Publications
Now showing items 1-100 of 225
In Search of the Amazon - Brazil, the United States and the Nature of a Region
(2013)
Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became ...
My Voice Is My Weapon - Music, Nationalism and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance
(2013)
David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from ...
Artery
(2025)
Austin Zeiderman unearths how the fraught past and future of Colombia’s Magdalena River articulate the mirrored hierarchies of race and environment to explore global entanglements of race, nature, and capital.
The Fine Art of Persuasion
(2025)
Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage.
Crip Spacetime
(2024)
Margaret Price examines the experiences of disabled academics to show how attempts at providing individual accommodations actually impede rather than enhancing access.
A Ritual Geology
(2022)
Robyn d’Avignon tells the history of West Africa’s centuries-old indigenous gold mining industries and its shared practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements.
The Small Matter of Suing Chevron
(2022)
Suzana Sawyer traces Ecuador’s lawsuit against the Chevron corporation for the environmental devastation resulting from its oil drilling practices, showing how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and ...
Lifelines
(2022)
Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, families, and frontline workers who experience and treat traumatic injury ...
Genres of Listening
(2022)
Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explains how psychoanalytic listening practices have expanded beyond the clinical setting to influence everyday social interactions in Buenos Aires.
Architecture and Development
(2022)
Ayala Levin charts the settler colonial imagination and practices that undergirded Israeli architectural development aid in Africa.
Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke
(2022)
This volume is an extended dialogue between the internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and film scholar Michael Berry in which Jia offers a comprehensive first-hand account of his life, art, and approach ...
Chapter Introduction: A Life Science in Its African Para-State
(2015)
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, ...
Chapter 4 What Future Remains? Remembering an African Place of Science
(2015)
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, ...
Chapter 10 The Territory of Medical Research: Experimentation in Africa's Smallest State
(2015)
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, ...
Bodies as Evidence
(2018-11-01)
From biometrics to predictive policing, contemporary security relies on sophisticated scientific evidence-gathering and knowledge-making focused on the human body. Bringing together new anthropological perspectives on the ...
An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
(2013-01-04)
As the first complete narrative in English of the Haitian Revolution, Marcus Rainsford's An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti was highly influential in establishing nineteenth-century world opinion of this ...
Contemporary Carioca
(2012-03-01)
Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture. Contemporary ...
Cosmopolitan Archeologies
(2009-03-02)
This book delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. Describing various forms of cosmopolitan engagement, the contributors explore the implications of applying ...
The Play in the System
(2020)
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher ...
Technicolored
(2018)
From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as ...
A Language of Song
(2009)
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood ...
A Century of Violence in a Red City
(2016)
In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the ...
Thinking Literature across Continents
(2016-12-02)
'Thinking Literature across Continents' finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why ...
Now Peru Is Mine
(2016-11-01)
Born in 1921, Manuel Llamojha Mitma became one of Peru's most creative and inspiring indigenous political activists. Now Peru Is Mine combines extensive oral history interviews with archival research to chronicle his ...
Musicians in Transit
(2016-12-23)
In Musicians in Transit Matthew B. Karush examines the transnational careers of seven of the most influential Argentine musicians of the twentieth century: Afro-Argentine swing guitarist Oscar Alemán, jazz saxophonist Gato ...
Cinema at the End of Empire
(2005-01-01)
How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and ...
Dying in Full Detail
(2017-03-02)
In 'Dying in Full Detail' Jennifer Malkowski explores digital media's impact on one of documentary film's greatest taboos: the recording of death. Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and ...
State of Ambiguity
(2014-03-03)
Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado seen at best as a prologue to the "real" revolution of ...
Citizenship in Question
(2017-01-03)
Citizenship is often assumed to be a clear-cut issue - either one has it or one does not. However, as the contributors to Citizenship in Question demonstrate, citizenship is not self-evident; it emerges from often obscure ...
Ever Faithful
(2014)
Known for much of the nineteenth century as "the ever-faithful isle," Cuba did not earn its independence from Spain until 1898, long after most American colonies had achieved emancipation from European rule. In this ...
Cooking Data
(2018-03-30)
COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk’s fieldwork ...
Art from a Fractured Past
(2013-11-01)
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission not only documented the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s but also gave Peruvians a unique opportunity to examine the causes and nature of that violence. In Art from a ...
Real Folks
(2011)
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined ...
The Dictator's Seduction
(2009)
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history ...
Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
(2010)
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging ...
After Ethnos
(2018)
For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the ...
The Indian Craze
(2009)
In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, “Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S. government’s Indian schools. Men and women across the United ...
Virulent Zones
(2020)
Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley ...
Biological Relatives
(2013)
Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological ...
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa
(2022)
Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years.
Utopia of the Uniform
(2024)
Tanja Petrović draws on interviews with dozens of veterans of the Yugoslav People’s Army to show how their experiences in the military provided a framework for bringing the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, ...
Made in Asia/America
(2024)
The contributors to Made in Asia/America explore the historical entanglements of video games, Asia, and America, showing how examining games offer new ways of imagining empire, race, and coalition.
FUTURE/PRESENT
(2024)
Building on five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that challenges structural racism in the art world, FUTURE/PRESENT includes a range of poetry, essays and criticism, ...
Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition
(2024)
Sora Y. Han offers a poetic and radical work of legal theory and criticism that works at the confluence of Korean and Black anticolonial thought and freedom struggles to articulate new visions of freedom.
A Certain Age
(2010)
'A Certain Age' is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout ...
A Theory of Regret
(2017-11-01)
In A THEORY OF REGRET Brian Price takes up regret as a useful political emotion and, surprisingly, as a way to understand bureaucracy. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, and Heidegger, as well as examples ...
Man or Monster?
(2016-11-04)
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, ...
The Banality of Good
(2024)
Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member state governments.
Women's Experimental Cinema
(2007-10-01)
Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this ...
Digital Sound Studies
(2018-10-01)
The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. ...
Garbage Citizenship
(2018)
Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, ...
Return
(2013-09-13)
Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the ...
Odd Couples
(2012-04-11)
Odd Couples examines friendships between gay men and straight women, and also between lesbians and straight men, and shows how these "intersectional" friendships serve as a barometer for shifting social norms, particularly ...
Visualizing Fascism
(2020)
Visualizing Fascism explores various ways of tracing, displaying, viewing, and interacting with fascism, examining fascism as both a global and aesthetic phenomenon during the twentieth century. It emphasizes transnational ...
Native Americans and the Christian Right
(2008)
In Native Americans and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith advances social movement theory beyond simplistic understandings of social-justice activism as either right-wing or left-wing and urges a more open-minded approach ...
Technocrats of the Imagination
(2020)
Technocrats of the Imagination traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and ...
The Un-Americans
(2009)
In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the ...
Ethnopornography
(2020)
Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers ...
Affective Trajectories
(2020)
Affective Trajectories explores affective and emotional experiences as manifestations of religion in the rapidly shifting conditions of postcolonial African urban spaces and the diaspora. The editors define the term ...
Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film
(2019)
Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study ...
Monetary Authorities
(2022)
Allan E. S. Lumba explores how the United States used monetary policy and banking systems to justify racial and class hierarchies, enforce capitalist exploitation, and counter movements for decolonization in the American ...
Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa
(2022)
Dianne M. Stewart analyzes the sacred poetics, religious imagination, and African heritage of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Energy without Conscience
(2017)
'In Energy without Conscience' David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical ...
Ethnography as Commentary
(2008)
The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her ...
Cartographic Memory
(2022)
Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano Movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland, California, showing how activists there constructed a politics forged through productions of space.
The Provocative Joan Robinson
(2009)
One of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century, Joan Robinson (1903–83) is widely regarded as the most important woman in the history of economic thought. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge ...
The Apartment Plot
(2010)
Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the “apartment plot,” her term for stories in which the apartment functions ...
The Lives of Jessie Sampter
(2022)
Sarah Imhoff tells the story of the queer, disabled, Zionist writer Jessie Sampter (1883–1938), whose body and life did not match typical Zionist ideals and serves as an example of the complex relationships between the ...
Scales of Captivity
(2022)
Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship.
The City Electric
(2022)
Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state.
The Florida Room
(2022)
Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to explore the city’s sonic cultures and its material and social realities.
Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea
(2022)
Namhee Lee explores how social memory and neoliberal governance in post-1987 South Korea have disavowed the revolutionary politics of the past.
The Sopranos
(2009)
“In its original run on HBO, The Sopranos mattered, and it matters still,” Dana Polan asserts early in this analysis of the hit show, in which he sets out to clarify the impact and importance of the series in both its ...
The Deliverance of Others
(2008)
The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue ...
Skin for Skin
(2014)
Since the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the ...
Crash
(2010)
Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of ...
Apartheid Remains
(2024)
Sharad Chari explores the how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban.
Living and Dying in São Paulo
(2025)
Jeffery Lesser focuses on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood to examine the competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials.
Since Time Immemorial
(2023)
Yanna Yannakakis traces the creation of Indigenous custom as a legal category and its deployment as a strategy of resistance to empire in colonial Mexico.
Mendings
(2023)
Megan Sweeney tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and love and loss, showing how her lifetime practice of sewing and mending clothes becomes a way of living.
Paradoxes of Nostalgia
(2022)
Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the afterlife of the cold war and its lingering shadows, showing how a nostalgia and longing for stability fuels US-led militarism and the rise of xenophobic right-wing ...
History from the Bottom Up & The Inside Out
(2017)
History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives ...
China in the World
(2022)
Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia—“all under heaven”—influences China’s dedication to contributing to and ...
Citizens of Photography
(2023)
Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to ...
Vanishing Sands
(2023)
In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world’s sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of ...
nonhuman witnessing
(2024)
In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological ...
Sexual States
(2016-01-01)
In Sexual States Jyoti Puri uses the example of the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Between ...
In Search of the Amazon
(2013-01-01)
Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became ...
Sovereignty in Ruins
(2017-04-07)
Featuring essays by some of the most prominent names in contemporary political and cultural theory, Sovereignty in Ruins presents a form of critique grounded in the conviction that political thought is itself an agent of ...
African Motors
(2025)
In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how everyday Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s to the early 2000s.
For Emplacement
(2024)
Mario Blaser proposes a new lens for combatting the momentous challenges the world currently faces, arguing that solutions to major crises should be based in the specificities of the places they emerge from rather than a ...
In the Skin of the City
(2022)
António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, by showing how it emerges out of the continual redefinition and negotiation of its physical and social boundaries.
Rainforest Capitalism
(2022)
Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy environment of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize the social, racial, and gender power dynamics of capitalist extraction.
Petrochemical Planet
(2023)
Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities in the United States, China, Europe, Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it ...
The Kidney and the Cane
(2025)
Alex M. Nading argues that the epidemic of chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes among those living near and working in Nicaragua’s sugarcane plantations is not a result of climate change, it is climate change.
Improvisation and Social Aesthetics
(2017-04-12)
Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a ...
Gesture and Power
(2018-05-04)
In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing ...
Portrait of a Young Painter
(2014-10-01)
This book adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Mary Kay Vaughan's chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zúñiga counters a literature that ...
My Voice Is My Weapon
(2013-05-01)
David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from ...
Downwardly Global
(2017)
In 'Downwardly Global' Lalaie Ameeriar examines the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women to Toronto. Despite being trained professionals in fields including engineering, law, medicine, and education, they ...