnographic descriptions of architectural work throughout.”—Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester, and author of The Making of a Building “Thomas Yarrow’s book is extremely valuable and opens up anthropological writing to folks who aren’t already a part of the conversation. Anyone will be able to read and relate to Architects.”—Keith M. Murphy, University of California, Irvine, and author of Swedish Design “Tacking deftly between vivid narrative description and rich theoretical reflection, this outstanding book will appeal to a wide readership in anthropology, design, art, and architecture.”—Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University, and author of Reel World

EXPERTISE: CULTURES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE

$18.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3849-4 300 pages, 6 x 9, 33 b&w halftones

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Mercenaries and Missionaries Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South Br andon Vaidyanathan

Mercenaries and Missionaries examines the relationship between rapidly diffusing forms of capitalism and Christianity in the Global South. Using more than two hundred interviews in Bangalore and Dubai, Brandon Vaidyanathan explains how and why global corporate professionals straddle conflicting moral orientations in the realms of work and religion. Seeking to place the spotlight on the role of religion in debates about the cultural consequences of capitalism, Vaidyanathan finds that an “apprehensive individualism” generated in global corporate workplaces is supported and sustained by a “therapeutic individualism” cultivated in evangelical-charismatic Catholicism. Mercenaries and Missionaries uncovers a symbiotic relationship between these individualisms and shows how this relationship unfolds in two global cities—Dubai, in non-democratic UAE, which holds what is considered the world’s largest Catholic parish, and Bangalore, in democratic India, where the Catholic Church, though afflicted by ethnic and religious violence, runs many of the city’s elite educational institutions. Vaidyanathan concludes that global corporations and religious communities create distinctive cultures, with normative models that powerfully orient people to those cultures—the Mercenary in cutthroat workplaces, and the Missionary in churches. As a result, global corporate professionals in rapidly developing cities negotiate starkly opposing moral commitments in the realms of work and religion, which in turn shapes their civic commitment to these cities. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at the Catholic University of America.

$29.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-3623-0 294 pages, 6 x 9, 8 b&w halftones 26

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“Vaidyanathan’s brilliant ethnography breaks ground in the study of capitalism in the Global South.”—Choice “Mercenaries and Missionaries gives an empathetic hearing to the way professionals understand their religious and professional lives, and balances deep knowledge of specific cases with themes of bigger import. This book deserves our attention.”—Allison Youatt Schnable, Assistant Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington “Brandon Vaidyanathan manages to contribute in significant ways to the broad areas of globalization and religion, guest-worker transnational migration, the sociology and anthropology of global charismatic Christianity, and [this book] should be used in college courses.”—José Casanova, Georgetown University, and author of Jesuits and Globalization


The Smile of the Human Bomb New Perspectives on Suicide Terrorism Gideon Ar an tr ansl ated by Jeffrey Green

In 2017, nearly six thousand people were killed in suicide attacks across the world. In The Smile of the Human Bomb, Gideon Aran dissects the moral logic of the suicide terrorism that led to those deaths. The book is a firsthand examination of the bomb site at the moment of the explosion, during the first few minutes after the explosion, and in the last moments before the explosion. Aran uncovers the suicide bomber’s final preparations before embarking on the suicide mission: the border crossing, the journey toward the designated target, penetration into the site, and the behavior of both sides within it. The book sheds light on the truth of the human bomb. Aran’s gritty and often disturbing account is built on a foundation of participant observation with squads of pious Jewish volunteers who gather the scorched fragments of the dead after terrorist attacks; newly revealed documents, including interrogation protocols; interviews with Palestinian armed resistance members and retired Israeli counterterrorism agents; observations of failed suicide terrorists in jail; and conversations with the acquaintances of human bombs. The Smile of the Human Bomb provides new insights on the Middle East conflict, political violence, radicalism, victimhood, ritual, and death and unveils a suicide terrorism scene far different from what is conventionally pictured. In the end, Aran discovers, the suicide terrorist is an unremarkable figure, and the circumstances of his or her recruitment and operation are prosaic and often accidental. The smiling human bomb is neither larger than life nor a monster, but an actor on a human scale. And suicide terrorism is a drama in which clichés and chance events play their role. Gideon Aran is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is author, most recently, of Kookism.

$34.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-2475-6 376 pages, 6 x 9, 8 b&w halftones

“By departing from the traditional political, military, economic, and theological analyses of terrorism, Aran presents an intriguing and novel view of the issue.”— Publishers Weekly “A conceptually innovative examination of suicide terrorism. . . . One of the book’s unique contributions is its analysis of suicide terrorism from an anthropological-sociological perspective, based on the author’s extensive field research in Israel and the West Bank. . . . An important contribution to the literature on suicide bombing attacks.”—Perspectives on Terrorism “This is a remarkable exploration of the meaning of suicide terrorism. It is an intellectual journey through personal accounts of victims and inside views of the Zaka movement of Orthodox Jews who locate bits of flesh remaining after suicide attacks. This is a thoughtful, sensitively written tour de force by one of Israel’s leading anthropologists, and the scope of his book is wide-ranging, touching on themes that are relevant to the many forms of religious extremism around the world.”—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God

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Battling the Buddha of Love A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built Jessica Marie Falcone

Battling the Buddha of Love is a work of advocacy anthropology that explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, a transnational Buddhist organization, as it sought to build the “world’s tallest statue” as a multi-million-dollar “gift” to India. Hoping to forcibly acquire 750 acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh, the Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” Falcone sheds light on the aspirations, values, and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against the Maitreya Project. Because the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are converts to Tibetan Buddhism, individuals Falcone terms “non-heritage” practitioners, she focuses on the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists hailing from Portland to Pretoria. She asks how could a transnational Buddhist organization committed to compassionate practice blithely create so much suffering for impoverished rural Indians. Falcone depicts the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy, and through her examination of these logics she reveals the divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures. Battling the Buddha of Love traces power, faith, and hope through the axes of globalization, transnational religion, and rural grassroots activism in South Asia, showing the unintended local consequences of an international spiritual development project. Jessica Marie Falcone is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University.

$23.95 paperback 978-1-5017-2348-3 324 pages, 6 x 9, 15 b&w halftones 28

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“Falcone draws on fieldwork and her own personal engagement with the resistance to describe the struggle over the creation of what would have been the largest-ever Buddha image.”—Buddhadharma “Falcone’s advocacy does not compromise the rigor or balance of her analysis. She draws on more than a decade of site observation and personal interviews to produce nuanced ethnographies of the various groups as they struggle with the unintended consequences of Buddhism’s globalization. . . . It will be a valuable resource for serious scholars of contemporary Buddhism and for those studying Buddhism and anthropology.”—Choice “As the title of this absorbing book Battling the Buddha of Love aptly describes, this lucid ethnography by Jessica Falcone explores the transnational life of a globalizing Tibetan Buddhist organization.”—Reading Religion


More Than Words Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali Richard Fox

Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of “the living letter” may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—linked to academic philology, reform Hinduism, and local politics—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. More than Words shows how Balinese practices of apotropaic writing—on palm-leaves, amulets, and bodies—challenge these notions, and yet coexist alongside them. Reflecting on this coexistence, Fox develops a theoretical approach to writing centered on the premise that such contradictory sensibilities hold wider significance than previously recognized for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond. Richard Fox is Professor and Chair of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada.

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-2535-7 264 pages, 6 x 9, 30 b&w halftones, 3 figures

“Fox explores the what, when, where, and why of writing on Bali. Fox more than delivers on his promise to add to an understanding of the local belief that the inscription itself is animated and as such venerated. . . . Fox more than surpasses his two stated goals: to make a “modest” contribution to the study of the Balinese system of beliefs, and to rethink human writing itself. This important work is a must for those interested in Asian religions and recommended for those interested in humanity’s unique abilities.”—Choice “More than Words is of the highest quality. Richard Fox’s ability to combine a concern with text and a refined ethnographic sensibility is excellent and engaging.”—Ronald Lukens-Bull, University of North Florida “More Than Words brings moral philosophy and philology together with traditions and practices of Balinese literacy; it joins history with the everyday particulars of Balinese lives. Richard Fox’s eloquent voice brings analysis and fieldwork together to present a comparative account of literacy that provides much more than mere words.”—Joseph Errington, Yale University

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Improvisational Islam Indonesian Youth in a Time of Possibility Nur Amali Ibr ahim

Improvisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each trying to envision alternative ways of being Muslim independent from established religious and political authorities. One group draws from methods originating from the business world, like accounting, auditing, and self-help, to promote a puritanical understanding of the religion and spearhead Indonesia’s spiritual rebirth. A second group reads Islamic scriptures alongside the western human sciences. Both groups, he argues, show a great degree of improvisation and creativity in their interpretations of Islam. These experimental forms of religious improvisations and practices have developed in a specific Indonesian political context that has evolved after the deposal of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime in 1998. At the same time, Improvisational Islam suggests that the Indonesian case study brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on and are inspired by not only their holy scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those originating in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as uncompromising and adversarial to the West and where bans and walls are deemed necessary to keep them out, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell. Nur Amali Ibrahim is Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of International Studies at Indiana University.

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-2786-3 210 pages, 6 x 9 30

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“In this landmark account, Nur Amali Ibrahim paints a nuanced, detailed portrait of students seeking to reconcile some of the major social forces that inflect everyday life across the Muslim world—Islam, liberalism, radicalism, and secularism—as they strive to both find and define their place in a fast-changing, democratizing nation.”—Daromir Rudnyckyj, University of Victoria, and author of the award-winning Spiritual Economies “Nur Amali Ibrahim presents an elegant and unexpected comparison of student groups: liberals at the National Islamic University, and Islamists at the secular University of Indonesia. Stressing the complexities of background, personal motivation, and accident that lead students to join such groups, Improvisational Islam shows how local incorporations of western technique act both as coping mechanisms for, and means of furthering the violence of neoliberal capitalism’s incursion into local environments.”—Gregory Starrett, University of North Carolina Charlotte, and author of Putting Islam to Work


Living with Animals Bonds across Species edited by Natalie Porter and Il ana Gershon

Living with Animals is a collection of imagined animal guides—a playful and accessible look at different human-animal relationships around the world. Anthropologists and their co-authors have written accounts of how humans and animals interact in labs, in farms, in zoos, and in African forests, among other places. Modeled after the classic A World of Babies, an edited collection of imagined Dr. Spock manuals from around the world—Living with Animals focuses on human-animal relationships in their myriad forms. This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read. If you have ever experienced a moment of “what if” curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth. Ilana Gershon is a professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She is the author of A World of Work, Down and Out in the New Economy, No Family is an Island, and The Breakup 2.0. Natalie Porter is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

“Just as animals themselves have long been good for humans to think with, Living with Animals provides readers with a rich set of materials to think about as we work to bring animals into the empirical and ethical worlds we convey through our ethnographic writing.”—American Ethnologist “Living with Animals makes a significant contribution to the field by providing much-needed guidance on how to pursue such lines of inquiry, while also advancing the “species turn” in a variety of intriguing directions.”—John Hartigan, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, and author of Care of the Species “Contributors to this collection explore the tensions, joys and contradictions of becoming human with other animals. While a range of styles enliven this volume and make it a pleasure to read, the authors’ commitments to unsettling assumptions about species difference will keep you thinking for years to come.”—Laura Ogden, author of Swamplife

$24.95 paperback 978-1-5017-2482-4 282 pages, 6 x 9, 14 b&w halftones

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Waste Consuming Postwar Japan Eiko Maruko Siniawer

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday. Eiko Maruko Siniawer is Professor of History at Williams College. She is the author of Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists.

$49.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-2584-5 414 pages, 6 x 9, 18 b&w halftones 32

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“Waste is an original, brilliantly conceived analysis of the protean forms and formations of waste in Japan—from the aftermath of WWII to today. Ranging across a multiplicity of genres, Eiko Maruko Siniawer insightfully demonstrates how waste’s many meanings constituted a potent signifier for the society’s ambivalence about scarcity and prosperity, frugality and affluence, wealth and well-being.”—William W. Kelly, Yale University, and author of The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers “Siniawer’s Waste explores the cultural and social meanings of waste in post-WWII Japanese society. This is a groundbreaking social history of the essential but often overlooked aspects of modern middle-class living.”—Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University, and author of Homecomings


Currencies of Imagination Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam Ivan V. Small

In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration. Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to. Ivan V. Small is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Central Connecticut State University. He is co-editor of Money at the Margins.

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1688-1 216 pages, 6 x 9, 15 b&w halftones

“Throughout Currencies of Imagination, Small masterfully navigates between vividly rendered ethnographic stories and astute interpretations of anthropological and allied theory, challenging readers to rethink the gift and money anew. And that is a gift social scientists can use.”—Cross-Currents “In this absorbing and vivid account of Vietnamese remittance economies, Ivan Small demonstrates the ongoing relevance of attention to the circulation of things as profoundly social and imaginative projects.”—Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross, and author of Essential Trade “Currencies of Imagination builds from multi-sited fieldwork in Vietnam and the US and paints a vivid picture of the social worlds influenced by transnational remittances. Ivan Small shows that remittances are a way of sending gratitude, of establishing and maintaining social bonds. Money is infused with morality and nostalgia, and the technologies of sending and receiving money navigate state regulations and social demands.”—Erik Harms, Yale University, and author of Luxury and Rubble

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Anthropogenic Rivers The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower Jerome Whitington

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, “sustainable” hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated ‘hactivism.’ Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas ‘anthropogenic’ usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a “historical ontology of ourselves,” Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures. Jerome Whitington is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University.

EXPERTISE: CULTURES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-3091-7 288 pages, 6 x 9, 6 b&w halftones, 1 b&w line drawing, 1 chart 34

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“I would and will teach Anthropogenic Rivers in courses on water, infrastructure and development. Jerome Whitington has written a fascinating book that will make quite a splash.”—Andrew Johnson, Princeton University, and author of Ghosts of the New City “Jerome Whitington’s book deserves a wide-ranging readership, from those interested in expertise and epistemology or in transnational neoliberalism, to those who care about environmental politics and ecologies.”—Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto, and author of Economization of Life “Anthropogenic Rivers brings us into the speculative terrain of activists, hydrological experts, farmers, and fishermen as they negotiated about possible futures. This carefully crafted ethnography considers the imaginative dimension of these collaborations. Rather than a polarizing account of a conflict, Whitington gently probes the risks, potentials, and uncertainties of a major engineering project.”—Eben Kirksey, Deakin University, and author of Emergent Ecologies


Remembering the Present Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia J. L . Cassaniti

What is mindfulness, and how does it vary as a concept across different cultures? How does mindfulness find expression in practice in the Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia? What role does mindfulness play in everyday life? J. L. Cassaniti answers these fundamental questions and more through an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to “remember the present” in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought. Focusing on Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, Remembering the Present examines the meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness. Using the experiences of people in Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Cassaniti shows how an attention to memory informs how people live today and how mindfulness is intimately tied to local constructions of time, affect, power, emotion, and self hood. By looking at how these people incorporate Theravada Buddhism into their daily lives, Cassaniti provides a signal contribution to the psychological anthropology of religious experience. Remembering the Present heeds the call made by researchers in the psychological sciences and the Buddhist side of mindfulness studies for better understandings of what mindfulness is and can be. Cassaniti addresses fundamental questions about self hood, identity, and how a deeper appreciation of the many contexts and complexities intrinsic in sati (mindfulness in the Pali language) can help people lead richer, fuller, and healthier lives. Remembering the Present shows how mindfulness needs to be understood within the cultural and historical influences from which it has emerged. J. L. Cassaniti is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Washington State Universit, and the author of Living Buddhism.

“The book is ambitious and easy to read, has many “rich descriptions,” that would be good for undergraduates and graduate students interested in mindfulness, Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhism, and the anthropology of Buddhism”—Religious Studies Review “Remembering the Present is a wonderfully interesting book. In addition to the religious studies audience, anthropologists will find much to engage in this book, offering a rare comparative study that provides provocative examples ripe for further engagement.”—Felicity Aulino, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst “This is an important and fascinating book, examining a key concept, ‘mindfulness,’ from multiple perspectives: religious studies, Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, psychology. The book should be of interest to a wide range of readers, to anyone interested in meditation.”—Devon Hinton, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-0917-3 318 pages, 6 x 9, 20 b&w halftones, 1 map

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School of Europeanness Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia Dace Dzenovsk a

In School of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe’s political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics. Using Latvia as a representative case, School of Europeanness is a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, “Europe Endless”: hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe’s chief virtues. School of Europeanness shows how post–Cold War liberalization projects in Latvia contributed to the current crisis of political liberalism in Europe, providing deep ethnographic analysis of the power relations in Latvia and the rest of Europe, and identifying the tension between exclusive polities and inclusive values as foundational of Europe’s political landscape. Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society.

“Dzenovska employs a deceptively simple, yet illuminating, tool for her study of the well-worn subject matter of the last thirty years of Latvia’s political and social relations. . . . her masterful book belongs on the shelves of academics from many disciplines.”—Slavonic and East European Review “Dzenovska’s critique is worth bearing in mind as increased migration has led to arise in right-wing nativism in Europe and the United States.”—Foreign Affairs “School of Europeanness has enough originality, as well as empirical data, to appeal to a wide range of scholars from different disciplines, including anthropology, politics, and international relations.”—Vera Tolz, University of Manchester “School of Europeanness is certainly an innovative and well-conceived book and has a considerable capacity to impact how we think about postsocialist societies, their directions of past and future social change.”—Timofey Agarin, Queens University, Belfast

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1115-2 276 pages, 6 x 9, 4 b&w halftones 36

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Border Capitalism, Disrupted Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone Stephen Campbell

Border Capitalism, Disrupted presents an insightful ethnography of migrant labor regulation at the Mae Sot Special Border Economic Zone on the Myanmar border in northwest Thailand. By bringing a new deployment of workerist and autonomist theory to bear on his fieldwork, Stephen Campbell highlights the ways in which workers’ struggles have catalyzed transformations in labor regulation at the frontiers of capital in the global south. Looking outwards from Mae Sot, Campbell engages extant scholarship on flexibilization and precarious labor, which, typically, is based on the development experiences of the global north. Campbell emphasizes the everyday practices of migrants, the police, employers, NGOs, and private passport brokers to understand the “politics of precarity” and the new forms of worker organization and resistance that are emerging in Asian industrial zones. Focusing, in particular, on the uses and effects of borders as technologies of rule, Campbell argues that geographies of labor regulation can be read as the contested and fragile outcomes of prior and ongoing working-class struggles. Border Capitalism, Disrupted concludes that with the weakened influence of formal unions, understanding the role of these alternative forms of working-class organizations in labor-capital relations becomes critical. With a broad data set gleaned from almost two years of fieldwork, Border Capitalism, Disrupted will appeal directly to those in anthropology, labor studies, political economy, and geography, as well as Southeast Asian studies. Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

$49.95 hardcover 978-1-5017-1110-7 222 pages, 6 x 9, 10 b&w halftones, 1 map

“Astute. . . . Stephen Campbell’s Border Capitalism, Disrupted insightfully describes Mae Sot as a space where a novel regulative ‘bordering’ process has produced a site uniquely ordered for global capitalism. His carefully-reasoned argument is introduced in the title of the book: that the production of two borders has enabled now ‘legal’ appropriation and exploitation of a fixed migrant population.”—Tea Circle “An excellent addition to the expanding literature that analyses the situation of migrant workers in Mae Sot. . . .and should be of great interest to people working on labour relations, labour migration, Southeast Asian studies, anthropology and political science.”—Journal of Contemporary Asia “Border Capitalism, Disrupted is an outstanding book packed with well-executed ethnographic analysis of the experiential (migrants’ lives) and the political (migration governance). . . . This is a must-read book for any student, scholar or policy official interested in Myanmar, Thailand, migration governance or the ethnography of policy.”—Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

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Harvests, Feasts, and Graves Postcultural Consciousness in Contemporary Papua New Guinea Ryan Schr am

Ryan Schram explores the experiences of living in intercultural and historical conjunctures among Auhelawa people of Papua New Guinea in Harvests, Feasts, and Graves. In this ethnographic investigation, Schram ponders how Auhelawa question the meaning of social forms and through this questioning seek paths to establish a new sense of their collective self. Harvests, Feasts, and Graves describes the ways in which Auhelawa people, and by extension many others, produce knowledge of themselves as historical subjects in the aftermath of diverse and incomplete encounters with Christianity, capitalism, and Western values. Using the contemporary setting of Papua New Guinea, Schram presents a new take on essential topics and foundational questions of social and cultural anthropology. If, as Marx writes, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Harvests, Feasts, and Graves asks: Which history weighs the most? And how does the weight of history become salient as a ground for subjective consciousness? Taking cues from postcolonial theory and indigenous studies, Schram rethinks the “ontological turn” in anthropology and develops a new way to think about the nature of historical consciousness. Rather than seeing the present as either tragedy or farce, Schram argues that contemporary historical consciousness is produced through reflexive sociality. Like all societies, Auhelawa is located in an intercultural conjuncture, yet their contemporary life is not a story of worlds colliding, but a shattered mirror in which multiple Auhelawa subjectivities are possible. Ryan Schram is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

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“This is an exceptionally rich and engaging ethnography that addresses classic themes with contemporary arguments, much as Auhelawa themselves do.”—Michael Lambek, University of Toronto “Ryan Schram’s Harvests, Feasts, and Graves is a compelling ethnography of contemporary Papua New Guinea that innovatively addresses complex theoretical issues of epistemology, historical consciousness, and the practice of anthropology itself.”—Courtney Handman, University of Texas at Austin


THE BATTLE FOR FORTUNE State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans

BANISHED TO THE GREAT NORTHERN WILDERNESS

in China

Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China

Charlene Makley

Ning Wang

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1318-7

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1967-7

CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY

SEX, LOVE, AND MIGRATION Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

The Rhetoric of Global Human Rights Campaignsl

Alexia Bloch

edited by Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk

$28.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1315-6

$29.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1876-2

LIMITS TO DECOLONIZATION

THINKING BEYOND THE STATE Marc Abélès, translated by Phillip Rousseau and Ma-

Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian

rie-Claude Haince

Chaco

$19.95 paperback 978-1-5017-0928-9

Penelope Anthias Cornell Series on Land

WORKING THE SYSTEM

Winner of the Best Book on Ethnic Political Incorporation, APSA

A Political Ethnography of the New Angola

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1436-8

Jon Schubert

NO PATH HOME

$27.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1370-5

Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement Elizabeth Cullen Dunn $26.95 paperback 978-1-5017-1230-2

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