Cornell University Press Anthropology Catalog 2017 by Cornell University Press

2017

NTH

ANTHROPOLGY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

CORNELLPRESS.CORNELL.EDU

ASIAN STUDIES

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RELIGION

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 in her 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.

“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, University of Massachusetts, Amherst ”This remarkably original and fascinating ethnography of mindfulness (sati) in Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka looks at traditional and modern(ist) Buddhism, western-derived scientific psychotherapy, and the everyday discourses of monks and laity. It should be read by Buddhists, scholars of Buddhism, and all modern practitioners and advocates of mindfulness training.” —Steven Collins, University of Chicago

J. L . Cassaniti is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Washington State University. She is the author of Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community.

$27.95 978-1-5017-0917-3 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-0799-5 hardcover 310 pages, 6 x 9, 20 b&w halftones, 1 map

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SOCIO LOGY

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EUROPE

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, Trans-European Express: 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 Dzenovsk a is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society.

$29.95 978-1-5017-1115-2 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1683-6 hardcover 270 pages, 6 x 9, 4 b&w halftones

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“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-Zilitinkevic, 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 “School of Europeanness is written with intellectual verve and imagination. Dzenovska argues that the frames of European belonging, national community, tolerance, and liberalism that have been applied in Latvia in the postsocialist decades have reproduced structures of exclusion and dominance in the relationship between a ‘good European core’ and a ‘not European enough’ periphery.” —Kevin Platt, University of Pennsylvania

ASIAN STUDIES

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LABOR

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.

“Border Capitalism, Disrupted is rich ethnographically, intelligent theoretically, deals with an important topic, and is well written. Stephen Campbell’s work will be of interest to scholars of borderlands, migration, police, and corruption, NGOs, anthropology of work, and global assembly industries.” —Josiah Heyman, University of Texas, El Paso

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

$49.95 978-1-5017-1110-7 hardcover 224 pages, 6 x 9, 10 b&w halftones, 1 map

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ASIAN STUDIES

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RELIGION

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 Schr am teaches and researches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

$27.95 978-1-5017-1100-8 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1099-5 hardcover 270 pages, 6 x 9, 7 b&w halftones, 3 maps

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“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

ECONOMIC S

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CHINA

The Battle for Fortune State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China Charlene Makley

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans’ encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology’s qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of economic development campaigns in China’s multiethnic northwestern province of Qinghai. Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as first and foremost a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans believe the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings seriously, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Makley uses this approach to encourage a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

“The analysis in The Battle for Fortune is fresh, original, and packed with insights. It is based on fieldwork in a region that is very difficult to work in, conducted during an extremely politically sensitive time. The Battle for Fortune also makes significant interventions into much broader sets of inquiries on development, capitalism, and anthropological inquiry writ large.” —Emily T. Yeh, University of Colorado at Boulder “The Battle for Fortune conveys a wealth of new insights about the deeply ambivalent, contradictory, and precarious experiences of Tibetan life in the contemporary PRC. Charlene Makley’s rich ethnography and brilliant use of theory will change the way we think Tibet in these tumultuous early decades of the twenty-first century.” —Ralph Litzinger, Duke University

Charlene Makley is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. She is author of The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China.

S T U D I E S O F T H E W E AT H E R H E A D E A S T A S I A N I N S T I T U T E , COLUMBIA UNIVER SIT Y

$29.95 978-1-5017-1967-7 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1964-6 hardcover 330 pages, 6 x 9, 26 b&w halftones, 2 maps, 1 diagram

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HUMAN RIGHTS

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S L AV E R Y

Contemporary Slavery The Rhetoric of Global Human Rights Campaigns edited by Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk

This volume brings together a cast of leading experts to carefully explore how the history and iconography of slavery has been invoked to support a series of government interventions, activist projects, legal instruments, and rhetorical performances. However well-intentioned these interventions might be, they nonetheless remain subject to a host of limitations and complications. Recent efforts to combat contemporary slavery are too often sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial and, therefore, end up failing the crucial test of speaking truth to power. The widely held notion that antislavery is one of those rare issues that “transcends” politics or ideology is only sustainable because the underlying issues at stake have been constructed and demarcated in a way that minimizes direct challenges to dominant political and economic interests. This must change. By providing an original approach to the underlying issues at stake, Contemporary Slavery will help readers understand the political practices that have been concealed beneath the popular rhetoric and establishes new conversations between scholars of slavery and trafficking and scholars of human rights and social movements. Contributors Jean Allain, Jonathan Blagbrough, Roy Brooks, Annie Bunting, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Andrew Crane, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Benjamin Lawrance, Joel Quirk, and Darshan Vigneswaran

Annie Bunting is Associate Professor of Law and Society at York University and Deputy Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas. Joel Quirk is Professor of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

$29.95 978-1-5017-1876-2 paperback 384 pages, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“This volume significantly enlarges our understanding of slavery in the contemporary world. The authors, collectively and individually, put their mastery of the interrelated literatures to excellent use, resulting in a collection that is insightful, innovative, and methodologically diverse..” —Mark Goodale, University of Lausanne “This is an important, fascinating, and comprehensive collection that addresses the nature of contemporary slavery in its wide range of manifestations. The authors make a compelling argument that when social movements fail to distinguish slavery from the related and often overlapping concepts of trafficking, forced labor, and forced marriage they do a disservice both to our collective understanding of these issues and to the development of effective interventions.” —Sally Engle Merry, New York University

GEOGR APHY

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URBAN STUDIES

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L AT I N A M E R I C A

Limits to Decolonization Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco Penelope Anthias

Penelope Anthias’s Limits to Decolonization addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary indigenous politics: struggles for territory. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Anthias reveals how two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling have failed to reverse a historical trajectory of indigenous dispossession in the Bolivian lowlands. Through an ethnographic account of the “limits” the Guaraní have encountered over the course of their territorial claim—from state boundaries to landowner opposition to hydrocarbon development—Anthias raises critical questions about the role of maps and land titles in indigenous struggles for self-determination. Anthias argues that these unresolved territorial claims are shaping the contours of an era of “post-neoliberal” politics in Bolivia. Limits to Decolonization reveals the surprising ways in which indigenous peoples are reframing their territorial projects in the context of this hydrocarbon state and drawing on their experiences of the limits of state recognition. The tensions of Bolivia’s “process of change” are revealed, as Limits to Decolonization rethinks current debates on cultural rights, resource politics, and Latin American leftist states. In sum, Anthias reveals the creative and pragmatic ways in which indigenous peoples contest and work within the limits of postcolonial rule in pursuit of their own visions of territorial autonomy.

“With this book Penelope Anthias has the potential to shape scholarly debates around indigenous struggles, neoliberalism, and postcolonial rule in important ways. Limits to Decolonization is a thoughtful challenge to the prevailing scholarship.” —Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Whitman College “Limits to Decolonization is a sensitive account of a peoples’ struggle for land and livelihood against the weight of centuries of colonialism and the power of the new extractivism. It is a great piece of work.” —Bret Gustafson, Washington University

Penelope Anthias holds a postdoctoral position in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen.

C O R N E L L S E R I E S O N L A N D : N E W P E R S P E C T I V E S I N T E R R I TO RY, DE V ELOPM ENT A N D EN VIRONM ENT

$27.95 978-1-5017-1436-8 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1435-1 hardcover 270 pages, 6 x 9, 7 halftones, 3 maps

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G E O G R A P H Y • E A S T E R N E U R O P E

No Path Home Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart. After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Privatizing Poland, also from Cornell.

$26.95 978-1-5017-1230-2 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-0966-1 hardcover 264 pages, 15 halftones, 3 line figures, 1 map, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“No Path Home is an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn’s fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as well as presenting a clear theoretical account.” —Laura Hammond, author of This Place Will Become Home

H I S TO R Y • S O C I O LO G Y • C H I N A

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China Ning Wang

After Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to “re-education” by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labor farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of these banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang’s use of newly uncovered Chinese-language sources challenges the concept of the intellectual as renegade martyr, showing how exiles often declared allegiance to the state for self-preservation. While Mao’s campaign victimized the banished, many of those same people also turned against their comrades. Wang describes the ways in which the state sought to remold the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival. Ning Wa ng is Associate Professor of History at Brock University.

“In this important, nuanced, and humane account of life within Chinese penal camps, Ning Wang complicates our picture of banished intellectuals by portraying them as complex human beings forced by circumstances to make some very difficult moral compromises.” —Frank Dikötter, author of Mao’s Great Famine “This is the best scholarly book I’ve read about the experiences of those banished to penal camps in Mao’s China. Wang reveals the dynamic interplay between rightists, camp guards, camp officials, and local and central authorities. He also illuminates the long-term human toll of banishment in all of its complexity.” —Jeremy Brown, coeditor of Maoism at the Grassroots

$29.95 978-1-5017-1318-7 paperback 288 pages, 6 x 9

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SOCIO LOGY

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WOMEN’S STUDIES

Sex, Love, and Migration Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic Alexia Bloch

Sex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women’s exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor. Alexia Bloch argues that the mobility of women is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation as migration fundamentally reshapes women’s emotional worlds and aspirations. Bloch documents how, as women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey since the early 1990s, they have forged new forms of intimacy in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often work for years on end. Sex, Love, and Migration takes as its subject the lives of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three distinct spheres—sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. Bloch challenges us to decouple images of women on the move from simple assumptions about danger, victimization, and trafficking. She redirects our attention to the aspirations and lives of women who, despite myriad impediments, move between global capitalist centers and their home communities. Alexia Bloch is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Red Ties and Residential Schools and The Museum at the End of the World.

$28.95 978-1-50170-1315-6 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1314-9 hardcover 288 pages, 18 halftones, 2 maps, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Sex, Love, and Migration offers essential insight on a widely observed but rarely studied form of mass migrant labor between Turkey and the densely populated Russian Federation. Gender and affect are at the foundation of this finely tuned analysis, and the ethnographic voice is eminently human.” —Bruce Grant, author of The Captive and the Gift “This book is an absolute pleasure to read. Alexia Bloch offers a terrific ethnographic treatment of the interrelated aspects of mobility, intimacy, gender, and capitalism— all of which are central to globalization and identity change.” —Douglas W. Blum, author of National Identity and Globalization “Sex, Love, and Migration is accessible yet provides depth and a complex picture of the economic, symbolic, social and moral shifts that accompany transnational migration.” —Jennifer Suchland, author of Economies of Violence

P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E • G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

Thinking beyond the State Marc Abélès tr ansl ated by Phillip Rousseau and Marie-Cl aude Haince

The French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy. Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shield—for both the Right and the Left—against the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology’s centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the State will find wide application in anthropology, political science and philosophy courses dealing with the state and globalization. Marc Abélès is Full Professor of Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of Quiet Days in Burgundy and The Politics of Survival.

“With panache and elegance, Marc Abélès strikes a fine balance between ethnographic encounter and theoretical adventure. This book mobilizes a critical political anthropology that makes an important intervention in the shifting scales and states of global power.” —Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University “This compact yet magisterial book provides a historically informed, crisp, and interpretively generative exploration of the contributions anthropological approaches can make in pursuing contemporary understandings of politics, states, and new institutional forms.” —Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz “A comprehensive statement from a major theorist regarding not only the future of political anthropology but also the future of the idea of a shared world.” —Carol J. Greenhouse, author of A Moment’s Notice

$19.95 978-1-5017-0928-9 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-0927-2 hardcover 120 pages, 5.5 x 8.5

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POLITICAL SCIENCE

Working the System A Political Ethnography of the New Angola Jon Schubert

Working the System offers key insights into the politics of the everyday in twenty-first-century dominant party and neo-authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Detailing the many ways ordinary Angolans fashion their relationships with the system—an emic notion of their current political and socioeconomic environment—Jon Schubert explores what it means and how it feels to be part of the contemporary Angolan polity. Schubert finds that for many ordinary Angolans, the benefits of the post-conflict “New Angola,” flush with oil wealth and in the midst of a construction boom, are few. The majority of the inhabitants of the capital, Luanda, struggle to make ends meet and live on under $2.00 per day. The “New Angola” as promoted by the ruling MPLA, Schubert contends, is an essentially urban, upwardly mobile, and aspirational project, premised on the acceptance of the regime’s political and economic dominance by its citizens. In the first ethnography of Angola to be published since the end of that country’s twenty-seven years of intermittent violent internal conflict in 2002, Schubert traces how Angolans may question and resist the system within an atmosphere of apparent compliance. Working the System will appeal to anthropologists and political scientists, urban sociologists, and scholars of African studies. Jon Schubert is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leipzig.

$27.95 978-1-5017-1370-5 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1369-9 hardcover 272 pages, 1 halftone, 4 maps, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Working the System is extremely well written and reveals a lifetime of engagement with Angolan society as well as a sophisticated sensibility that is fully attuned to some of the most pressing debates in the social sciences. Rarely have I read a book in which understanding and empathy are so fully matched by lucidity and detachment.” —Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea “Working the System offers a rich and penetrating analysis of contemporary Angola. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of a petro-state and the cultural repertoires that people develop around them.” —Marissa J. Moorman, author of Intonations

RELIGION • ISL AM

Hearing Allah’s Call Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam Julian Millie

Hearing Allah’s Call changes the way we think about Islamic communication. In the city of Bandung in Indonesia, sermons are not reserved for mosques and sites for Friday prayers. Muslim speakers are in demand for all kinds of events, from rites of passage to motivational speeches for companies and other organizations. Julian Millie spent fourteen months sitting among listeners at such events, and he provides detailed contextual description of the everyday realities of Muslim listening as well as preaching. In describing the venues, the audience, and preachers—many of whom are women—he reveals tensions between entertainment and traditional expressions of faith and moral rectitude. The sermonizers use in-jokes, double entendres, and mimicry in their expositions, playing on their audiences’ emotions, triggering reactions from critics who accuse them of neglecting listeners’ intellects. Millie focused specifically on the listening routines that enliven everyday life for Muslims in all social spaces—imagine the hardworking preachers who make Sunday worship enjoyable for rural as well as urban Americans— and who captivate audiences with skills that attract criticism from more formal interpreters of Islam. The ethnography is rich and full of insightful observations and details. Hearing Allah’s Call will appeal to students of the practice of anthropology as well as all those intrigued by contemporary Islam.

“Innovative and illuminating, Hearing Allah’s Call is an excellent account of Muslim oratorical practice in West Java.” —Bill Watson, author of Of Self and Nation “One of the most important features of recent Indonesian history has been the astonishing growth of interest in and activity revolving around Islam. Analysis by a well-informed and sympathetic observer, as Julian Millie clearly is, of any aspect of this phenomenon is very valuable.” —Ward Keeler, author of Javanese Shadow Puppets

Julian Millie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Monash University. He is the author of Bidasari and Splashed by the Saint.

$29.95 978-1-5017-1312-5 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1311-8 hardcover 264 pages, 3 halftones, 4 tables, 6 x 9

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SOCIO LOGY

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CURRENT EVENTS

Singlewide Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park Sonya Sal amon and K atherine MacTavish

In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America’s trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families’ dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the “mobile home industrial complex” may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families who live in trailer parks, rather than being “trailer trash,” culturally resemble the parks’ neighbors who live in conventional homes. Sonya Salamon is Professor Emerita of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Prairie Patrimony and Newcomers to Old Towns. K atherine MacTavish is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Oregon State University.

$29.95 978-1-5017-1322-4 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1321-7 hardcover 280 pages, 9 halftones, 18 tables, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Singlewide is an important and muchneeded contribution to our understandings of rural poverty. Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish do an excellent job of situating the demand for trailer park housing in the larger context of rural economic changes and housing policies.” —Lyn C. Macgregor, University of Wisconsin–Madison “In Singlewide, distinguished ethnographers Sonya Salamon and Kate MacTavish tell an extraordinary story of trailer people—segregated, stigmatized, and cut off from mainstream society and the rural communities in which they live.” —Daniel T. Lichter, Cornell University “In Singlewide Sonya Salamon and Kate MacTavish provide a fascinating study of the meanings and implications of trailer park life. Readers will find a thoughtful analysis of the industry as well as a comprehensive and policy-rich account of the difficulties encountered by low-income families ‘chasing the American dream’ through mobile home ownership.” —Ann R. Tickamyer, co-editor of Rural Poverty in the United States

G E O G R A P H Y • M I N I N G

Rare Earth Frontiers From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes Julie Michelle Klinger

Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation.

“Rare Earth Frontiers could easily become the go-to reference for policymakers concerned with the global politics of rare earths. I could envision this book being adopted in courses offered in the disciplines of material science, political science, economics, political anthropology, geography, and sociology. I very much became engrossed in the fieldwork stories, which helped to put a human face on this topic.” —Ryan Kiggins, coeditor of The Political Economy of Rare Earth Elements

Julie Michelle Klinger is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Faculty Fellow at the Global Economic Governance Initiative, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.

$27.95 978-1-5017-1459-7 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1458-0 hardcover 272 pages, 4 halftones, 10 maps, 6 charts, 6 x 9

C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E • C E N T R A L A S I A

Order at the Bazaar Power and Trade in Central Asia Regine A. Spector

Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region—they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized as islands of order in a chaotic national context. Spector draws on interviews, archival sources, and participant observation to show how traders, landowners, and municipal officials create order in the absence of a coherent government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Merchants have adapted Soviet institutions, including trade unions, and pre-Soviet practices, such as using village elders as the arbiters of disputes, to the urban bazaar by building and asserting their own authority. Spector’s findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of one small country; they teach us how economic development operates when the rule of law is weak. Regine A. Spector is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

$49.95 978-1-5017-0932-6 hardcover 266 pages, 13 halftones, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Order at the Bazaar is an excellent book. Regine A. Spector uses bazaars to provide a fascinating ethnography of postcommunism and Central Asia.” —Scott Radnitz, author of Weapons of the Wealthy Order at the Bazaar is an informative and innovative analysis of the political economy of bazaar markets in Kyrgyzstan. It will appeal to students, scholars of the region, and political scientists concerned with weak and/or failing states.” —Michele E. Commercio, author of Russian Minority Politics in Post-Soviet Latvia and Kyrgyzstan

M E D I C I N E • H E A LT H C A R E • I N D I A

India and the Patent Wars Pharmaceuticals in the New Intellectual Property Regime Murphy Halliburton

India and the Patent Wars contributes to an international debate over the costs of medicine and restrictions on access under stringent patent laws showing how activists and drug companies in low-income countries seize agency and exert influence over these processes. Murphy Halliburton contributes to analyses of globalization within the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, and public health by drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with pharmaceutical producers in India and the United States. India has been at the center of emerging controversies around patent rights related to pharmaceutical production and local medical knowledge. Halliburton shows that Big Pharma is not all-powerful, and that local activists and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, have been able to undermine the aspirations of multinational companies and the WTO. Halliburton traces how key drug prices have gone down, not up, in low-income countries under the new patent regime through partnerships between US- and India-based companies, but warns us to be aware of access to essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries going forward.

“In India and the Patent Wars, Murphy Halliburton addresses the question of how IP law and trade agreements should deal with sophisticated knowledge systems organized by principles quite unlike those of the West. Halliburton convincingly challenges the conventional view that pits Big Pharma and allopathic medicine against local knowledge-keepers and holistic healing.” —Michael F. Brown, author of Who Owns Native Culture?

Murphy Halliburton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Mudpacks and Prozac.

T H E C U LT U R E A N D P O L I T I C S O F H E A LT H C A R E W O R K

ILR PRESS

$24.95 978-1-5017-1347-7 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-1346-0 hardcover 168 pages, 4 halftones, 6 x 9

C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

U R B A N S T U D I E S • A S I A

Cities for Profit The Real Estate Turn in Asia’s Urban Politics Gavin Shatkin

Cities for Profit examines the phenomenon of urban real estate megaprojects in Asia—massive, privately built planned urban developments that have captured the imagination of politicians, policymakers, and citizens across the region. These controversial projects, embraced by elites, occasion massive displacement and have extensive social and economic impacts. Gavin Shatkin finds commonalities and similarities in dozens of such projects in Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing. Shatkin is at the vanguard of urban studies in his focus on real estate. Just as cities are increasingly defined and remapped according to the value of the land under their residents’ feet, the lives of city dwellers are shaped and constrained by their ability to keep up with rising costs of urban life. Scholars and policy and planning professionals alike will benefit from Shatkin’s comprehensive research. Cities for Profit contains insights from more than 150 interviews, site visits to projects, and data from government and nongovernmental organization reports and data, urban plans, architectural renderings, annual reports and promotional materials of developers, and newspaper and other media accounts. Gavin Shatkin is Associate Professor of Architecture at Northeastern University.

$27.95 978-1-5017-1113-8 paperback $95.00 978-1-5017-0990-6 hardcover 290 pages, 16 halftones, 3 maps, 3 charts, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“In this meticulously researched, methodologically elegant study, Gavin Shatkin offers an essential guide to state-led but profit-driven transformations of urban land, property, governance, and space in Asian cities.” —Neil Brenner, author of Critique of Urbanization “Cities for Profit breaks new conceptual ground in the study of global urbanism at the start of the new millennium. The writing is clear, the analysis is pathbreaking, and the approach is innovative.” —Martin Murray, author of Taming the Disorderly City

H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

“I Love Learning; I Hate School” An Anthropology of College Susan D. Blum

Frustrated by her students’ performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter’s problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students. In “I Love Learning; I Hate School,” Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help students—people in general—master meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the ways higher education is structured often leads them to fail to learn. More than that, it leads to ill effects. In this critique of higher education, infused with anthropological insights, Blum explains why so much is going wrong and offers suggestions for how to bring classroom learning more in line with appropriate forms of engagement. She challenges our system of education and argues for a “reintegration of learning with life.” Susan D. Blum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College; My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture; Lies That Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths; and Portraits of “Primitives”: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation; the editor of Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication (three editions); and coeditor of China Off Center: Mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom.

$19.95 978-1-5017-1348-4 paperback $24.95 978-1-5017-0021-7 hardcover 360 pages, 6 x 9, 1 halftone, 4 line figures

“As I read ‘I Love Learning; I Hate School,’ I sprained my neck from nodding in vigorous agreement. The book casts an anthropological lens on education in general and higher education in particular, and the result is a catalog of many of the things that I believe ail us when it comes to teaching and learning.” —John Warner, Inside Higher Ed “We should take very seriously the critique of higher education offered by Susan Blum; the book is excellent, and I highly recommend it. Blum does the profession a service by drawing our attention to the ways in which traditional educational structures put barriers in the way of our students and their learning.” —Chronicle of Higher Education “Susan D. Blum has written the book the majority of college faculty would write if they only had her encyclopedic knowledge, deep insight, and courage.” —David F. Lancy, author of The Anthropology of Childhood “‘I Love Learning; I Hate School’ is a mustread for all who care about educational improvement and renewal.” —Peter Demerath, author of Producing Success C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

MEDICINE

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WA R

• A F G H A N I S TA N

Doctors at War Life and Death in a Field Hospital Mark de Rond foreword by Chris Hedges

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war’s absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys. Mark de Rond is a professor of organizational ethnography at Cambridge University. His innovative research has featured widely in the press and has generated a series of award-winning books, including The Last Amateurs, and scholarly articles. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of many books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. T H E C U LT U R E A N D P O L I T I C S O F H E A LT H C A R E W O R K

ILR PRESS

$21.95 978-1-5017-0548-9 hardcover 176 pages, 5 x 8

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Provides renewed insight into the irrational world of humans, where we engage in endless efforts to kill one another while mustering immense energy to save and repair those injured and harmed in the process.” —Choice Magazine “Brilliantly written, brutally honest, and often very funny, Doctors at War is a powerfully affecting book. The book deserves a place as one of the best to come out of the Afghanistan debacle.” —Frank Ledwidge, author of Losing Small Wars “Mark de Rond depicts the workaday life of army surgeons on field deployment brilliantly and without glamor. He brings the Afghanistan war into sharp focus by highlighting the human costs of the conflict.” —John Van Maanen, author of Tales of the Field ”De Rond’s masterful narrative brings into sharp focus the absurdities of clashing organizational, professional, and cultural values and practices.” —Dvora Yanowco, author of Interpretive Research Design

H E A LT H

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CURRENT EVENTS

Fat-Talk Nation The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat Susan Greenhalgh

In recent decades, America has been waging a veritable war on fat. Every sector of society is engaged in constant “fat talk” aimed at educating, badgering, and ridiculing heavy people into shedding pounds. We hear a great deal about the dangers of fatness to the nation, but little about the dangers of today’s epidemic of fat talk to individuals and society at large. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing—and it is virtually unknown. How do those who do not fit the “ideal” body type feel being the object of abuse, discrimination, and even revulsion? How do young people, already prone to self-doubt about their bodies, withstand the daily assault on their body type and sense of self-worth? In Fat-Talk Nation, Susan Greenhalgh gives young people an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame. Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, “bad BMIs,” and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. To unpack the complexity of fat politics today, Greenhalgh introduces a cluster of terms—biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat personhood. These concepts, which constitute a theory of the workings of our biocitizenship culture, offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might work to reverse course for the next generation. Susan Greenhalgh is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. She is the author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain, among other titles.

$19.95 978-1-5017-0076-7 paperback $26.95 978-0-8014-5395-3 hardcover 336 pages, 6 x 9, 11 tables

“At a time when men, women, and children are taught to hate their bodies, Susan Greenhalgh pushes back against the socalled ‘War on Obesity’—I would call her a ‘war resister.’ She argues convincingly that the ‘obesity epidemic’ is not about health but about shame and stigma, a national anxiety that traumatizes most people, especially youth. This book promises to become a classic in its field.” —Esther D. Rothblum, coeditor of The Fat Studies Reader “Fat-Talk Nation is an extremely rich book: well-written, well-resarched, provocative. The essays by young people are a gold mine, and the fact that Greenhalgh listens closely to these stories makes her work absolutely stand out.” —Amy Farrell, author of Fat Shame “Fat-Talk Nation is a powerful and absorbing expose of the unintended consequences of America’s war on fat, making a convincing argument that a war on obesity is not just unwarranted and ineffective, but damaging—to people of all sizes.” —Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size and Body Respect

C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

ECONOMIC S

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MINING

Fear and Fortune Spirit Worlds and Emerging Economies in the Mongolian Gold Rush Met te M. High

Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The widespread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country where people’s lives were disrupted by the end of the USSR and tens of millions of livestock were killed in devastating droughts in the early 2000s. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity, born out of uncertain times, poses an intense moral problem; in the “land of dust,” disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. Tracing the continuities and discontinuities between human and nonhuman worlds, Mette M. High follows the paths of gold as it is excavated and converted into “polluted money,” entering local shops and Buddhist monasteries, joining the illegal gold trade, and returning as “renewed” money for the “big bosses” of the gold mines. High has done several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, spending time with the “ninjas,” as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. This book is about radical change, or as many Mongolians put it, when life becomes “strange” and “chaotic.” Addressing how our lives and those of others are intimately intertwined, Fear and Fortune offers an expansive and capacious approach to understanding the high stakes involved in human economic life. Met te M. High is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.

$22.95 978-1-5017-0755-1 paperback $89.95 978-1-5017-0754-4 hardcover 180 pages, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Fear and Fortune is an important and timely ethnographic account of the Mongolian gold rush. Not only does it make a useful contribution to the burning issue of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of mining economies, but it does so in an accessible and engaging style, rendering people’s daily lives with an intimate yet tactful touch.” —Grégory Delaplace, coeditor of Frontier Encounters “Fear and Fortune is a well-crafted, highly accessible, and very attractive read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. Mette M. High offers up some highly original discussions of what ‘money’ constitutes in a part of the world where the same value is neither consistently nor automatically attributed to the national currency. High enables us to have a uniquely up close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice.” —Katherine Swancutt, author of Fortune and the Cursed

POLITICAL SCIENCE

• A N TA R T I C

The Technocratic Antarctic An Ethnography of Scientific Expertise and Environmental Governance Jessica O’Reilly

The Technocratic Antarctic is an ethnographic account of the scientists and policymakers who work on Antarctica. In a place with no indigenous people, Antarctic scientists and policymakers use expertise as their primary model of governance. Scientific research and policymaking are practices that inform each other, and the Antarctic environment—with its striking beauty, dramatic human and animal lives, and specter of global climate change—not only informs science and policy but also lends Antarctic environmentalism a particularly technocratic patina. Jessica O’Reilly conducted most of her research for this book in New Zealand, home of the “Antarctic Gateway” city of Christchurch, and on an expedition to Windless Bight, Antarctica, with the New Zealand Antarctic Program. O’Reilly also follows the journeys Antarctic scientists and policymakers take to temporarily “Antarctic” places such as science conferences, policy workshops, and the international Antarctic Treaty meetings in Scotland, Australia, and India. Competing claims of nationalism, scientific disciplines, field experiences, and personal relationships among Antarctic environmental managers disrupt the idea of a utopian epistemic community. O’Reilly focuses on what emerges in Antarctica among the complicated and hybrid forms of science, sociality, politics, and national membership found there. The Technocratic Antarctic unfolds the historical, political, and moral contexts that shape experiences of and decisions about the Antarctic environment. Jessica O’Reilly is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

E X P E R T I S E : C U LT U R E S A N D T E C H N O L O G I E S O F K N O W L E D G E

$26.95 978-0-8014-5692-3 paperback $89.95 978-0-8014-5412-7 hardcover 224 pages, 6 x 9

“This book offers a focused ‘ethnographic account’ of those who provide scientific expertise and environmental governance on all matters pertaining to Antarctica. [The Technocratic Antarctic] serves as a fine resource for those seeking more information about Antarctica and aspects of its environmental policy. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.” —Choice Magazine “The Technocratic Antarctic tackles important questions about how nature is discovered and policy crafted. O’Reilly chronicles five engrossing case studies that illustrate the ways in which science and policy are necessarily imbricated in the most mundane activities and the most monumental.” —Martha Lampland, coeditor of Standards and Their Stories ”The anthropology of science, born with Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life, now enters its second phase with Jessica O’Reilly’s The Technocratic Antarctic. Her accounts of men and women at the edge of the world on Antarctic ice lie at the center of new approaches to science.” —Ben Orlove, author of Lines in the Water

C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

TECH N O LOGY

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G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

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INDIA

A Moral Technology Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi Leo Coleman

In India over the past century, electrification has meant many things: it has been a colonial gift of modern technology, a tool of national integration and political communication, and a means of gauging the country’s participation in globalization. Electric lights have marked out places of power, and massive infrastructures have been installed in hopes of realizing political promises. In A Moral Technology, the grids and wires of an urban public utility are revealed to be not only material goods but also objects of intense moral concern. Leo Coleman offers a distinctive anthropological approach to electrification in New Delhi as more than just an economic or industrial process, or a “gridding” of social and political relations. It may be understood instead as a ritual action that has formed modern urban communities and people’s sense of citizenship, and structured debates over state power and political legitimacy. Coleman explores three historical and ethnographic case studies from the founding of New Delhi as an imperial capital city, to its reshaping as a national capital for post-independence India, up to its recent emergence as a contemporary global city. These case studies closely describe technological politics, rituals, and legal reforms at key moments of political change in India, and together they support Coleman’s argument that ritual performances, moral judgments, and technological installations combine to shape modern state power, civic life, and political community. Leo Coleman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters.

$27.95 978-1-5017-0752-0 paperback $89.95 978-1-5017-0751-3 hardcover 256 pages, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Developing nuanced and valuable readings of critical moments in the story of electrification in Delhi/New Delhi, Leo Coleman suggests that electricity far exceeds its formal role as infrastructure. He persuasively argues that the ideological burden and meaning of electricity informs its physical distribution, while demonstrating how political associations, relationships, and networks are imagined, cast, and reconfigured through the distribution of electricity.” —Ritika Prasad, author of Tracks of Change

SOCIO LOGY

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RELIGION

Fragile Conviction Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan Mathijs Pelkmans

How do specific secular and religious ideologies—such as nationalism, neoliberalism, atheism, Pentecostalism, Tablighi Islam, and shamanism—gain popularity and when do they lose traction? To answer these questions, Mathijs Pelkmans critically examines the trajectories of a range of ideologies as they move into the post-Soviet frontier in Central Asia. Ethnographically rooted in the everyday life of a former mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan, Fragile Conviction shows how residents have dealt with the existential and epistemic crises that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Residents became enchanted by the truths of Muslim and Christian missionaries, embraced the teachings of neoliberal and nationalist ideologues, and were riveted by the visions of shamanic healers. But no matter how much enthusiasm and hope these ideas first engendered, the commitment to any of them rarely lasted very long. Pelkmans finds that there is an inverse relationship between the tenacity and the effervescence of collective ideas, between their strength to persist and their ability to trigger committed action. Introducing the concept of pulsation, he argues in Fragile Conviction that ideational power must be understood in relation to three aspects: the voicing of the idea, its tension with everyday reality, and its reverberation within groups of listeners. The conclusion that the power of conviction is rooted in the instability of sociocultural contexts is a message that has relevance far beyond urban Central Asia. Mathijs Pelkmans is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, also from Cornell, and editor of Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union and Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies.

$26.95 978-1-5017-0514-4 paperback $89.95 978-1-5017-0513-7 hardcover 232 pages, 6 x 9

“Fragile Conviction presents an original and thought-provoking meditation on the power and limitations of ideology. Mathijs Pelkmans explores the dynamics of conviction and disillusionment in the politically and economically unstable setting of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Using examples from Soviet agitprop, Christian and Muslim proselytism, and faith healers, he creates a vivid portrait of what he calls the ‘pulsation’ of ideological engagement, its rhythms and temporalities.” —Sonja Luehrmann, author of Secularism Soviet Style “Fragile Conviction conjures a world area that has been plunged into profound and ongoing social disruption since the end of the USSR and is now being remade. Drawing on more than twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, Mathijs Pelkmans advances a theory of faith that, refreshingly, insists on flexibility and contingency rather than assumptions of homogeneous wholesale conformity. Pelkmans humanizes religion itself in a world area that is so often otherwise known only through its anticipated fundamentalisms.” —Bruce Grant, author of The Captive and the Gift

C O R N E L L P R E S S .C O R N E L L . E D U

H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

Selling Hope and College Merit, Markets, and Recruitment in an Unranked School Alex Posecznick

It has long been assumed that college admission should be a simple matter of sorting students according to merit, with the best heading off to the Ivy League and highly ranked liberal arts colleges and the rest falling naturally into their rightful places. Admission to selective institutions, where extremely fine distinctions are made, is characterized by heated public debates about whether standardized exams, high school transcripts, essays, recommendation letters, or interviews best indicate which prospective students are “worthy.” And then there is college for everyone else. But what goes into less-selective college admissions in an era when everyone feels compelled to go, regardless of preparation or life goals? “Ravenwood College,” where Alex Posecznick spent a year doing ethnographic research, was a small, private, nonprofit institution dedicated to social justice and serving traditionally underprepared students from underrepresented minority groups. To survive in the higher education marketplace, the college had to operate like a business and negotiate complex categories of merit while painting a hopeful picture of the future for its applicants. Selling Hope and College is a snapshot of a particular type of institution as it goes about the business of producing itself and justifying its place in the market. Posecznick documents what it takes to keep a “mediocre” institution open and running, and the struggles, tensions, and battles that members of the community tangle with daily as they carefully walk the line between empowering marginalized students and exploiting them. An anthropologist by training, Alex Posecznick manages the programs in Education, Culture, and Society, and International Education Development at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he also serves as a member of the Associated Faculty. ILR PRESS

$19.95 978-1-5017-0982-1 paperback $89.95 978-1-5017-0758-2 hardcover 240 pages, 6 x 9

C H A N G I N G T H E WO R L D O N E B O O K AT A T I M E

“Alex Posecznick’s topic and argument are timely and compelling and his voice is readable and interesting. I feel like I know this school and its people and troubles as well as its specialness. The stories linger with me when I put the book aside.” —Jane Jensen, author of Piecing It Together “In Selling Hope and College, Alex Posecznick successfully demonstrates that the notion of mediocrity in higher education is not an objective reality in and of itself but rather is a function of the way higher education institutions have generally become systematized. I know of no other ethnography of a college serving mostly adult working-class women of color, and Posecznick rightfully puts the focus on the precarity of the students’ experiences in and outside the classroom. Selling Hope and College is an excellent—and poignant— read, and a book that I hope will be widely taught.” —Bonnie Urciuoli, author of Exposing Prejudice

H E A LT H

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JA PA N

A Disability of the Soul An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan K aren Nak amur a

Karen Nakamura

A Disability of the Soul AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA AND MENTAL ILLNESS IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN

Bethel House, located in a small fishing village in northern Japan, was founded in 1984 as an intentional community for people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Using a unique, community approach to psychosocial recovery, Bethel House focuses as much on social integration as on therapeutic work. As a centerpiece of this approach, Bethel House started its own businesses in order to create employment and socialization opportunities for its residents and to change public attitudes toward the mentally ill, but also quite unintentionally provided a significant boost to the distressed local economy. Through its work programs, communal living, and close relationship between hospital and town, Bethel has been remarkably successful in carefully reintegrating its members into Japanese society. It has become known as a model alternative to long-term institutionalization. In A Disability of the Soul, Karen Nakamura explores how the members of this unique community struggle with their lives, their illnesses, and the meaning of community. Told through engaging historical narrative, insightful ethnographic vignettes, and compelling life stories, her account of Bethel House depicts its achievements and setbacks, its promises and limitations. A Disability of the Soul is a sensitive and multidimensional portrait of what it means to live with mental illness in contemporary Japan. K aren Nak amur a is Associate Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (winner of the Association for Asian Studies’s John Whitney Hall Book Prize) and A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan, both from Cornell.

$24.95 978-1-5017-1704-8 paperback $81.95 978-0-8014-5192-8 hardcover 264 pages, 6 x 9, 31 b&w halftones, 2 tables, 2 charts, 2 maps, 1 b&w line drawing

“Nakamura has produced two films and a book that work against stigma and call attention to mental illness as a disability and to the humanity of those who suffer from it. These texts will be of broad interest beyond the world of Japan studies.” —The Journal of Japanese Studies “This easily accessible and deeply engaging work combines broad historical, social, and cultural context with intimate personal experiences and poignantly articulated vignettes to immerse the reader in the lives of members of Bethel House.” —Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory “A Disability of the Soul is an extraordinary description of the lived experience of schizophrenics in the context of an impressive northern Japanese community program.” —Arthur Kleinman, author of Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture “This is a terrific book—moving, clear, and compassionate. It not only illustrates the way psychiatric illness is shaped by culture, but also suggests that social environments can be used to improve the course and outcome of the illness. Well worth reading.” —T. M. Luhrmann, author of Of Two Minds

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POLITICAL SCIENCE

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G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

Making and Faking Kinship Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea Caren Freeman

In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosŏnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation. As Caren Freeman’s fieldwork in China and South Korea shows, the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea’s transnational kin-making project. Unlike migrant brides who could acquire citizenship, migrant workers were denied the rights of long-term settlement, and stringent quotas restricted their entry. As a result, many Chosŏnjok migrants arranged paper marriages and fabricated familial ties to South Korean citizens to bypass the state apparatus of border control. Making and Faking Kinship depicts acts of “counterfeit kinship,” false documents, and the leaving behind of spouses and children as strategies implemented by disenfranchised people to gain mobility within the region’s changing political economy. Caren Freeman is Director of Studies at Hereford Residential College and works in the International Studies Office at the University of Virginia.

$27.95 978-1-5017-1352-1 paperback $35.00 978-0-8014-4958-1 hardcover 280 pages, 6 x 9, 9 halftones, 1 map

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“[A] sensitive, revealing ethnographic study.” —Foreign Affairs “Making and Faking Kinship makes a significant contribution to the anthropology of South Korea, as well as scholarship on transnational migration, legality and nationalism, and gender and kinship. I highly recommend it for undergraduate courses.” —The Journal of Asian Studies “Freeman has written a brilliant book... It is easily the best ethnography in Korean Studies to appear in some years and is therefore essential reading for anyone seeking to be conversant in Northeast Asia, migration, kinship, gender, family, and globalization.” —Contemporary Sociology “Caren Freeman has a keen ethnographic eye and seasoned prose to match. Making and Faking Kinship is full of ethnographic surprises, a number of which go far to unsettle facile thinking about gender, migration, nation, and family; it is a must-read!” —Nancy Abelmann, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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