In Varieties of Muslim Experience, anthropologist Lawrence Rosen explores aspects of Arab Muslim life that are, at first glance, perplexing to Westerners. He ranges over such diverse topics as why Arabs eschew portraiture, why a Muslim scientist might be attracted to fundamentalism, and why the Prophet must be protected from blasphemous cartoons. What connects these seemingly disparate features of Arab social, political, and cultural life? Rosen argues that the common thread is the importance Arabs place on the negotiation of interpersonal relationships—a link that helps to explain actions as seemingly unfathomable as suicide bombing and as elusive as Quranic interpretation.
Written with eloquence and a deep knowledge of the entire spectrum of Muslim experience, Rosen’s book will interest not only anthropologists and Islamicists but anyone invested in better understanding the Arab world.
Examining the border-enclosure strategy Israel uses to impose Palestinian im/mobilization, Maryam Griffin considers the ways public transportation in the Palestinian West Bank is a constant site of social struggle. Her illuminating book, Vehicles of Decolonization, studies collective movement, resistance, and everyday life in the West Bank to show how Palestinians assert a kind of Indigenous self-determination over mobility that Israeli settler colonialism seeks to undermine.
Having immersed herself in a year of fieldwork, Griffin maps multiple engagements with the flexible bus, shared van, and private taxi services to demonstrate that the politics of mobility are shaped by ongoing settler colonialism and Indigenous struggle. Griffin uses critical border studies to look at the contested nature of mobility at the sites of transit, where Palestinians practice self-determination through routine participation, spectacular political organizing and demonstration, and artistic renderings.
Featuring a variety of street images, Vehicles of Decolonization shows that multiple registers of people power work in concert not only to resist settler colonial logics but to reinhabit the land through the practice and preservation of alternative relations of mobility.
At the heart of human existence lie fundamental questions that are pondered by philosophers, theologians, poets and thoughtful people from all walks of life. What is the meaning of life? Who or what is a divine being? How can a benevolent deity justify human suffering? Such questions are especially relevant to our lives in the current climate of American society. In Vespers: American Poems of Religion and Spirituality, editors Virgil Suárez and Ryan G. Van Cleave offer the reading world a timely anthology of powerful and passionate poems that cut to the heart of our contemporary theological and spiritual underpinnings.
Featuring fifty of today's most respected American poets, including Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Carolyn Kizer, Vespers allows us to witness and understand the challenging ideas and philosophies surrounding religion and spirituality. Through these poems, we can come to a better understanding of who, what, and why we are.
From deathbed spirituals to initiation songs, transformative ballads to transcendent sonnets, poets of myriad backgrounds—Native American, African American, Asian American, Latino, Protestant, Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish—echo the thoughts, concerns, and fears that linger in our souls. Their poems help us realize that we are not alone, that we're never truly alone, that even in the face of darkness the world is vibrant, beautiful, joyous.
More than a creative exploration of theological concerns—Vespers is a roadmap of where we've been, where we are, and where we are heading in terms of our spiritual and religious existence. It will keep you company, good company, whatever your religious or spiritual background.
In the late 1990s, South Korean film and other cultural products, broadly known as hallyu (Korean wave), gained unprecedented international popularity. Korean films earned an all-time high of $60.3 million in Japan in 2005, and they outperformed their Hollywood competitors at Korean box offices. In Virtual Hallyu, Kyung Hyun Kim reflects on the precariousness of Korean cinema’s success over the past decade. Arguing that state film policies and socioeconomic factors cannot fully explain cinema’s true potentiality, Kim draws on Deleuze’s concept of the virtual—according to which past and present and truth and falsehood coexist—to analyze the temporal anxieties and cinematic ironies embedded in screen figures such as a made-in-the-USA aquatic monster (The Host), a postmodern Chosun-era wizard (Jeon Woo-chi), a schizo man-child (Oasis), a weepy North Korean terrorist (Typhoon), a salary man turned vengeful fighting machine (Oldboy), and a sick nationalist (the repatriated colonial-era film Spring of Korean Peninsula). Kim maintains that the full significance of hallyu can only be understood by exposing the implicit and explicit ideologies of protonationalism and capitalism that, along with Korea’s ambiguous post-democratization and neoliberalism, are etched against the celluloid surfaces.
Powerful personal accounts from migrants crossing the US–Mexico border provide an understanding of their experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy
Migrants, refugees, and deportees live through harrowing situations, yet their personal stories are often ignored. While politicians and commentators mischaracterize and demonize, herald border crises, and speculate about who people are and how they live, the actual memories of migrants are rarely shared. In the tradition of oral storytelling, Voices of the Border reproduces the stories migrants have told, offering a window onto both individual and shared experiences of crossing the US–Mexico border.
This collection emerged from interviews conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit organization that provides humanitarian assistance and advocates for migrants. Based in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora—twin border cities connected by shared histories, geographies, economies, and cultures—the editors and their colleagues documented migrants’ testimonios to amplify their voices. These personal narratives of lived experiences, presented in the original Spanish with English translations, bring us closer to these individuals’ strength, love, and courage in the face of hardship and injustice. Short introductions written by migrant advocates, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, and scholars provide additional context at the beginning of each chapter.
These powerful stories help readers better understand migrants' experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy for their community.
Royalties from the sale of the book go to the Kino Border Initiative.
Winner of the 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award
Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration is a lively ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism and its engagement with marine and terrestrial biodiversity on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila, located in the ecologically critical Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.
In this highly readable text, anthropologist Keri Vacanti Brondo provides a pioneering theoretical framework that conceptualizes conservation voluntourism as a green industry. Brondo argues that the volunteer tourism industry is the product of coloniality and capitalism that works to produce and sustain an economy of affect while generating inequalities and dispossession. Employing a decolonizing methodology based on landscape assemblage theory, Brondo offers “thinking-like-a-mangrove” to attend to alternative worldings in Utila beyond the hegemonic tourist spectacle–dominated world attached to the volunteer tourism industry. Readers journey through the mangroves and waters alongside voluntourists, iguanas, whale sharks, turtles, lionfish, and islanders to build valuable research experience in environmental management while engaging in affective labor and multispecies relations of care.
Conservation organizations benefit from the financial capital and labor associated with conservation tourism, an industry boosted by social media. This critical work asks us to consider the impacts of this new alternative tourism market, one that relies on the exchange of “affect” with other species. How are human socialities made through interactions with other species? What lives and dies in Utila’s affect economy? Why are some species killable? Who gets to decide?
This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. The contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. Voting the Gender Gap analyzes trends in voting while probing how women's political empowerment and gender affect American politics and the electoral process.
Contributors are Susan J. Carroll, Erin Cassese, Cal Clark, Janet M. Clark, M. Margaret Conway, Kathleen A. Dolan, Laurel Elder, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Steven Greene, Leonie Huddy, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Barbara Norrander, Margie Omero, and Lois Duke Whitaker.
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