Best of
Anthropology

2019

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World


Tyson Yunkaporta - 2019
    He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia


Christina Thompson - 2019
    For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.Sea People includes an 8-page photo insert, illustrations throughout, and 2 endpaper maps.

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century


Charles King - 2019
    But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school of thought at Columbia University called cultural anthropology. He proposed that cultures did not exist on a continuum from primitive to advanced. Instead, every society solves the same basic problems--from childrearing to how to live well--with its own set of rules, beliefs, and taboos.Boas's students were some of the century's intellectual stars: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is one of the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans of the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now-classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped vanishing civilizations from the Arctic to the South Pacific and overturned the relationship between biology and behavior. Their work reshaped how we think of women and men, normalcy and deviance, and re-created our place in a world of many cultures and value systems. Gods of the Upper Air is a page-turning narrative of radical ideas and adventurous lives, a history rich in scandal, romance, and rivalry, and a genesis story of the fluid conceptions of identity that define our present moment.

Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image


Paul W. Brand - 2019
    The resilience of skin, the strength and structure of the bones, the dynamic balance of the muscles--your physical being is knit according to a pattern of stunning purpose. Now Gold Medallion winners Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image have been completely revised and updated to offer a new audience timeless reflections on the body. Join renowned leprosy surgeon Dr. Paul Brand and bestselling writer Philip Yancey on a remarkable journey through inner space--a spellbinding account of medical intervention, pain and healing, and the courage of humanity. Discover here the eternal truths revealed by our seemingly ordinary existence. The human body is a window into the very structure of God's creation and a testament to God's glory.

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History


Lewis Dartnell - 2019
    But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the south-east United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea. Everywhere is the deep imprint of the planetary on the human.From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the breathtaking impact of the earth beneath our feet on the shape of our human civilizations.

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization


Graham Hancock - 2019
    Could shattering secrets about the deep past of humanity await discovery in North America? Until very recently there was almost universal agreement amongst scientists that human beings first entered the Americas from Siberia around 13,000 years ago by walking into Alaska across the Bering landbridge. Thanks to scientific advances, and to archaeological and geological discoveries made in the past five years, we now know that the Americas were populated by humans for tens of thousands of years before the previously accepted date. Deeply puzzling and hitherto unsuspected genetic connections have also emerged - for example linking Native Americans both with Australian Aborigines and with Western Europeans. In the final volume of The Fingerprints of the Gods trilogy he puts the final piece of the jigsaw in place, proving that the great, technically advanced civilisation that flourished in Britain and Europe and throughout the world before the last Ice Age was centred in Northern America.

The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection


Tamim Ansary - 2019
    Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea


Don Kulick - 2019
    He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of white society on the farthest reaches of the globe—and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution


Richard W. Wrangham - 2019
    What occurred during human evolution to account for this paradox? What are the two kinds of aggression that primates are prone to, and why did each evolve separately? How does the intensity of violence among humans compare with the aggressive behavior of other primates? How did humans domesticate themselves? And how were the acquisition of language and the practice of capital punishment determining factors in the rise of culture and civilization?Authoritative, provocative, and engaging, The Goodness Paradox offers a startlingly original theory of how, in the last 250 million years, humankind became an increasingly peaceful species in daily interactions even as its capacity for coolly planned and devastating violence remains undiminished. In tracing the evolutionary histories of reactive and proactive aggression, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham forcefully and persuasively argues for the necessity of social tolerance and the control of savage divisiveness still haunting us today.

Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco


Savannah Shange - 2019
    The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe


Johannes Krause - 2019
    Krause is a pioneer in the revolutionary new science of archaeogenetics, archaeology augmented by revolutionary DNA sequencing technology, which has allowed scientists to uncover a new version of human history reaching back more than 100,000 years. Using this technology to re-examine human bones from the distant past, Krause has been able to map not only the genetic profiles of the dead, but also their ancient journeys.In this concise narrative he tells us their long-forgotten stories of migration and intersection. It's well known that many human populations carry genetic material from Neanderthals; but, as Krause and his colleagues discovered, we also share DNA with a newly uncovered human form, the Denisovans. We know now that a wave of farmers from Anatolia migrated into Europe 8,000 years ago, essentially displacing the dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers who preceded them. The farmer DNA is one of the core genetic components of contemporary Europeans and European Americans. Though the first people to cross into North and South America have long been assumed to be primarily of East Asian descent, we now know that they also share DNA with contemporary Europeans and European Americans. Genetics has an unfortunate history of smuggling in racist ideologies, but our most cutting-edge science tells us that genetic categories in no way reflect national borders.Krause vividly introduces us to prehistoric cultures such as the Aurignacians, innovative artisans who carved animals, people, and even flutes from bird bones more than 40,000 years ago; the Varna, who buried their loved ones with gold long before the Pharaohs of Egypt; and the Gravettians, big-game hunters who were Europe's most successful early settlers until they perished in the ice age. This informed retelling of the human epic confirms that immigration and genetic mingling have always defined our species and that who we are is a question of culture not genetics.

The Theopolitan Vision


Peter J. Leithart - 2019
    The solution is right in front of us—the Christian church, an outpost of the heavenly city among the cities of men. The Theopolitan Vision explains what the church is, and how the Spirit empowers the church's world-transforming mission through Word and worship, Scripture and liturgy. It shows how the church can be a city of light in a dark age.

Comfort Zones: women writers tackling unfamiliar ground in aid of Women for Women International


Sonder & Tell - 2019
    In a series of essays, letters and stories, the writers tackle themes and forms that are brave, vulnerable and new. All profits will go to the charity Women for Women International. Broadcaster Lindsey Hilsum says goodbye to her late friend Marie Colvin in a heartfelt letter, journalist Emma Gannon reflects on the life lessons she has learned at the age of 30, while author Poorna Bell details her path to finding happiness in her own company, from that of a dark, bottomless chasm into a dazzlingly bright portal lit with endless possibility. Elsewhere Mina Holland of The Guardian considers her relationship with her parents on the eve of becoming a mother, and novelist Elizabeth Day considers the meaning of success: A lot of the time it will feel like failure, like a challenge that needs to be overcome. Contributors have donated their time and skills bring this collection together. All profits will go to the charity Women for Women International, who work with at-risk women in countries affected by conflict and war. The collection has been curated by content agency Sonder & Tell and published by British fashion brand Jigsaw, with stories by:Alice-Azania Jarvis, Ana Santi, Anna Jones, Ariane Sherine, Brita Fernandez Schmidt, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, Daisy Buchanan, Elizabeth Day, Emma Gannon, Farrah Storr, Funmi Fetto, Gillian Orr, Irenosen Okojie, Lindsey Hilsum, Marianne Power, Mina Holland, Natasha Lunn, Nellie Eden, Olivia Sudjic, Pandora Sykes, Phoebe Lovatt, Poorna Bell, Sophie Mackintosh, Sophie Wilkinson, Tahmina Begum, Vicky Spratt, Yomi Adegoke, Zing Tsjeng

Nine Rupees an Hour: Disappearing Livelihoods of Tamil Nadu


Aparna Karthikeyan - 2019
    Through her five years of travelling across the villages of Tamil Nadu, Aparna Karthikeyan gets to know men and women who do exceptional—yet perfectly ordinary—things to earn a living. She documents, through ten of these stories, the transformations, aspirations and disruptions of the last twenty-five years. The people she meets force these questions of her, and her reader: What is the culture we seek to preserve? What will become of food security without farmers? How can ‘development’ exclude 833 million people? Including interviews with journalist P. Sainath, musician T.M. Krishna and writer Bama, among others, Nine Rupees an Hour is a critical portrayal of the drastic and systematic erosion of traditional livelihoods.These engaging narratives unravel a peoples’ perspective of work and life, where creative beauty and human dignity merge to matter, even if their worth in market-obsessed economics is merely nine rupees an hour. Evocative and relevant, they jostle our comfort. Statistics and economic analyses of wages and work, juxtaposed with the lives people lead, help us understand the situation on the ground. A book all of us must read’—Aruna Roy, Social activistSustainable livelihoods provide the foundation for a happy life. We owe a deep sense of gratitude to Aparna Karthikeyan for bringing out this useful book based on real-life examples. I hope the book will be widely read. —M.S. Swaminathan, plant geneticist and agricultural scientist

Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals


Barbara Natterson-Horowitz - 2019
    Both are naive risk-takers. I loved this book!” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human and Animals in Translation A revelatory investigation of human and animal adolescence and young adulthood from the New York Times bestselling authors of Zoobiquity.With Wildhood, Harvard evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and award-winning science writer Kathryn Bowers have created an entirely new way of thinking about the crucial, vulnerable, and exhilarating phase of life between childhood and adulthood across the animal kingdom. In their critically acclaimed bestseller, Zoobiquity, the authors revealed the essential connection between human and animal health. In Wildhood, they turn the same eye-opening, species-spanning lens to adolescent young adult life. Traveling around the world and drawing from their latest research, they find that the same four universal challenges are faced by every adolescent human and animal on earth: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy; how to court potential mates; and how to feed oneself. Safety. Status. Sex. Self-reliance. How human and animal adolescents and young adults confront the challenges of wildhood shapes their adult destinies. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers illuminate these core challenges through the lives of four animals in the wild: Ursula, a young king penguin; Shrink, a charismatic hyena; Salt, a matriarchal humpback whale; and Slavc, a roaming European wolf. Through their riveting stories—and those of countless others, from adventurous eagles and rambunctious high schooler to inexperienced orcas and naive young soldiers—readers get a vivid and game-changing portrait of adolescent young adults as a horizontal tribe, sharing behaviors and challenges, setbacks and triumphs. Upending our understanding of everything from risk-taking and anxiety to the origins of privilege and the nature of sexual coercion and consent, Wildhood is a profound and necessary guide to the perilous, thrilling, and universal journey to adulthood on planet earth.

Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game


Andrew R Gallimore - 2019
    But one natural psychedelic in particular towers above the rest in its astonishing power to replace the normal waking world with a bizarre alternate reality replete with a diverse panoply of intelligent alien beings. As well as being the most powerful, N, N-dimethyltryptamine, more commonly known as DMT, is also the most common naturally-occurring psychedelic and can be found in countless plant species scattered across the Earth. DMT carries a profound message embedded in our reality, a message that we are now beginning to decode.In Alien Information Theory, neurobiologist, chemist, and pharmacologist, Dr. Andrew R. Gallimore, explains how DMT provides the secret to the very structure of our reality, and how our Universe can be likened to a cosmic game that we now find ourselves playing.Gallimore explains how our reality was constructed using a fundamental code which generated our Universe -- and countless others -- as a digital device built from pure information with the purpose of enabling conscious intelligences, such as ourselves, to emerge. You will learn how fundamental digital information self-organises and complexifies to generate the myriad complex forms and organisms that fill our world; how your brain constructs your subjective world and how psychedelic drugs alter the structure of this world; how DMT switches the reality channel by allowing the brain to access information from normally hidden orthogonal dimensions of reality. And, finally, you will learn how DMT provides the secret to exiting our Universe permanently -- to complete the cosmic game and to become interdimensional citizens of hyperspace.Alien Information Theory is a unique account of this hidden structure of reality and our place within it, drawing on a diverse range of disciplines -- including neuroscience, computer science, physics, and pharmacology -- to carefully explain these complex ideas, which are illustrated with full-colour diagrams throughout.

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.


Ashante M. Reese - 2019
    Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.

Theopolitan Liturgy (Theopolis Fundamentals)


Peter J. Leithart - 2019
    To understand and do the Christian liturgy, we need to take account of the whole Bible.In Theopolitan Liturgy, Peter J. Leithart examines the liturgical features of creation. The world is a temple. History is a dialogue with God. Life and society is sacrificial. Time follows a liturgical pattern.Because creation is inherently liturgical, the liturgy isn't a retreat from the world. It's a transformation of the world. Church buildings use space as God designed it to be used, as space for worship. In the liturgy, we are trained to respond rightly to God's word, and learn the habit of living sacrifice. The church's calendar Christianizes time, imprinting the gospel on our days and years.Leithart demonstrates that the liturgy isn't a retreat from engagement with the world. It is the church's primary engagement with the world. The liturgy is the initial Christianization of creation.The introduction to the Theopolis Fundamentals Series was Leithart's book, Theopolitan Vision. Leithart's Theopolitan Liturgy is the first book in the series.The early volumes of the Theopolis Fundamentals Series summarize the convictions of the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham, Alabama and James B. Jordan's Biblical Horizons about topics including biblical interpretation, liturgical theology and practice, and the church's cultural and political mission. The Fundamentals will be followed by a collection of Theopolis Explorations volumes that will examine Scripture, liturgy, and culture in more depth and detail.

The Missing Lands: Uncovering Earth's Pre-flood Civilization


Freddy Silva - 2019
     But ask indigenous people the world over and they will state that, 12,000 years ago — during a period called the Younger Dryas — another culture lived alongside them. Described as unusually tall, fair-skinned, red-haired or blonde, these ‘gods’ knew how to bend the forces of nature, enabling them to built extraordinary megalithic temples and develop a comparatively advanced civilization. After a global flood wiped out their island homelands, the remaining gods emerged at strategic locations to rebuild their former world, and teach human survivors the roots of civilized society. Then, they vanished. Who were these people? Where did they come from? And what did they want with us? From the Birthplace of the Gods in New Zealand, to the Andean home of the Shining People, and the Yucatec temple cities of the People of The Serpent, best-selling author Freddy Silva re-examines the world’s flood traditions and discovers an interconnected web of master seafarers, astronomers and magicians, their monuments and traditions, and a previously unknown island nation where the antediluvian gods lived before it sank. He also examines the environmental challenge they faced and how it is destined to reoccur, the outcome of which will be determined by the very people they once sought to elevate from barbarism — ourselves.

Compendium Of The Emerald Tablets


Billy Carson - 2019
    It was a pleasure.” – Erich Von Daniken, Best Selling Author “Chariots Of The Gods” and Television Host “Today, Billy Carson brings to our community, the Compendium of the Emerald Tablets. Finally, we are able to dive deeper into the meaning of what Thoth really intended for us to know, to explore and discover what is truly important about ourselves and the world around us.” – Jimmy Church, JimmyChurchRadio.com, iHeart Radio and Coast To Coast AM The goal of this book is to provide you with a deep understanding of the profound and ancient knowledge that is your birthright. I will lead you on a journey that will delve into the history of the Emerald Tablets and the secret mysteries contained within these cryptic artifacts.As we begin, it is important for you to know that The Emerald Tablets were written by an ancient being known as Thoth the Atlantean. To date, there have been two manifestations of the Emerald Tablets. First, thousands of years ago Thoth created multiple tablets of text and then concealed the location of these ancient tablets. Second, Thoth chose to incarnate as Hermes the Thrice Great. As Hermes, he carried a single Emerald Tablet.What to Expect In the first two chapters of this book I will provide information so you can understand and validate for yourself the role of extraterrestrials in our history. I will also offer evidence as to how Thoth the Atlantean was influential in our development as humans.Chapters 3-17 contain the words of Thoth as translated by the American, Dr. Michael Doreal. Doreal’s translation often uses stanzas—a grouping of lines used in poetry. I have kept this format to make it easy for you to recognize when the words of Thoth begin and when they end. In each chapter, I add information and commentary to further express the meaning I find in the quotes from Thoth.

Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind


Owen Strachan - 2019
    Engaging the major anthropological questions of the age, like transgender, homosexuality, technology, and more, author Owen Strachan establishes a Christian anthropology rooted in Biblical truth, in stark contrast to the popular opinions of the modern age.

Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human


Madelaine Böhme - 2019
    What they discover is beyond anything they imagined: the fossilized bones of Danuvius guggenmosi ignite a global media frenzy. This ancient ancestor defies our knowledge of human history—his nearly twelve-million-year-old bones were not located in Africa—the so-called birthplace of humanity—but in Europe, and his features suggest we evolved much differently than scientists once believed.In prose that reads like a gripping detective novel, Ancient Bones interweaves the story of the dig that changed everything with the fascinating answer to a previously undecided and now pressing question: How, exactly, did we become human? Placing Böhme’s discovery alongside former theories of human evolution, the authors show how this remarkable find (and others in Eurasia) are forcing us to rethink the story we’ve been told about how we came to be, a story that has been our guiding narrative—until now.

At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging


Wendy Wickwire - 2019
    From his base at Spences Bridge, BC, Teit forged a participant-based anthropology that was far ahead of its time. Whereas his contemporaries, including famed anthropologist Franz Boas, studied Indigenous peoples as members of “dying cultures,” Teit worked with them as members of living cultures resisting colonial influence over their lives and lands. Whether recording stories, mapping place-names, or participating in the chiefs’ fight for fair treatment, he made their objectives his own. With his allies, he produced copious, meticulous records; an army of anthropologists could not have achieved a fraction of what he achieved in his short life. Wickwire’s beautifully crafted narrative accords Teit the status he deserves, consolidating his place as a leading and innovative anthropologist in his own right.

The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition


Jason Pine - 2019
    Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.” The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth  connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative. By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.

Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic


Narges Bajoghli - 2019
    Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts.Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. Contestation over how to define the regime underlies all their efforts to communicate with the public. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.

Kill Class


Nomi Stone - 2019
    military trains. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine--alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart. Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone's two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at Pineland, a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. Kill Class is an arresting ethnography of American military culture, one that allows readers to circle at length through the cloverleaf interchanges where warfare nestles into even the most mundane corners of everyday life."Kill Class is a rare achievement...Stone's language sears through the simulation to the actual war, lighting a long fuse of image and utterance that detonates, finally, in the imagination of what we have become." -Carolyn Forché"Easily one of the most important books of our time. Nomi Stone is a principled poet, rousing the conscience of poetry for a nation asleep through its wars and annihilation of real live human bodies. Her concerns for the world are only matched by her skills as a poet. There is no denial in her lines that this world is worth protecting and that it is entirely up to us, 'Brother, look into my eyes until the act is done.'" -CA Conrad"Nomi Stone has a singular gift for excavating the magnetism between language and the physical bodies it signifies. In her extraordinary collection Kill Class, Stone makes poems out of the hubris and mistrust that make violence a human commodity. And through these moments of violence, she builds poem that are simultaneously archival and creative. She excavates lyrics that meditate on humanity without ever losing sight of the brutal transactions of war and their requisite dehumanizations, subjugations, and traumas. What an unexpected and absorbing book. What a potent treatise on war-making." -Adrian Matejka

The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better Communities


Caveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs) - 2019
    It has been the subject of fawning media profiles, an exhibit in the Smithsonian, and is beloved by tech billionaires and boho counterculturalists alike. But why does it matter? What does it actually have to offer us? The answer, Caveat Magister writes, is simple: Burning Man's philosophy can help us build better communities in which individuals' freedom to follow their own authentic passions also brings them together in common purpose. Burning Man is a prototype, and its philosophy is a how-to manual for better communities, that, instead of rules, offers principles. Featuring iconic and impossible stories from "the playa," interviews with Burning Man's founders and staff, and personal recollections of the late Larry Harvey--Burning Man's founder, "Chief Philosophical Officer," and the author's close friend and colleague--The Scene That Became Cities introduces readers to the experience of Burning Man; explains why it grew; posits how it could impact fields as diverse as art, economics, and politics; and makes the ideas behind it accessible, actionable, and useful.

Bandit Saints of Java: How Java's Eccentric Saints Are Challenging Fundamentalist Islam in Modern Indonesia


George Quinn - 2019
    The pilgrimage culture on the island of Java in Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim country - is a rebuke to the conservative orthodoxy that has been gaining ground in Indonesia's religious landscape since the 1980s. In the rhetoric of this orthodoxy the "real" Islam is pure and exclusive. Piety comes from obedience to religious authority and its rules. Local pilgrimage is anything but pure and exclusive or rigidly authoritarian. It is powerfully Islamic but it fuses Islam with local history, the ancient power of place and a pastiche of devotional practices with roots deep in the pre-Islamic past. Quietly but tenaciously - just outside the great echo chamber of public space - it is growing as fast as the higher profile neo-orthodoxy. Bandit Saints of Java delves deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities and stories in the weird world of local pilgrimage, where Middle Eastern Islam wrestles with the ancient power of Javanese civilisation. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practised today - largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists - by many of Java's 130 million people.

Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics


Mary Eberstadt - 2019
    To compensate, they join the ranks of ideological tribes spawned by identity politics and react with frenzy against any perceived threat to their group. As identitarians track and expose the ideologically impure, other citizens face the consequences of their rancor: a litany of “isms” run amok across all levels of cultural life; the free marketplace of ideas muted by agendas shouted through megaphones; and a spirit of general goodwill warped into a state of perpetual outrage.  How did we get here? Why have we divided against one another so bitterly? In Primal Screams, acclaimed cultural critic Mary Eberstadt presents the most provocative and original theory to come along in recent years. The rise of identity politics, she argues, is a direct result of the fallout of the sexual revolution, especially the collapse and shrinkage of the family.  As Eberstadt illustrates, humans from time immemorial have forged their identities within the structure of kinship. The extended family, in a real sense, is the first tribe and first teacher. But with its unprecedented decline across a variety of measures, generations of people have been set adrift and can no longer answer the question Who am I? with reference to primordial ties. Desperate for solidarity and connection, they claim membership in politicized groups whose displays of frantic irrationalism amount to primal screams for familial and communal loss.Written in her impeccable style and with empathy rarely encountered in today’s divisive discourse, Eberstadt’s theory holds immense explanatory power that no serious citizen can afford to ignore. The book concludes with three incisive essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel, each sharing their perspective on the author’s formidable argument.

Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future


Riane Eisler - 2019
    It brings together findings--largely overlooked--from the natural andsocial sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man overnature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how ourbrains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.

Bushcraft Illustrated: A Visual Guide


Dave Canterbury - 2019
    Filled with more than 300 illustrations, Bushcraft Illustrated showcases the necessary tools and skills for an awesome outdoor adventure, including such as: Packs: Learn the different types and how to craft and pack your own. Cordage: Essential knot knowledge for outdoor survival. Firecraft: How to start a fire with a variety of materials. Trapping: Tips for catching small game. Plants: A catalog of edible plants to forage. …And much more! With its many helpful illustrations and detailed, easy-to-follow instructions, this illustrated Bushcraft guide is a must-have for the seasoned outdoor lover and adventure novice alike!

Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas


Alpa Shah - 2019
    The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of the dense, hilly forests of eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah’s journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation on how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world.   The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: a high-caste leader who had been underground for almost thirty years, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims.    By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology


Jo-Ann Archibald - 2019
    The term “indigenous storywork” has come to encompass the sheer breadth of ways in which indigenous storytelling serves as a historical record, as a form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. But such traditions have too often been relegated to the realm of myth and legend, recorded as fragmented distortions, or erased altogether.Decolonizing Research brings together indigenous researchers and activists from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to assert the unique value of indigenous storywork as a focus of research, and to develop methodologies that rectify the colonial attitudes inherent in much past and current scholarship. By bringing together their own indigenous perspectives, and by treating indigenous storywork on its own terms, the contributors illuminate valuable new avenues for research, and show how such reworked scholarship can contribute to the movement for indigenous rights and self-determination.

The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity


Darryl Li - 2019
    Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

Hope Dancing: Finding purpose and a place to serve among the Maya


Leslie Baer Dinkel - 2019
     If you’ve ever despaired at the state of the world or doubted the power we each have to profoundly change lives for the better, you must read the story of how Leslie Baer Dinkel and a handful of like-minded friends changed the course of tens of thousands of lives in Guatemala. Still reeling from the untimely death of a beloved mentor, Dinkel, 33, immersed herself in service to the homeless—many of whom spoke Spanish—and ended up in Guatemala to improve her modest Spanish skills. Landing in a war zone, she visited a refugee village and the horror she encountered upended her life. She promised impoverished villagers she would return with help, and over the next decade, delivered more than $3 million in emergency medical aid. With the generous help of a remarkable group of volunteers she assembled, Dinkel established a thriving help project offering life-saving health services, educational scholarships and more to those barely surviving in one of Guatemala’s worst poverty belts. This intimate memoir recalls with wit and whimsy encounters with extraordinary people who guided her, including Mother Teresa, and the curious coincidences that led her to Guatemala. From identifying her first recruits to the extortion, perilous kidnappings, and other misadventures, you will become a participant in the daunting challenge of saving lives during a brutal civil war and forging hope in its aftermath. Hope Dancing: Finding purpose and a place to serve among the Maya offers tremendous insight into poverty, prejudice, the nature of self-determination, and especially, the transformational power of full-hearted giving. 100% of author proceeds are designated to charity. Each book purchased provides medicine to improve the lives of ten children. IndieReader 5-Star Rated – “…sometimes harrowing, always thought-provoking…readers will not want this story to end.”

Earth And Spirit: Medicinal Plants And Healing Lore From Puerto Rico


Maria Benedetti - 2019
    This lively and deeply personal glimpse of Caribbean healing presents the voices of dozens of people who knew, loved and worked with medicinal plants and island earth lore. Ten interviews feature traditional curanderos, a granny midwife, spiritual healers, natural beauticians and others. Remedies are presented in an extensive recipe section organized by health condition, ranging from Alcohol Addiction to Warts. The author's foreword and epilog place the work in cultural and ecological contexts, and all plants are cross referenced with their English, Puerto Rican and scientific names. Rich in practical wisdom, anecdotes and humor, Earth and Spirit inspires love and respect for the living world of plants and for the resourceful people of Puerto Rico who have helped keep this tradition alive. A timeless and beautiful experience, a thought-provoking, fun and useful reference. For your kitchen. For your bedroom! Salud!

Narkomania: Drugs, Hiv, and Citizenship in Ukraine


Jennifer J. Carroll - 2019
    Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on normal citizens.Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of good citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.

The Trail of Nenaboozho: and Other Creation Stories


Isaac Murdoch - 2019
    

Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Social Determinants of Health


Donald A. Barr - 2019
    Yet wide disparities persist between social groups, and many Americans suffer from poorer health than people in other developed countries. In this revised edition of Health Disparities in the United States, Donald A. Barr provides extensive new data about the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate these health disparities. Examining the significance of this gulf for the medical community and society at large, Barr offers potential policy- and physician-based solutions for reducing health inequity in the long term.This thoroughly updated edition focuses on a new challenge the United States last experienced more than half a century ago: successive years of declining life expectancy. Barr addresses the causes of this decline, including what are commonly referred to as "deaths of despair"--from opiate overdose or suicide. Exploring the growing role geography plays in health disparities, Barr asks why people living in rural areas suffer the greatest increases in these deaths. He also analyzes recent changes under the Affordable Care Act and considers the literature on how race and ethnicity affect the way health care providers evaluate and treat patients.As both a physician and a sociologist, Barr is uniquely positioned to offer rigorous medical explanations alongside sociological analysis. An essential text for courses in public health, health policy, and sociology, this compelling book is a vital teaching tool and a comprehensive reference for social science and medical professionals.

Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites


Trevor Bryce - 2019
    Yet their empire was always vulnerable to destruction by enemy forces; their Anatolian homeland occupied a remote region, with no navigable rivers; and they were cut off from the sea. Perhaps most seriously, they suffered chronic under-population and sometimes devastating plague. How, then, can the rise and triumph of this ancient imperium be explained, against seemingly insuperable odds?In his lively and unconventional treatment of one of antiquity's most mysterious civilizations, whose history disappeared from the records over three thousand years ago, Trevor Bryce sheds fresh light on Hittite warriors as well as on the Hittites' social, religious and political culture and offers new solutions to many unsolved questions. Revealing them to have been masters of chariot warfare, who almost inflicted disastrous defeat on Rameses II at the Battle of Qadesh (1274 BCE), he shows the Hittites also to have been devout worshippers of a pantheon of storm-gods and many other gods, and masters of a new diplomatic system which bolstered their authority for centuries.Drawing authoritatively both on texts and on ongoing archaeological discoveries, while at the same time offering imaginative reconstructions of the Hittite world, the author argues that while the development of a warrior culture was essential, not only for the Empire's expansion but for its very survival, this by itself was not enough. The range of skills demanded of the Hittite ruling class went way beyond mere military prowess, while there was much more to the Hittites themselves than just skill in warfare. This engaging volume reveals the Hittites in their full complexity, including the festivals they celebrated; the temples and palaces they built; their customs and superstitions; the crimes they committed; their social hierarchy, from king to slave; and the marriages and pre-nuptial agreements they contracted. It takes the reader on a journey which combines epic grandeur, spectacle and pageantry with an understanding of the intimacies and idiosyncrasies of Hittite daily life.

Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War


Taomo Zhou - 2019
    Taomo Zhou asks probing questions of this important period in the histories of the People's Republic of China and Indonesia. What was it like to be a youth in search of an ancestral homeland that one had never set foot in, or an economic refugee whose expertise in private business became undesirable in one's new home in the socialist state? What ideological beliefs or practical calculations motivated individuals to commit to one particular nationality while forsaking another?As Zhou demonstrates, the answers to such questions about ordinary migrants are crucial to a deeper understanding of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Through newly declassified documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution argues that migration and the political activism of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia were important historical forces in the making of governmental relations between Beijing and Jakarta after World War II. Zhou highlights the agency and autonomy of individuals whose life experiences were shaped by but also helped shape the trajectory of bilateral diplomacy. These ethnic Chinese migrants and settlers were, Zhou contends, not passively acted upon but actively responding to the developing events of the Cold War. This book bridges the fields of diplomatic history and migration studies by reconstructing the Cold War in Asia as social processes from the ground up.Honorable mention for the Harry J. Benda Prize (Southeast Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies)A Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2020

Telling the Truth about God: Quaker Approaches to Theology


Rhiannon Grant - 2019
    Drawing on the author's academic research into Quaker uses of religious language and her teaching to Quaker and academic groups, Rhiannon Grant aims to make accessible some key theological and philosophical insights. She explains that Quakers might sound vague but are actually making clear and creative theological claims. Theology isn't just for wordy people or intellectuals, it's for everyone. And that's important because our religious language is related to, not separate from, our religious experience. It also becomes clear that denying other people's claims often leads to making your own and that even apparently negative positions can also be making positive statements. How do Quakers tell the truth about God? This book explores this key theological process through fourteen short chapters. As Quakers, we say that we know some things, but not very much, about God, and that we are in a constant process of trying to improve our ways of saying what we do know.

The Sadness of Geography: My Life as a Tamil Exile


Logathasan Tharmathurai - 2019
    As his terrifying and often astonishing journey unfolds, he finds himself in a refugee camp, being smuggled across international borders, living with drug dealers, and imprisoned. The Sadness of Geography is a moving story of innocence lost, the persecution of an entire people, and the universal quest for a better life.

Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom


Elizabeth Bernstein - 2019
    Drawing on years of in-depth fieldwork, Elizabeth Bernstein sheds light not only on trafficking but also on the broader structures that meld the ostensible pursuit of liberation with contemporary techniques of power. Rather than any meaningful commitment to the safety of sex workers, Bernstein argues, what lies behind our current vision of trafficking victims is a transnational mix of putatively humanitarian militaristic interventions, feel-good capitalism, and what she terms carceral feminism: a feminism compatible with police batons.

Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft


Brian Hoggard - 2019
    Witch-bottles, dried cats, horse skulls, written charms, protection marks and concealed shoes were all used widely as methods of repelling, diverting or trapping these energies. Many of these practices and symbols can be found around the globe, demonstrating the universal nature of efforts by people to protect themselves from witchcraft.

Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier


Nosheen Ali - 2019
    For over seven decades, the territorial conflict over Kashmir has locked India and Pakistan in brutal wars and hate-centred nationalisms. The book illuminates how within this story of hate lie other stories - of love and betrayal, loyalty and suspicion, beauty and terror - that help us grasp how the Kashmir conflict is affectively structured and experienced on the ground. Placing these emotions at the centre of its analysis, the book rethinks the state-citizen relation in deeply felt and intimate terms, offering a multi-layered ethnographic understanding of power and subjection in contemporary Pakistan.

Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State


Shannon Speed - 2019
    But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability neoliberal multicriminalism and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation. With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

A Magical Education: Talks on Magic and Occultism


John Michael Greer - 2019
    From practical methods of occult training to the politics and metapolitics of magic, from the shadowy world of Victorian sex magic to the alchemy of initiatory ritual, from the complex origins of modern Neopaganism to the approaching twilight of Neopagan pop culture and what comes next, the talks collected in this book seek to inspire curiosity and reflection, not to set out an ironclad case for this or that point of view. This book is an extraordinary insight into the life and work of a working magician and occultist.

Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History


Iain Borden - 2019
    Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart.Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.

To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima


Pellegrino Charles - 2019
    To Hell and Back offers readers a stunning, "you are there" time capsule, wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written. At the narrative's core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand--the Japanese civilians on the ground. As the first city targeted, Hiroshima is the focus of most histories. Pellegrino gives equal weight to the bombing of Nagasaki, symbolized by the thirty people who are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki--where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of both cataclysms within Ground Zero. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell behind which Yamaguchi's office conference was convened--placing him and few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection while the entire building disappeared around them. Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within an illustrated narrative that challenges the "official report," showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and why. Also available from compatible vendors is an enhanced e-book version containing never-before-seen video clips of the survivors, their descendants, and the cities as they are today. Filmed by the author during his research in Japan, these 18 videos are placed throughout the text, taking readers beyond the page and offering an eye-opening and personal way to understand how the effects of the atomic bombs are still felt 70 years after detonation.

Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views


James K. Beilby - 2019
    While homosexuality and same-sex marriage have been at the forefront, there is a new cultural awareness of sexual diversity and gender dysphoria. The transgender phenomenon has become a high-profile battleground issue in the culture wars.This book offers a full-scale dialogue on transgender identities from across the Christian theological spectrum. It brings together contributors with expertise and platforms in the study of transgender identities to articulate and defend differing perspectives on this contested topic. After an introductory chapter surveys key historical moments and current issues, four views are presented by Owen Strachan, Mark A. Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky, Megan K. DeFranza, and Justin Sabia-Tanis. The authors respond to one another's views in a respectful manner, modeling thoughtful dialogue around a controversial theological issue. The book helps readers understand the spectrum of views among Christians and enables Christian communities to establish a context where conversations can safely be held.

Journey of A Civilization: Indus to Vaigai


R. Balakrishnan - 2019
    Balakrishnan considers these issues to be not only interconnected but two sides of the same coin.This book aims to place new evidence about the Dravidian affiliation with the language of the Indus people and positions the ancient Sangam Tamil corpus as a proto-document that is relevant for understanding Tamil pre-history which had probable connections to the Indus Civilization. The spatial and temporal distances between the Indus Valley Civilization and ancient Thamizhagam can be a restricting factor to tracing remnants of the Dravidian in the northwestern geographies and its legacy markers in the Sangam texts. Using technological tools such as Geographic Information System (GIS), the author has analyzed what he calls the 'Journey of a Civilization’ and argues that place-names are reliable markers to track ancient migrations.The book celebrates the plural foundations of Indian culture and prefers a narrative of the ‘Rain Forest’ instead of the popular ‘Melting Pot’ metaphor. As P. J. Cherian observes, Balakrishnan has provided a road map for future research with far-reaching consequences. Journey of a Civilization: Indus to Vaigai seeks to establish common ground between the Indus Valley and Old Tamil traditions.

America's Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics


Joel Edward Goza - 2019
    MLK challenged us to investigate the "ideational roots of race hate" and Ghosts does just that by examining a philosophical "trinity"--Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith--whose works collectively helped to institutionalize, imagine, and ingrain racist ideologies into the hearts and minds of the American people.As time passed, America's racial imagination evolved to form people incapable of recognizing their addiction to racist ideas. Thus, Ghosts comes to a close with the brilliant faith and politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. who sought to write the conscience of the Prophetic Black Church onto American hearts, minds, and laws. If our nation's racist instincts still haunt our land, so too do our hopes and desires for a faith and politics marked by mercy, justice, and equity--and there is no better guide to that land than the Prophetic Black Church and the one who saw such a land from the mountaintop.

Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room


Daniel Beunza - 2019
    Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, Taking the Floor considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, Daniel Beunza explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have models reshaped financial markets? How have models altered moral behavior in organizations?Beunza takes readers behind the scenes in a bank unit that, within its firm, is widely perceived to be "a class act," and he considers how this trading room unit might serve as a blueprint solution for the ills of Wall Street's unsustainable culture. Beunza demonstrates that the integration of traders across desks reduces the danger of blind spots created by models. Warning against the risk of moral disengagement posed by the use of models, he also contends that such disengagement could be avoided by instituting moral norms and social relations.Providing a unique perspective on a complex subject, Taking the Floor profiles what an effective, responsible trading room can and should look like.

The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea


Hannah Appel - 2019
    oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism—practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle


Elizabeth Hutton Turner - 2019
    The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence's radical way of transforming history into art by looking at his thirty panel series of paintings, Struggle . . . from the History of the American People (1954-56). Essays by Steven Locke, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly, and Lydia Gordon mark the historic reunion of this series--seen together in this exhibition for the first time since 1958. In entries on the panels, a multitude of voices responds to the episodes representing struggle from American history that Lawrence chose to activate in his series. The American Struggle reexamines Lawrence's lost narrative and its power for twenty-first century audiences by including contemporary art and artists. Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins, and Hank Willis Thomas invite us to reconsider history through themes of struggle in ways that resonate with Lawrence's artistic invention. Statements by these artists amplify how they and Lawrence view history not as distant period of the past but as an active imaginative space that is continuously questioned in the present tense and for future audiences.

Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront


Fiona Anderson - 2019
    Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers’ sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz’s work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront’s ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.

Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America


Rebecca J. Lester - 2019
    Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders—their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.  Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It’s also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.

Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney


Mark Edmonds - 2019
    Its largest island, Mainland, is home to some of the oldest and best-preserved Neolithic sites in Europe, the most famous of which are the passage grave of Maeshowe, the megaliths of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the village of Skara Brae – evidence of a dynamic society with connections binding Orkney to Ireland, to southern Britain and to the western margins of continental Europe. Despite 150 years of archaeological investigation, however, there is much that we do not know about the societies that created these sites. What historical background did they emerge from? What social and political interests did their monuments serve? And what was the nature of the links between Neolithic societies in Orkney and elsehwere? Following a broadly chronological narrative, and highlighting different lines of evidence as they unfold, Mark Edmonds traces the development of the Orcadian Neolithic from its beginnings in the early fourth millennium BC through to the end of the period nearly two thousand years later. Juxtaposing an engaging and accessible narrative with beautifully evocative photographs of Orkney and its monuments, he uses artefacts, architecture and the wider landscape to recreate the lives of Neolithic communities across the region.

Portrait of Humanity: 200 Photographs That Capture the Changing Face of Our World


Various - 2019
    'Portrait of Humanity' invites photographers of every level to capture the many faces of humanity; to document the universal expressions of life - laughter, courage, moments of reflection, journeys to work, first hellos, last goodbyes, and everything in between. The resulting photobook contains 200 images selected by a panel of experts from around the world that together create a unified, global portrait of humanity.

Asylum of Shadows


Stephanie Ellis - 2019
    Marian, destitute and about to be orphaned as her father succumbs to the ravages of syphilis, is taken there by Dr. Janssen. This eminent physician offers her work and a roof over her head. Employed as a seamstress, she stitches shrouds for the dead and hoods for the hangman. Marian is taken to the ward of St. Carcifex. This shadowy ward receives the recently deceased, particularly those who have hung from the gallows. Her task in this gloomy place is to watch over them, make sure the dead stay dead. On Marian’s first night, she is charged with the care of two murderers, who, despite their hanging, do not appear to have the expected deathly pallor. On the second night, these guests are joined by innocent, hard-working men, victims of an unfortunate dock accident. Marian is enraged that such should be forced to share the ward. As her own mind falls victim to the ravages of the disease which killed her father, she metes out her own justice, her own vengeance – on dead and alive alike. (Cover by Adrian Baldwin)

Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings


andrey tarkovskyAleksandr Sokurov - 2019
    

The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity


Angelina E. Castagno - 2019
    Niceness is almost always portrayed and felt as a positive quality. In schools, nice teachers are popular among students, parents, and administrators. And yet Niceness, as a distinct set of practices and discourses, is not actually good for individuals, institutions, or communities because of the way it maintains and reinforces educational inequity. In The Price of Nice, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores Niceness in educational spaces from elementary schools through higher education to highlight how this seemingly benign quality reinforces structural inequalities. Grounded in data, personal narrative, and theory, the chapters show that Niceness, as a raced, gendered, and classed set of behaviors, functions both as a shield to save educators from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity and as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance. Contributors: Sarah Abuwandi, Arizona State U; Colin Ben, U of Utah; Nicholas Bustamante, Arizona State U; Aidan/Amanda J. Charles, Northern Arizona U; Jeremiah Chin, Arizona State U; Sally Campbell Galman, U of Massachusetts; Frederick Gooding Jr., Texas Christian U; Deirdre Judge, Tufts U; Katie A. Lazdowski; Román Liera, U of Southern California; Sylvia Mac, U of La Verne; Lindsey Malcolm-Piqueux, California Institute of Technology; Giselle Martinez Negrette, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Amber Poleviyuma, Arizona State U; Alexus Richmond, Arizona State U; Frances J. Riemer, Northern Arizona U; Jessica Sierk, St. Lawrence U; Bailey B. Smolarek, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Jessica Solyom, Arizona State U; Megan Tom, Arizona State U; Sabina Vaught, U of Oklahoma; Cynthia Diana Villarreal, U of Southern California; Kristine T. Weatherston, Temple U; Joseph C. Wegwert, Northern Arizona U; Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson, Binghamton U; Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong, Trinity College; Denise Gray Yull, Binghamton U.

The Court of Better Fiction: Three Trials, Two Executions and Arctic Sovereignty


Debra Komar - 2019
    While in custody, one of the accused allegedly killed a police officer and a Hudson's Bay Company trader.The Canadian government hastily established an unprecedented court in the Arctic, but the trial quickly became a master class in judicial error. The verdicts were decided in Ottawa weeks before the court convened. Authorities were so certain of convictions, the executioner and gallows were sent north before the trial began. In order to win, the Crown broke many of its own laws.The precedent established Canada’s legal relationship with the Inuit, who would spend the next seventy-seven years fighting to regain their autonomy and Indigenous rule of law.

The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture


Charles King - 2019
    From the Arctic to the South Pacific, from Haiti to Japan, they immersed themselves in distant or isolated communities, where they observed and documented radically different approaches to love and child-rearing, family structure and the relationship between women and men. With this evidence they were able to challenge the era’s scientific consensus – and deep-rooted Western belief – that intelligence, ability and character are determined by a person’s race or sex, and show that the roles people play in society are shaped in fact according to the immense variety of human cultures.Theirs were boundary-breaking lives, filled with scandal, romance, rivalry and tragedy. Those of Margaret Mead and her essential partner Ruth Benedict resulted in fame and notoriety. Those of Native American activist Ella Deloria and the African-American writer and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston ended in poverty and obscurity; here their achievements are brought fully into the light for the first time. All were outsiders, including the controversial founder of their field, the wild-haired professor, German immigrant and revolutionary thinker, Franz Boas.The Reinvention of Humanity takes us on their globe-spanning adventures and shows how, together, these courageous and unconventional people created the moral universe we inhabit today.

Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis


Kimberly Sue - 2019
    As incarceration has become a predominant American social policy for managing the problem of drug use, including the opioid epidemic, this book examines how prisons and jails have attempted concurrent programs of punishment and treatment to deal with inmates struggling with a diagnosis of substance use disorder. An addiction physician and medical anthropologist, Kimberly Sue powerfully illustrates the impacts of incarceration on women’s lives as they seek well-being and better health while confronting lives marked by structural violence, gender inequity, and ongoing trauma.

Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka


Mythri Jegathesan - 2019
    The tea industry's economic crisis and Sri Lanka's twenty-six year long civil war have ushered in changes to life and work on the plantations, where family members now migrate from plucking tea to performing domestic work in the capital city of Colombo or farther afield in the Middle East. Using feminist ethnographic methods in research that spans the transitional time between 2008 and 2017, Mythri Jegathesan presents the lived experience of these women and men working in agricultural, migrant, and intimate labor sectors.In Tea and Solidarity, Jegathesan seeks to expand anthropological understandings of dispossession, drawing attention to the political significance of gender as a key feature in investment and place making in Sri Lanka specifically, and South Asia more broadly. This vivid and engaging ethnography sheds light on an otherwise marginalized and often invisible minority whose labor and collective heritage of dispossession as "coolies" in colonial Ceylon are central to Sri Lanka's global recognition, economic growth, and history as a postcolonial nation.

Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water


Kim Walker - 2019
    Its roots go back centuries, starting with the Andes and the cinchona tree, and it had its start as a natural medicine instead of as a tasty mixer. Quinine, tonic water’s signature ingredient, was once used to treat Malaria and is still used by some to soothe leg cramps. From the Quechua people and Spanish colonists, to French chemists and British officers, the journey from botanical discovery to cocktail staple is a fascinating story.Just the Tonic is an accessible yet informative history of tonic water, written by leading experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew—which is home to one of the largest collections in the world of historic cinchona. It takes us through the discovery and development of quinine and its eventual meeting with sparkling water. It also introduces us to the basic botany and development of the cinchona tree. The iconic gin and tonic cocktail is not forgotten in these pages. The authors look at the changing role of the drink, tracing the rise and fall, and rise again, of cocktails straight from officers’ messes of British India, the art deco cocktail bars of the 1920s, through to the Mad Men era and the recent resurgence of gin as a drink of choice. A final chapter on cocktail recipes provides instructions on how to make delicious alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks using an array of different tonics and spirits. Mixed into the book are reproductions of stunning historical artwork, posters, and photographs. This is the first authoritative book on the history and role of tonic water, making it the perfect addition to both bookshelves and bar carts. The book won the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink awards 2020 for Debut Drink Book.

Skins of Columbus


Edgar Garcia - 2019
    Edgar Garcia intervenes with a poetic experiment: Every night of the three months of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, Garcia read his corresponding journal entry before sleep. Asleep, his mind sutures displacements, migrations, and restorations into an assemblage of hemispheric becoming.

Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene


Alejandro Frid - 2019
    At this pivotal moment in history, the most important story we can be telling ourselves is that humans are not inherently destructive.In seeking the answers, Frid draws from a deep well of personal experience and that of Indigenous colleagues, finding a glimmer of hope in Indigenous cultures that, despite the ravishes of colonialism, have for thousands of years developed intentional and socially complex practices for resource management that epitomize sustainability.Changing Tides is for everyone concerned with the irrevocable changes we have unleashed upon our planet and how we might steer towards a more benign Anthropocene.

Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome


Lindsay C. Watson - 2019
    In seven chapters, each addressed to an important arm of Greco-Roman magic, the volume discusses the history of the rediscovery and publication of the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a key source for our understanding of ancient magic; the startling violence of ancient erotic spells and the use of these by women as well as men; the alteration in the landscape of defixio (curse tablet) studies by major new finds and the confirmation these provide that the frequently lethal intent of such tablets must not be downplayed; the use of herbs in magic, considered from numerous perspectives but with an especial focus on the bizarre-seeming rituals and protocols attendant upon their collection; the employment of animals in magic, the factors determining the choice of animal, the uses to which they were put, and the procuring and storage of animal parts, conceivably in a sorcerer's workshop; the witch as a literary construct, the clear homologies between the magical procedures of fictional witches and those documented for real spells, the gendering of the witch-figure and the reductive presentation of sorceresses as old, risible and ineffectual; the issue of whether ancient magicians practised human sacrifice and the illuminating parallels between such accusations and late 20th century accounts of child-murder in the context of perverted Satanic rituals.By challenging a number of orthodoxies and opening up some underexamined aspects of the subject, this wide-ranging study stakes out important new territory in the field of magical studies.

Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine


Maria Sonevytsky - 2019
    From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India


Ajantha Subramanian - 2019
    In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions.Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine


Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins - 2019
    To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank--including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel--rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Play (Logic #6)


Ben Tarnoff - 2019
    Culture needs human society, whereas animals play all the time. The origins of computers also lie in play—code-breaking and imitation games. Today, the gaming industry makes over one hundred billion dollars per year and we gamify everything from exercise to sex to sleep to crowdsourced scientific work. In the era of “do what you love,” the lines between work and play, pleasure and labor, blur.

Ka'm-t'em: A Journey Toward Healing


Kishan Lara-Cooper - 2019
    Her baskets were woven so tightly that water could not penetrate them. She was aging and had many experiences to share. Through prayer, she began to weave a basket for the people. The wise woman worked day after day, weaving, praying, and singing. As her strong hands moved gracefully over her materials, she shared a story to be retold, a song to be sung again, and a lesson to be learned. When she finished, she had created a large beautiful basket bowl. She called this basket Ka'm-t'em because it held the treasures of the people. In a Yurok village at Bluff Creek, the woman placed the basket in the water where two rivers join together, and stood silent as the basket began its journey. Ka'm-t'em: A Journey toward Healing was inspired by this piece of history. Just as the woven basket was made to share knowledge, one purpose of this book is to expose you, the reader, to Indigenous knowledge, the journey to protect it, and the healing that occurs through transmitting it to younger generations. This book presents Indigenous testimonials of resistance, renewal, advocacy, resilience, beauty, and awakening. The precious knowledge shared in this book inspires reclamation of identity and encourages readers to seek, search, embrace, and value their own truth.

Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times


Amira Mittermaier - 2019
    From foods prepared in Sufi soup kitchens, to meals distributed by pious volunteers in slums, to almsgiving, these acts are ultimately about giving to God by giving to the poor. Surprisingly, many who practice such giving say that they do not care about the poor, instead framing their actions within a unique non-compassionate ethics of giving. At first, this form of giving may appear deeply selfish, but further consideration reveals that it avoids many of the problems associated with the idea of “charity.” Using the Egyptian uprising in 2011 and its call for social justice as a backdrop, this beautifully crafted ethnography suggests that “giving a man a fish” might ultimately be more revolutionary than “teaching a man to fish.”

Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South


Rick Van Noy - 2019
    All across America and the globe, communities have to adapt to rising sea levels, intensified storms, and warmer temperatures. One way or another, climate change will be a proving ground. We will either sink, in cases where the land is subsiding, or swim, finding ways to address these challenges.While temperatures and seas are rising slowly, we have some immediate choices to make. If we act quickly and boldly, there is a small window of opportunity to prevent the worst. We can prepare for the changes by understanding what is happening and taking specific measures. There is "commitment" already in the climate change system. To minimize those effects will require another kind of commitment, the kind Rick Van Noy illustrates in these stories about a climate-distressed South.Like Rachel Carson's groundbreaking work Silent Spring, Rick Van Noy's Sudden Spring is a call to action to mitigate the current trends in our environmental degradation. By highlighting stories of people and places adapting to the impacts of a warmer climate, Van Noy shows us what communities in the South are doing to become more climate resilient and to survive a slow deluge of environmental challenges.

Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India


Lilly Irani - 2019
    Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations.Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene


Liam Young - 2019
    The data centres, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialised agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis. This issue is an atlas of sites, architectures and infrastructures that are not built for us, but whose form, materiality and purpose is configured to anticipate the logics of machine vision and habitation rather than our own. We are said to be living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet. This collection of spaces, however, more accurately constitutes an era of the Post-Anthropocene, a period where it is technology and artificial intelligence that now computes, conditions and constructs our world. Marking the end of human-centred design, the issue turns its attention to the new typologies of the post-human, architecture without people and our endless expanse of Machine Landscapes.Contributors: Merve Bedir and Jason Hilgefort, Benjamin Bratton, Ingrid Burrington, Alice Gorman, Jesse LeCavalier, Clare Lyster, Geoff Manaugh, Tim Maughan, Simone C Niquille, Chris Perry and Trevor Paglen.Featured interviews: Rem Koolhaas of OMA; Deborah Harrison, designer of Microsoft's Cortana; and Paul Inglis, designer of the urban landscapes of Blade Runner 2049.

Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries


Daniel Pauly - 2019
    

Ghetto: The History of a Word


Daniel B. Schwartz - 2019
    Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics.Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere.Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for "premodern" Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York's Lower East Side and Chicago's Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.

Battles and Battlefields of Ancient Greece: A Guide to Their History, Topography and Archaeology


C. Jacob Butera - 2019
    

Mythology: Celtic Mythology, Creatures, and Irish Folklore


Kelly Mass - 2019
    Others are quickly mentioned, and some historical background about the Celts, Irish, and Scottish is provided to set the stage. Overall, a fantastic guide to both be entertained and informed. Get started now!

Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea's Human Rights Abuses on the Record


Sandra Fahy - 2019
    In Dying for Rights, Sandra Fahy provides the definitive account of the abuses committed by the North Korean state, domestically and internationally, from its founding to the present.Dying for Rights scrutinizes North Korea's treatment of its own people as well as foreign nationals, how violations committed by the state spread into the international realm, and how North Korea uses its state media and presence at the United Nations. Fahy meticulously documents the extent of arbitrary detention, torture, executions, and the network of prison camps throughout the country. The book details systematic and widespread violations of freedom of speech and of movement, freedom from discrimination, and the rights to food and to life. Fahy weaves together public and private testimonies from North Koreans resettled abroad, as well as NGO reports, the stories and facts brought to light by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into North Korea, and North Korea's own state media, to share powerful personal narratives of human rights abuses. A compassionate yet objective investigation into the factors that sustain and perpetuate the flouting of basic rights, Dying for Rights reveals the profound culpability of the North Korean state in the systematic denial of human dignity.

Mercados: Recipes from the Markets of Mexico


David Sterling - 2019
    Just as David Sterling’s Yucatán earned him praise for his “meticulously researched knowledge” (Saveur) and for producing “a labor of love that well documents place, people and, yes, food” (Booklist), Mercados now invites readers to learn about local ingredients, meet vendors and cooks, and taste dishes that reflect Mexico’s distinctive regional cuisine.Serving up more than one hundred recipes, Mercados presents unique versions of Oaxaca’s legendary moles and Michoacan’s carnitas, as well as little-known specialties such as the charcuterie of Chiapas, the wild anise of Pátzcuaro, and the seafood soups of Veracruz. Sumptuous color photographs transport us to the enormous forty-acre, 10,000-merchant Central de Abastos in Oaxaca as well as tiny tianguises in Tabasco. Blending immersive research and passionate appreciation, David Sterling’s final opus is at once a must-have cookbook and a literary feast for the gastronome.

Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic


Amy Moran-Thomas - 2019
    Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar"--or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar." A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of cr�nicas--a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those "still fighting it" as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families' arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

Voices of Yellowstone 's Capstone A Narrative Atlas of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness


Traute N. Parrie - 2019
    

Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey


Ayse Parla - 2019
    Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope explores the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability and rethinks the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised--but never guaranteed.In contrast to the typical focus on despair, Ayşe Parla studies the hopefulness of migrants. Turkish immigration policies have worked in lockstep with national aspirations for ethnic, religious, and ideological conformity, offering Bulgaristanlı migrants an advantage over others. Their hope is the product of privilege and an act of dignity and perseverance. It is also a tool of the state, reproducing a migration regime that categorizes some as desirable and others as foreign and dispensable. Through the experiences of the Bulgaristanlı, Precarious Hope speaks to the global predicament in which increasing numbers of people are forced to manage both cultivation of hope and relentless anxiety within structures of inequality.

A Guru’s Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora (Music in American Life)


Sarah Morelli - 2019
    The North Indian classical dance has since become an important art form within the greater Indian diaspora. Yet its adoption outside of India raises questions about what happens to artistic practices when we separate them from their broader cultural contexts.A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.

Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families


Heide Castañeda - 2019
    Heide Castañeda reveals the trauma, distress, and inequalities that occur daily, alongside the stratification of particular family members' access to resources like education, employment, and health care. She also paints a vivid picture of the resilience, resistance, creative responses, and solidarity between parents and children, siblings, and other kin.Castañeda's innovative ethnography combines fieldwork with individuals and family groups to paint a full picture of the experiences of mixed-status families as they navigate the emotional, social, political, and medical difficulties that inevitably arise when at least one family member lacks legal status. Exposing the extreme conditions in the heavily-regulated U.S./Mexico borderlands, this book presents a portentous vision of how the further encroachment of immigration enforcement would affect millions of mixed-status families throughout the country.

Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India


Dolly Kikon - 2019
    In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work.Anthropologist Dolly Kikon uses in-depth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India, a region between Southeast Asia and China where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. Bringing a fresh and exciting direction to borderland studies, she explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples' love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors. Living with Oil and Coal illuminates questions of citizenship, social justice, and environmental politics that are shared by communities worldwide.

The True Nature Of Human Nature: The Symbiotic Parasite Known As Religion


Orlando Rodriguez - 2019
    However, the rhino horn is comprised of keratin, the same material as our fingernails and has no medicinal value. As a matter of fact, if rhino horn proved to have medicinal benefits, it would mean that we too can acquire these effects by biting our own fingernails! Unfortunately, this ill-conceived notion is the reason why rhinos are being hunted to extinction. Look at what belief can make people do. How can we subscribe to the belief of a God when we do not prescribe the same method of critical thinking imposed upon Santa Claus to religion as well? We depart on a guided thought experiment to understand how religion came to be, why religion has been a mainstay in modernity and what armamentarium to use in our fight against religious zealots. If you are a theist, the purpose of this book is to reason you out of something you had no reason to believe in the first place. If you are already on the fence, I look to burn down that structure. As I plant the flag for all to see, we will journey through fables, morality, science, and sin and verify if religion can, in fact, be eradicated. Born in Brentwood, NY, Orlando Rodriguez has moved many times since his childhood. He settled down in Manhattan in 2002. In what can only be described as love at first sight, he met and married his wife in 2003 and has three children. After living in Manhattan for several years, they all moved to Freehold, NJ, where they enjoy the relaxed life on weekends. Orlando’s hobbies include astronomy, working out, playing the guitar and the violin. The True Nature Of Human Nature Is Orlando’s first published work. His next book will be called When Dinosaurs Fall.

Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the U.S. South


Nolan Kline - 2019
    Nolan Kline focuses on the hidden, health-related impacts of immigrant policing to examine the role of policy in shaping health inequality in the U.S., and responds to fundamental questions regarding biopolitics, especially how policy can reinforce ‘race’ as a vehicle of social division. He argues that immigration enforcement policy results in a shadow medical system, shapes immigrants’ health and interpersonal relationships, and has health-related impacts that extend beyond immigrants to affect health providers, immigrant rights groups, hospitals, and the overall health system. Pathogenic Policing follows current immigrant policing regimes in Georgia and contextualizes contemporary legislation and law enforcement practices against a backdrop of historical forms of political exclusion from health and social services for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. For anyone concerned about the health of the most vulnerable among us, and those who interact with the overall health safety net, this will be an eye-opening read.

The Anthropology of the Future


Rebecca Bryant - 2019
    Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction


Natania Meeker - 2019
    Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art.Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity.The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism's manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.

Mythology: African Folklore and Ancient Legends


Coby Evans - 2019
    And although the west hasn’t fully embraced some of these interesting stories, they have been told by many and remembered by some, enough to write them down and discover what they are all about. Different regions have different traditions, of course, and you’ll learn more about many of them in this book. The mythological creatures, animals, gods, and goddesses all have distinct qualities and traits, so strap up and go for a ride in the African world of fantasy as you learn what people believed in and imagined. Find out more about the culture, the fertility rituals, birth, death, creation, and lots of other details.Begin your book now.

Signs of Difference


Susan Gal - 2019
    Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically.

Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate


Alison Phipps - 2019
    It comprises 18 studies from communities across Europe, the US, South America, Asia and New Zealand. They set sign language legislation within the national context of language policies in each country and show patterns of intersection between language ideologies, public policy and deaf communities' discourses. Each chapter, grounded in scholarship by deaf scholars, describes a deaf community's expectations and hopes for legal recognition and the type of sign language legislation achieved. The chapters also discuss the strategies used in achieving the passage of the legislation, as well as an account of barriers confronted and surmounted (or not) in the legislative process. It will be of interest to language activists in the fields of sign language and other minority languages, policymakers and researchers in deaf studies, sign linguistics, sociolinguistics, human rights law and applied linguistics.

An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time to Shift Paradigms


Robert Borofsky - 2019