The Confédération Paysanne, one of France's largest farmers' unions, has successfully fought against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but unlike other allied movements, theirs has been led by producers rather than consumers. In Food, Farms, and Solidarity, Chaia Heller analyzes the group's complex strategies and campaigns, including a call for a Europe-wide ban on GM crops and hormone-treated beef, and a protest staged at a McDonald's. Her study of the Confédération Paysanne shows the challenges small farms face in a postindustrial agricultural world. Heller also reveals how the language the union uses to argue against GMOs encompasses more than the risks they pose; emphasizing solidarity has allowed farmers to focus on food as a cultural practice and align themselves with other workers. Heller's examination of the Confédération Paysanne's commitment to a vision of alter-globalization, the idea of substantive alternatives to neoliberal globalization, demonstrates how ecological and social justice can be restored in the world.

In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.

Eating is essential for life, but it also embodies social and symbolic dimensions. This volume shows how foods and peoples were mutually transformed in the ancient Andes.

Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of Foodways of the Ancient Andes offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. The volume spans time periods and localities in the Andean region to reveal how food is intertwined with multiple aspects of the human experience, from production and consumption to ideology and sociopolitical organization. It illustrates the Andean peoples’ resilience in the face of challenges brought about by food scarcity and environmental change. Chapters dissect the intersection of food, power, and status in early states and empires; examine the impact of food during times of conflict and instability; and illuminate how sacred and high-status foods contributed to the building of the Inka Empire.

Featuring forty-six contributors from ten countries, the chapters employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show that food can provide not only simple nutrition but also a multitude of strategies, social and political relationships, and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.

Contributors
Aleksa K. Alaica
Sonia Alconini
Marta Alfonso-Durruty
Sarah I. Baitzel
Véronique Bélisle
Carolina Belmar
Carrie Anne Berryman
Matthew E. Biwer
Deborah E. Blom
Tamara L. Bray
Matthew T. Brown
Maria C. Bruno
José M. Capriles
Katherine L. Chiou
Susan D. deFrance
Lucia M. Diaz
Richard P. Evershed
Maureen E. Folk
Alexandra Greenwald
Chris Harrod
Christine A. Hastorf
Iain Kendall
Kelly J. Knudson
BrieAnna S. Langlie
Cecilia Lemp
Petrus le Roux
Marcos Martinez
Anahí Maturana-Fernández
Weston C. McCool
Melanie J. Miller
Nicole Misarti
Flavia Morello
Patricia Quiñonez Cuzcano
Omar Reyes
Arturo F. Rivera Infante
Manuel San Román
Francisca Santana-Sagredo
Beth K. Scaffidi
Augusto Tessone
Andrés Troncoso
Tiffiny A. Tung
Mauricio Uribe
Natasha P. Vang
Sadie L. Weber
Kurt M. Wilson
Michelle E. Young

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”

In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.

A lively exploration of the cultural significance of shoes.

Many observers of Kenya’s complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose the country’s problems do not often consider what these fiscal and political issues mean to ordinary Kenyans. How do Kenyans express their own political understanding, make sense of governance, and articulate what they expect from their leaders?
 
In For Money and Elders, Robert W. Blunt addresses these questions by turning to the political, economic, and religious signs in circulation in Kenya today. He examines how Kenyans attempt to make sense of political instability caused by the uncertainty of authority behind everything from currency to title deeds. When the symbolic order of a society is up for grabs, he shows, violence may seem like an expedient way to enforce the authority of signs. Drawing on fertile concepts of sovereignty, elderhood, counterfeiting, acephaly, and more, Blunt explores phenomena as diverse as the destabilization of ritual “oaths,” public anxieties about Satanism with the advent of democratic reform, and mistrust of official signs. The result is a fascinating glimpse into Kenya’s past and present and a penetrating reflection on meanings of violence in African politics.

2020 Award for Distinguished Book from the Animals & Society Section of the American Sociological Association

One in five people in the United States is a birdwatcher, yet the popular understanding of birders reduces them to comical stereotypes, obsessives who only have eyes for their favorite rare species. In real life, however, birders are paying equally close attention to the world around them, observing the devastating effects of climate change and mass extinction, while discovering small pockets of biodiversity in unexpected places.
 
For the Birds offers readers a glimpse behind the binoculars and reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. With a wealth of data from in-depth interviews and over three years of observing birders in the field, environmental sociologist Elizabeth Cherry argues that birders learn to watch wildlife in ways that make an invaluable contribution to contemporary conservation efforts. She investigates how birders develop a “naturalist gaze” that enables them to understand the shared ecosystem that intertwines humans and wild animals, an appreciation that motivates them to participate in citizen science projects and wildlife conservation.
 

Forbidden Relatives challenges the belief--widely held in the United States--that legislation against marriage between first cousins is based on a biological risk to offspring. In fact, its author maintains, the U.S. prohibition against such unions originated largely because of the belief that it would promote more rapid assimilation of immigrants.
A social anthropologist, Martin Ottenheimer questioned U.S. laws against cousin marriage because his international research into marriage patterns showed no European countries prohibit such unions. He examines the historical development of U.S. laws governing marriage, contrasts them with European laws, and analyzes the genetic implications of first cousin marriage. Modern genetic evidence, Ottenheimer says, doesn't support the concept that children of these unions are at any special risk.
Ottenheimer's book, the only volume available that deals with kinship in this way, will challenge readers and give them much to consider and discuss.
 

The Force of Custom presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation is shown to be a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt in order to meet the challenges of contemporary political, legal, economic, and religious environments. Officially, codified state law should take precedence when it comes to dispute resolution, yet the unwritten laws of salt and the increasing importance of Islamic law provide the standards for ordering everyday life. As Beyer further demonstrates, interpretations of both Islamic and state law are also intrinsically linked to salt.
            By interweaving case studies on kinship, legal negotiations, festive events, mourning rituals, and political and business dealings, Beyer shows how salt is the binding element in rural Kyrgyz social life and how it is used to explain and negotiate moral behavior and to postulate communal identity. In this way, salt provides a time-tested, sustainable source of authentication that defies changes in government and the shifting tides of religious movements.

The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it traveled precious cargoes of silk, gold and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centers of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years; however, legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasures and guarded by demons. In the early years of the last century foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.

Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another.

Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands.

The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.

As one of Africa’s few democracies, Senegal has long been thought of as a leader of moral, political, and economic development on the continent. We tend to assume that any such nation has achieved favorable international standing due to its own merits. In Forensics of Capital, Michael Ralph upends this kind of conventional thinking, showing how Senegal’s diplomatic standing was strategically forged in the colonial and postcolonial eras at key periods of its history and is today entirely contingent on the consensus of wealthy and influential nations and international lending agencies.
           
Ralph examines Senegal’s crucial and pragmatic decisions related to its development and how they garnered international favor, decisions such as its opposition to Soviet involvement in African liberation—despite itself being a socialist state—or its support for the US-led war on terror—despite its population being predominately Muslim. He shows how such actions have given Senegal an inflated political and economic position and status as a highly credit-worthy nation even as its domestic economy has faltered. Exploring these and many other aspects of Senegal’s political economy and its interface with the international community, Ralph demonstrates that the international reputation of any nation—not just Senegal—is based on deep structural biases. 

“The Forest of Taboos may be considered among the most important books ever written by an anthropologist. Valeri writes superbly, and this book makes a fundamental contribution to one of the most central lines of thought in twentieth-century anthropology. He shows that taboo is finally comprehensible.”—John Stephen Lansing, University of Michigan
 
“The Forest of Taboos is no conventional ethnography, more an extended meditative essay on its subject, erudite, rich in ideas and data, wide-ranging in its theoretical inspiration, and self-consciously literary in form. It is a fitting memorial to an author whose life was so tragically cut short.”—Roy Ellen, University of Kent at Canterbury

This eloquent and profound book, completed by Valerio Valeri shortly before his death in 1998, contends that the ambivalence felt by all humans about sex, death, and eating other animals can be explained by a set of coordinated principles that are expressed in taboos. In elegant prose, Valeri evokes the world of the Huaulu, forest hunters of Indonesia. The hidden attractions of the animal world, which invades the human world in perilous ways, he shows, also delineate that which the Huaulu regard as most human about themselves.

Forests of Gold is a collection of essays on the peoples of Ghana with particular reference to the most powerful of all their kingdoms: Asante. Beginning with the global and local conditions under which Akan society assumed its historic form between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these essays go on to explore various aspects of Asante culture: conceptions of wealth, of time and motion, and the relationship between the unborn, the living, and the dead. The final section is focused upon individuals and includes studies of generals, of civil administrators, and of one remarkable woman who, in 1831, successfully negotiated peace treaties with the British and the Danes on the Gold Coast. The author argues that contemporary developments can only be fully understood against the background of long-term trajectories of change in Ghana.

Throughout Africa one craft among many stands out: that of the blacksmith. In many African cultures, smiths occupy a significant position, not just as artisans engaging in a difficult craft but also as special people. Often they perform other crafts, as well, and make up a somewhat separate group inside society. The Forge and the Funeral describes the position of the smith in the culture of the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria. Situated in the Mandara Mountains and straddling the border of these two countries, Kapsiki culture forms a specific and highly relevant example of the phenomenon of the smith in Africa. As an endogamous group of about 5 percent of the population, Kapsiki smiths perform an impressive array of crafts and specializations, combining magico-religious functions with metalwork, in particular as funeral directors, as well as with music and healing. The Forge and the Funeral gives an intimate description and analysis of this group, based upon the author’s four decades–long involvement with the Kapsiki/Higi. Description and analysis are set within the more general scholarly debates about the dynamics of professional closure—including the notions of caste and guild—and also consider the deep history of iron and brass in Africa.

In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.

Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.

Often considered the father of anthropological studies in Mexico, Manuel Gamio originally published Forjando Patria in 1916. This groundbreaking manifesto for a national anthropology of Mexico summarizes the key issues in the development of anthropology as an academic discipline and the establishment of an active field of cultural politics in Mexico. Written during the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, the book has now been translated into English for the first time.

Armstrong-Fumero's translation allows readers to develop a more nuanced understanding of this foundational work, which is often misrepresented in contemporary critical analyses. As much about national identity as anthropology, this text gives Anglophone readers access to a particular set of topics that have been mentioned extensively in secondary literature but are rarely discussed with a sense of their original context. Forjando Patria also reveals the many textual ambiguities that can lend themselves to different interpretations.

The book highlights the history and development of Mexican anthropology and archaeology at a time when scholars in the United States are increasingly recognizing the importance of cross-cultural collaboration with their Mexican colleagues. It will be of interest to anthropologists and archaeologists studying the region, as well as those involved in the history of the discipline.

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist

"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

No description available.

Gazing into the black skies from the Anasazi observatory at Chimney Rock or the Castillo Pyramid in the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá, a modern visitor might wonder what ancient stargazers looked for in the skies and what they saw. Once considered unresearchable, these questions now drive cultural astronomers who draw on written and unwritten records and a constellation of disciplines to reveal the wonders of ancient and contemporary astronomies.

Cultural astronomy, first called archaeoastronomy, has evolved at ferocious speed since its genesis in the 1960s, with seminal essays and powerful rebuttals published in far-flung, specialized journals. Until now, only the most closely involved scholars could follow the intellectual fireworks. In Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy, Anthony Aveni, one of cultural astronomy's founders and top scholars, offers a selection of the essays that built the field, from foundational works to contemporary scholarship.
Including four decades of research throughout the Americas by linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, astronomers, and engineers, this reader highlights the evolution of the field through thematic organization and point-counterpoint articles. Aveni - an award-winning author and former National Professor of the Year - serves up incisive commentary, background for the uninitiated, and suggested reading, questions, and essay topics. Students, readers, and scholars will relish this collection and its tour of a new field in which discoveries about ancient ways of looking at the skies cast light on our contemporary views.

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin, author of The House that Giacomo Built, comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long twentieth century.

Each chapter of Four Germanys is reflective of generational rather than historical time. In 1922, Edwin Schorcht inherited his family farm, and in Part One, Pitkin traces the derivation of this farmstead.  Part Two focuses on Schorcht’s children who came of age in Hitler’s Germany. Part Three has the Schorchts growing up in the Ulbricht years (1950–73) of the German Democratic Republic. The book concludes with the great-granddaughter, Maria, looking back to the past in relation to the new Germany that history had bequeathed her.

Ultimately, Four Germanys reflects the impact of critical historical events on ordinary East Germans while it also reveals how one particular family managed its own historical adaptation to these events.

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists working in this field—Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane—to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it.
           
The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cultural settings, asking questions such as: How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an anthropology of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics approaches the political in both Western and non-Western societies. Contrasting perspectives and methods—and yet in complimentary ways—this masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty-first century. 

From flammable tap water and sick livestock to the recent onset of hundreds of earthquakes in Oklahoma, the impact of fracking in the United States is far-reaching and deeply felt. In Fractivism Sara Ann Wylie traces the history of fracking and the ways scientists and everyday people are coming together to hold accountable an industry that has managed to evade regulation. Beginning her story in Colorado, Wylie shows how nonprofits, landowners, and community organizers are creating novel digital platforms and databases to track unconventional oil and gas well development and document fracking's environmental and human health impacts. These platforms model alternative approaches for academic and grassroots engagement with the government and the fossil fuel industry. A call to action, Fractivism outlines a way forward for not just the fifteen million Americans who live within a mile of an unconventional oil or gas well, but for the planet as a whole.

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn't?

This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.

In Fragments of Bone, thirteen essayists discuss African religions as forms of resistance and survival in the face of Western cultural hegemony and imperialism. The collection presents scholars working outside of the Western tradition with backgrounds in a variety of disciplines, genders, and nationalities. These experts draw on research, fieldwork, personal interviews, and spiritual introspection to support a provocative thesis: that fragments of ancestral traditions are fluidly interwoven into New World African religions as creolized rituals, symbolic systems, and cultural identities. 

Contributors: Osei-Mensah Aborampah, Niyi Afolabi, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Randy P. Conner, T. J. Desch-Obi, Ina Johanna Fandrich, Kean Gibson, Marilyn Houlberg, Nancy B. Mikelsons, Roberto Nodal, Rafael Ocasio, Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Fragments of Culture explores the evolving modern daily life of Turkey. Through analyses of language, folklore, film, satirical humor, the symbolism of Islamic political mobilization, and the shifting identities of diasporic communities in Turkey and Europe, this book provides a fresh and corrective perspective to the often-skewed perceptions of Turkish culture engendered by conventional western critiques. In this volume, some of the most innovative scholars of post 1980s Turkey address the complex ways that suburbanization and the growth of a globalized middle class have altered gender and class relations, and how Turkish society is being shaped and redefined through consumption. They also explore the increasingly polarized cultural politics between secularists and Islamists, and the ways that previously repressed Islamic elements have reemerged to complicate the idea of an "authentic" Turkish identity. Contributors examine a range of issues from the adjustments to religious identity as the Islamic veil becomes marketed as a fashion item, to the media's increased attention in Turkish transsexual lifestyle, to the role of folk dance as a ritualized part of public life.

Fragments of Culture shows how attention to the minutiae of daily life can successfully unravel the complexities of a shifting society. This book makes a significant contribution to both modern Turkish studies and the scholarship on cross-cultural perspectives in Middle Eastern studies.

The death of her grandfather sets Neni Panourgiá and her readers on a path through the rituals of mourning and memory in modern urban Greece. Blending emotional richness and intellectual rigor, the anthropologist returns home in this exploration of kinship and identity within her own family and native city of Athens. What emerges is not only a new anthropological view of contemporary Greek culture, but also a reflective consideration of the self and subject.
    Following men and women grappling with questions of mortality, Panourgiá moves through the streets and neighborhoods of Athens, seaside resorts and pistachio groves, the corridors and rooms of the Cancer Institute, wakes in apartments and observances in cemeteries. She mingles popular culture, venerable traditions, and contemporary theory as she considers how individuals define their identity as Athenians, as members of a family, as subjects of a polity, in sickness and in health, in death or in mourning. Memory is their guide as it negotiates their relationships with a personal, collective, and cultural past—and the memory of many deaths challenges and reaffirms, deconstructs and reconstructs who they are.
    As intellectually ambitious as it is moving, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity reconfigures the subject and object of anthropological study and recasts the line where experience ends and analysis begins.
 

Fredrik Barth, editor of the influential Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century anthropology. In this accessible but penetrating intellectual biography, Thomas Hylland Eriksen explores Barth’s six-decade career, following Barth from his early ecological studies in Pakistan to political studies in Iran, to groundbreaking fieldwork in Norway, New Guinea, Bali, and Bhutan. Along the way, Eriksen raises many of the questions that emerge from Barth’s own work: questions of unity and diversity, of culture and relativism, and of art and science. This will surely be the definitive biography of Barth for many years to come.

Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions. Kirksey studied West Papua's movement for freedom while a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and narratives of his own experiences, he argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies.

Paul Riesman's Freedom in Fulani Social Life is based upon his two years of residence among the Jelgobe, a group of semi-nomadic Fulani of the Sahel in Upper Volta, western Africa. Since its original publication, this classic study has profoundly influenced the field of anthropology through its re-examination of the enthnographer's personal input on his research.

"Freedom in Fulani Social Life richly documents how the ethnographer's own personal and cultural background is implicated in the research process. . . . For this reason, [Riesman's] book will be of paramount interest to all ethnographers."—Philip L. Kilbride, Reviews in Anthropology

"A remarkably well-written and insightful account of Fulani life. . . . In addition to using the conventional approaches of participating in and observing the daily activities of the Jelgobe . . . Riesman enriches his account by examining his personal feelings about particular incidents."—Library Journal

"An interesting and provocative study."—Choice

At the time of his death in 1988, Paul Riesman was an anthropologist who taught at Carleton College.

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

In 1927, the Claflin-Emerson expedition of the Peabody Museum began a rapid and extensive archaeological reconnaissance of eastern Utah. The expedition was funded by William H. Claflin and Raymond Emerson, Bostonian businessmen with a deep devotion to the American Indian and a probing interest in the remote and mysterious regions of the American West.

Early expedition surveys and excavations conducted by Noel Morss would lead to a definition of the Fremont culture; later research would augment existing data on the Fremont by adding entirely new traits, disclosing new variations in architecture and basketry, and providing new information on the distribution of previously known traits.

In The Fremont Culture: A Study in Culture Dynamics on the Northern Anasazi Frontier, archaeologist James H. Gunnerson provides the results of his 1950s survey and excavation in the Utah area. He presents a functional synthesis of the Fremont culture and discusses the dynamics of its growth and decline.

Gunnerson’s report also uses the original field notes, maps, plans, photographs, sketches, and unpublished preliminary reports of the Claflin-Emerson expedition. Together, the reports of Morss and Gunnerson offer the most important and complete overview of the expedition available. They are fitting tributes to the men of that expedition, scientists who recognized the importance of an ancient people who once wrested a meager living from the rugged canyon country of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

A tectonic shift has occurred in the gastronomic field in France, upsetting the cultural imagination. In a European country captivated by a high-stakes power struggle between chefs and restaurants in the culinary field, the mass marketing of factory-processed industrial cuisine and fast foods has created shock waves in French society, culture, and the economy. 

In this insightful book, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism, Rick Fantasia examines how national identity and the dynamics of cultural meaning-making within gastronomy have changed during a crucial period of transformation, from the 1970s through the 1990s. He illuminates the tensions and surprising points of cooperation between the skill, expertise, tradition, artistry, and authenticity of grand chefs and the industrial practices of food production, preparation, and distribution. 

Fantasia examines the institutions and beliefs that have reinforced notions of French cultural supremacy—such as the rise and reverence of local cuisine—as well as the factors that subvert those notions, such as when famous French chefs lend their names to processed, frozen, and pre-packaged foods available at the supermarket. Ultimately, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism shows what happens to a cultural field, like French gastronomy, when the logic and power of the economic field imposes itself upon it.

Bringing together leading scholars from Belgium, Canada, France, and the United States, French Thinking about Animals makes available for the first time to an Anglophone readership a rich variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the animal question in France. While the work of French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari has been available in English for many years, French Thinking about Animals opens up a much broader cross-cultural dialogue within animal studies. These original essays, many of which have been translated especially for this volume, draw on anthropology, ethology, geography, history, legal studies, phenomenology, and philosophy to interrogate human-animal relationships. They explore the many ways in which animals signify in French history, society, and intellectual history, illustrating the exciting new perspectives being developed about the animal question in the French-speaking world today. Built on the strength and diversity of these contributions, French Thinking about Animals demonstrates the interdisciplinary and internationalism that are needed if we hope to transform the interactions of humans and nonhuman animals in contemporary society.

Among a growing number of ethnographies of eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange, and kinship, From a Shattered Sun is the first to address squarely issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Lévi-Strauss concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage.
    On the basis of extensive fieldwork in the Tamimbar islands, Susan McKinnon analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance—of both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations.  In addition, Tamimbarese society is marked by the existence of multiple, differentially valued forms of marriage, affiliation, and residence.  Rather than seeing these various forms as analytically separable types, McKinnon demonstrates that it is only by viewing them as integrally related—in terms of culturally specific understandings of "houses," gender, and exchange—that one can perceive the processes through which hierarchy and equality are created.

From Belonging to Belief presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region. She explores belief and nonbelief, varying practices of Islam, discourses of extremism, and the role of the state, to elucidate the everyday experiences of Bazaar-Korgonians. McBrien shows how Islam is explored, lived, and debated in both conventional and novel sites: a Soviet-era cleric who continues to hold great influence; popular television programs; religious instruction at wedding parties; clothing; celebrations; and others. Through ethnographic research, McBrien reveals how moving toward Islam is not a simple step but rather a deliberate and personal journey of experimentation, testing, and knowledge acquisition.  Moreover she argues that religion is not always a matter of belief—sometimes it is essentially about belonging.
            From Belonging to Belief offers an important corrective to studies that focus only on the pious turns among Muslims in Central Asia, and instead shows the complex process of evolving religion in a region that has experienced both Soviet atheism and post-Soviet secularism, each of which has profoundly formed the way Muslims interpret and live Islam.

From Black to Schwarz explores the long and varied history of the exchanges between African America and Germany, with a particular focus on cultural interplay. Covering a wide range of media of expression—music, performance, film, scholarship, literature, visual arts, reviews—these essays trace and analyze a cultural interaction, collaboration, and mutual transformation that began in the eighteenth century, boomed during the Harlem Renaissance/Weimar Republic, survived the Third Reich’s “Degenerate Art” campaigns, and (with new media available to further exchanges), is still increasingly empowering and inspiring participants on both sides of the Atlantic.

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue.

The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes and topics that he engaged throughout his life—including hospitality, grace, the symbolic economy of reciprocity, kinship, the paradoxes of friendship, ritual logics, the anthropology of dress, and more—this omnibus brings his reflections to new life.
           
Holding Pitt-Rivers’s diversity of subjects and ethnographic foci in the same gaze, this book reveals a theoretical unity that ran through his work and highlights his iconic wit and brilliance. Striking at the heart of anthropological theory, the pieces here explore the relationship between the mental and the material, between what is thought and what is done. Classic, definitive, and yet still extraordinarily relevant for contemporary anthropology, Pitt-Rivers’s lifetime contribution will provide a new generation of anthropologists with an invaluable resource for reflection on both ethnographic and theoretical issues. 

In this vivid ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the "backwardness" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea.

The American Southwest is characterized by environmentally and culturally diverse landscapes, which include the northern Rio Grande valley as it cuts through north-central New Mexico from Taos to Albuquerque. The region has a long and rich history of anthropological research primarily focused on the archaeological remains found along this valley corridor. Only recently has research involving large-scale surveys and excavations been conducted on the nearby mesas and mountains that form the rugged margins of the river valley. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom incorporates this new research into a perspective that links the ever-changing and complementary nature of lowland and upland land use.

The essays in this collection are unified by three specific themes: landscape, movement, and technology. Landscape involves the ecological backdrop of the northern Rio Grande valley, including past and present environments. Movement refers to the positioning of people across the landscape along with the dynamic and fluid nature with which people—past and present—view their relationship with the “above” and “below.” Technology not only refers to the tools and facilities that past people may have used but to the organization of labor needed to cooperatively exploit a variety of subsistence resources and the exchange of products across the region. This volume provides both a cross section of current research from expert scholars and a broad perspective that seeks to integrate new data from lowland and upland contexts. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom will appeal to those interested in obsidian source studies, geoarchaeology, past climatic regimes, foraging societies, early agriculture, ceramic technology, subsistence, early village formation, ethnogenesis, and historic multiethnic economies.

Over the past four decades immigration to France from the Francophone countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) has changed in character. For much of the twentieth century, migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to France were men seeking work, who frequently undertook manual labour, working long hours in difficult conditions. Recent decades have seen an increase in family reunification - the arrival of women and children from North Africa, either accompanying their husbands or joining them in France. Contemporary creative representations of migration are shaped by this shift in gender and generation from a solitary, mostly male experience to one that included women and children. Just as the shift made new demands of the 'host' society, it made new demands of authors and filmmakers as they seek to represent migration. This study reveals how text and film present new ways of thinking about migration, moving away from the configuration of the migrant as man and worker, to take into account women, children, and the ties between. Isabel Hollis-Touré is a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast. She has published widely on North African migration to France.

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science.  Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well.

 From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off.  Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.

In paperback for the first time, From Racism to Genocide is an explosive, richly detailed account of how Nazi anthropologists justified racism, developed practical applications of racist theory, and eventually participated in every phase of the Holocaust. 

Using original sources and previously unpublished documentation, Gretchen E. Schafft shows the total range of anti-human activity from within the confines of a particular discipline. Based on seven years of archival research in the United States and abroad, the work includes many original photos and documents, most of which have never before been published. It uses primary data and original texts whenever possible, including correspondence written by perpetrators. The book also reveals that the United States was not merely a bystander in this research, but instead contributed professional and financial support to early racial research that continued through the first five years of Hitler’s regime.

While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world.

Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich

A new reading of Panama’s nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism

Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.

The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.

The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious life of the Araweté—a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia—focuses on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity.

Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity—consumption—showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. From the Enemy's Point of View argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.
 

The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.

The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
 

From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras is a major contribution to the study of globalization, labor, and women’s movements. Jennifer Bickham Mendez presents a detailed ethnographic account of the Nicaraguan Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement, “María Elena Cuadra” (mec), which emerged as an autonomous organization in 1994. Most of its efforts revolve around organizing women workers in Nicaragua’s free trade zones and working to improve conditions in maquiladora factories. Mendez examines the structural and cultural elements of mec in order to demonstrate how globalization affects grassroots advocacy for social and economic justice. She argues that globalization has created opportunities for new forms of organizing among those local populations that suffer its effects and that mec, which has forged vital links with transnational feminist and labor groups, exemplifies the possibilities—and pitfalls—of this new type of organizing.

Mendez draws on interviews with leaders and program participants, including maquiladora workers; her participant observation while she worked as a volunteer within the organization; and analysis of the public statements, speeches, and texts written by mec members. She provides a sense of the day-to-day operations of the group as well as its strategies. By exploring the tension between mec and transnational feminist, labor, and solidarity networks, she illustrates how mec women’s outlooks are shaped by both their revolutionary roots within the Sandinista regime and their exposure to global discourses of human rights and citizenship. The complexities of the women’s labor movement analyzed in From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras speak to social and economic justice movements in the many locales around the world.

Anyone curious about what drew people like Christopher McCandless (the subject of Into the Wild) and John Muir to Alaska will find nuanced answers in Frontier Romance, Judith Kleinfeld’s thoughtful study of the iconic American love of the frontier and its cultural influence. Kleinfeld considers the subject through three catagories: rebellion, redemption, and rebirth; escape and healing; and utopian community. Within these categories she explores the power of narrative to shape lives through concrete, compelling examples—both heart-warming and horrifying. Ultimately, Kleinfeld argues that the frontier narrative enables Americans—born or immigrant—to live deliberately, to gather courage, and to take risks, face danger, and seize freedom rather than fear it. 

With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the “New Economy” of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.

Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.

Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom

" This volume is likely to prove indispensable to historians of anthropology in general and of British anthropology in particular. There are a wide range of historical skills on display, from traditional textual analysis to historical sociology of the most sophisticated sort, and there is a more or less thorough chronological coverage from the era of classical evolutionism virtually up to the present. One can only hope that historicizing anthropologists will sample some of these wares."—Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

We are a century removed from Queen Victoria's death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time addresses the theme of the Victorians' continuing legacy and its effect on our own culture and perception of the world. The contributors' diverse topics include the persistent influence of Jack the Ripper on police procedures, the enormous success of the magazine Victoria and the lifestyle it promotes, and film, television, and theatrical adaptations of Victorian texts.

Also addressed are appropriations of Oscar Wilde to market gay identity in contemporary advertising, and appeals to the Victorian empire in constructing the 'New Britain' for the era of globalization. Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time encourages a critique of how these artifacts contribute to contemporary culture and confronts the challenges of disseminating the older culture in the new millennium.

The contributors include Simon Joyce, Ronald R. Thomas, Miriam Bailin, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Jesse Matz, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Kathleen Lonsdale, Christine L. Krueger, Florence Boos, David Barndollar, Susan Schorn, and Sue Lonoff.

In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized "Asian" bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore's ethnic-stratified databases that come to "represent" majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering "Asia" itself as a shifting entity. In Ong's analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population's genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.

"This ethnography is more like a film than a book, so well does Stoller evoke the color, sight, sounds, and movements of Songhay possession ceremonies."—Choice

"Stoller brilliantly recreates the reality of spirit presence; hosts are what they mediate, and spirits become flesh and blood in the 'fusion' with human existence. . . . An excellent demonstration of the benefits of a new genre of ethnographic writing. It expands our understanding of the harsh world of Songhay mediums and sorcerers."—Bruce Kapferer, American Ethnologist

"A vivid story that will appeal to a wide audience. . . . The voices of individual Songhay are evident and forceful throughout the story. . . . Like a painter, [Stoller] is concerned with the rich surface of things, with depicting images, evoking sensations, and enriching perceptions. . . . He has succeeded admirably." —Michael Lambek, American Anthropologist

"Events (ceremonies and life histories) are evoked in cinematic style. . . . [This book is] approachable and absorbing—it is well written, uncluttered by jargon and elegantly structured."—Richard Fardon, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Compelling, insightful, rich in ethnographic detail, and worthy of becoming a classic in the scholarship on Africa."—Aidan Southall, African Studies Review

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.