BiblioVault - Books about Anthropology

Remembering Victoria

A Tragic Nahuat Love Story

By James M. Taggart

University of Texas Press, 2007

On October 15, 1983, a young mother of six was murdered while walking across her village of Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico, with her infant son and one of her daughters. This woman, Victoria Bonilla, was among more than one hundred villagers who perished in violence that broke out soon after the Mexican army chopped down a cornfield that had been planted on an unused cattle pasture by forty Nahuat villagers.

In this anthropological account, based on years of fieldwork in Huitzilan, James M. Taggart turns to Victoria's husband, Nacho Angel Hernández, to try to understand how a community based on respect and cooperation descended into horrific violence and fratricide. When the army chopped down the cornfield at Talcuaco, the war that broke out resulted in the complete breakdown of the social and moral order of the community.

At its heart, this is a tragic love story, chronicling Nacho's feelings for Victoria spanning their courtship, marriage, family life, and her death. Nacho delivered his testimonio to the author in Nahuat, making it one of the few autobiographical love stories told in an Amerindian language, and a very rare account of love among the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. There is almost nothing in the literature on how a man develops and changes his feelings for his wife over his lifetime. This study contributes to the anthropology of emotion by focusing on how the Nahuat attempt to express love through language and ritual.

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The Remittance Landscape

Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA

Sarah Lynn Lopez

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Immigrants in the United States send more than $20 billion every year back to Mexico—one of the largest flows of such remittances in the world. With The Remittance Landscape, Sarah Lynn Lopez offers the first extended look at what is done with that money, and in particular how the building boom that it has generated has changed Mexican towns and villages.

Lopez not only identifies a clear correspondence between the flow of remittances and the recent building boom in rural Mexico but also proposes that this construction boom itself motivates migration and changes social and cultural life for migrants and their families. At the same time, migrants are changing the landscapes of cities in the United States: for example, Chicago and Los Angeles are home to buildings explicitly created as headquarters for Mexican workers from several Mexican states such as Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. Through careful ethnographic and architectural analysis, and fieldwork on both sides of the border, Lopez brings migrant hometowns to life and positions them within the larger debates about immigration.

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Remote Avant-Garde

Aboriginal Art under Occupation

Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Duke University Press, 2016

In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted "remote" Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent art responds to national emergency, from the creation of locally hunted grass sculptures to biliterary acrylic witness paintings to stop-motion animation. Following directly from the unprecedented success of the Western Desert art movement, contemporary Aboriginal artists harness traditions of experimentation to revivify at-risk vernacular languages, maintain cultural heritage, and ensure place-based practice of community initiative. Biddle shows how these new art forms demand serious and sustained attention to the dense complexities of sentient perception and the radical inseparability of art from life. Taking shape on frontier boundaries and in zones of intercultural imperative, Remote Avant-Garde presents Aboriginal art "under occupation" in Australia today.

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Remote Warfare

New Cultures of Violence

Rebecca A. Adelman

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Considers how people have confronted, challenged, and resisted remote warfare

Drone warfare is now a routine, if not predominant, aspect of military engagement. Although this method of delivering violence at a distance has been a part of military arsenals for two decades, scholarly debate on remote warfare writ large has remained stuck in tired debates about practicality, efficacy, and ethics. Remote Warfare broadens the conversation, interrogating the cultural and political dimensions of distant warfare and examining how various stakeholders have responded to the reality of state-sponsored remote violence.

The essays here represent a panoply of viewpoints, revealing overlooked histories of remoteness, novel methodologies, and new intellectual challenges. From the story arc of Homeland to redefining the idea of a “warrior,” these thirteen pieces consider the new nature of surveillance, similarities between killing with drones and gaming, literature written by veterans, and much more. Timely and provocative, Remote Warfare makes significant and lasting contributions to our understanding of drones and the cultural forces that shape and sustain them.

Contributors: Syed Irfan Ashraf, U of Peshawar, Pakistan; Jens Borrebye Bjering, U of Southern Denmark; Annika Brunck, U of Tübingen; David A. Buchanan, U.S. Air Force Academy; Owen Coggins, Open U; Andreas Immanuel Graae, U of Southern Denmark; Brittany Hirth, Dickinson State U; Tim Jelfs, U of Groningen; Ann-Katrine S. Nielsen, Aarhus U; Nike Nivar Ortiz, U of Southern California; Michael Richardson, U of New South Wales; Kristin Shamas, U of Oklahoma; Sajdeep Soomal; Michael Zeitlin, U of British Columbia.

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Rendering Life Molecular

Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter

Natasha Myers

Duke University Press, 2015

What are living bodies made of? Protein modelers tell us that our cells are composed of millions of proteins, intricately folded molecular structures on the scale of nanoparticles. Proteins twist and wriggle as they carry out the activities that keep cells alive. Figuring out how to make these unruly substances visible, tangible, and workable is a challenging task, one that is not readily automated, even by the fastest computers. Natasha Myers explores what protein modelers must do to render three-dimensional, atomic-resolution models of these lively materials. Rendering Life Molecular shows that protein models are not just informed by scientific data: model building entangles a modeler’s entire sensorium, and modelers must learn to feel their way through the data in order to interpret molecular forms. Myers takes us into protein modeling laboratories and classrooms, tracking how gesture, affect, imagination, and intuition shape practices of objectivity. Asking, ‘What is life becoming in modelers' hands?’ she tunes into the ways they animate molecules through their moving bodies and other media. In the process she amplifies an otherwise muted liveliness inflecting mechanistic accounts of the stuff of life.

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Renegade Dreams

Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago

Laurence Ralph

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries—both physical and psychological—for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.

Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.

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The Renewal of Cultural Studies

Edited by Paul Smith

Temple University Press, 2011

Cultural Studies, once a burgeoning academic field, developed into a discipline in which just about any cultural text, object or event could be studied. The Renewal of Cultural Studies offers a panoramic view of the field, its assumptions, and its methodologies. Editor Paul Smith and thirty contributors map out new directions that will redefine and sustain the field of cultural studies.

In twenty-seven original essays, cultural studies is examined in relation to other disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, media, and American studies. The discipline is reviewed in the context of globalization, in relation to topics such as war, public policy, and labor, its pedagogy and politics, and in Marxist, feminist, and environmentalist contexts.

Smith wants to establish theoretical and methodological common ground among cultural studies scholars. Providing a “state of the discipline,” The Renewal of Cultural Studies asks, “What can and should the field of Cultural Studies be doing now?”

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Renewing the Maya World

Expressive Culture in a Highland Town

By Garrett W. Cook

University of Texas Press, 2000

Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradías perform the annual cycle of rituals and festivals prescribed by Costumbre (syncretized Maya Christian religion), which serves to renew the cosmic order. In this richly detailed ethnography, Garrett Cook explores how these festivals of Jesucristo and the saints derive from and reenact three major ancient Maya creation myths, thus revealing patterns of continuity between contemporary expressive culture and the myths, rituals, and iconography of the Classic and Postclassic Maya.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s and renewed in the 1990s, Cook describes the expressive culture tradition performed in and by the cofradías and their dance teams. He listens as dancers and cofrades explain the meaning of service and of the major ritual symbols in the cults of the saints and Jesucristo. Comparing these symbols to iconographic evidence from Palenque and myths from the Popol Vuh, Cook persuasively argues that the expressive culture of Momostenango enacts major Maya creation myths—the transformative sunrise, the representation of the year as the life cycle of anthropomorphized nature, and the erection of an axis mundi.

This research documents specific patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the communal expression of Maya religious and cosmogonic themes. Along with other recent research, it demonstrates the survival of a basic Maya pattern—the world-creating vegetative renewal cycle—in the highland Maya cults of the saints and Jesucristo.

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Repossessing Shanland

Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred

Jane M. Ferguson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolution Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shan state that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual.

Based on close readings of Shan-language media and years of ethnographic research in a community of soldiers and their families, Jane M. Ferguson details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan in their own voices. She shows how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on identity formation, transformation, and how people understand and experience borderlands today.

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Represented Communities

Fiji and World Decolonization

John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.

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Representing Aztec Ritual

Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagun

Eloise Quiñones Keber

University Press of Colorado, 2020

Arriving in Mexico less than a decade after the Spanish conquest of 1521, the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún not only labored to supplant native religion with Christianity, he also gathered voluminous information on virtually every aspect of Aztec (Nahua) life in contact-period Mexico. His pioneering ethnographic work relied on interviews with Nahua elders and the assistance of a younger generation of bicultural, missionary-trained Nahuas. Sahagún's remarkably detailed descriptions of Aztec ceremonial life offer the most extensive account of a non-Western ritual system recorded before modern times.

Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún uses Sahagún's corpus as a starting point to focus on ritual performance, a key element in the functioning of the Aztec world. With topics ranging from the ritual use of sand and paper to the sacrifice of women, contributors explore how Aztec rites were represented in the images and texts of documents compiled under colonial rule and the implications of this European filter for our understanding of these ceremonies. Incorporating diverse disciplinary perspectives, contributors include Davíd Carrasco, Philip P. Arnold, Kay Read, H. B. Nicholson, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Guilhem Olivier, Doris Heyden, and Eloise Quiñones Keber.

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Representing Talent

Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies

Violaine Roussel

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Audiences love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but beyond the red carpet and behind the velvet curtain exists a legion of individuals who make showbiz work: agents. Whether literary, talent, or indie film, agents are behind the scenes brokering power, handling mediation, and doing the deal-making that keeps Hollywood spinning. In Representing Talent, Violaine Roussel explores the little-known but decisive work of agents, turning the spotlight on how they help produce popular culture.

The book takes readers behind the scenes to observe the day-to-day activities of agents, revealing their influence on artistic careers and the prospects of Hollywood’s forthcoming projects. Agents are crucial to understanding how creative and economic power are intertwined in Hollywood today. They play a key role in the process by which artistic worth and economic value are evaluated and attributed to people and projects. Roussel’s fieldwork examines what “having relationships” really means for agents, and how they perform the relationship work that’s at the heart of their professional existence and success. Representing Talent helps us to understand the players behind the definition of entertainment itself, as well as behind its current transformations.

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Repression, Exile, and Democracy

Uruguayan Culture

Saul Sosnowski and Louise B. Popkin, eds.

Duke University Press, 1992

Repression, Exile, and Democracy, translated from the Spanish, is the first work to examine the impact of dictatorship on Uruguyan culture. Some of Uruguay's best-known poets, writers of fiction, playwrights, literary critics and social scientists participate in this multidisciplinary study, analyzing how varying cultural expressions have been affected by conditions of censorship, exile and "insilio" (internal exile), torture, and death.
The first section provides a context for the volume, with its analyses of the historical, political, and social aspects of the Uruguayan experience. The following chapters explore various aspects of cultural production, including personal experiences of exile and imprisonment, popular music, censorship, literary criticism, return from exile, and the role that culture plays in redemocratization.
This book's appeal extends well beyond the study of Uruguay to scholars and students of the history and culture of other Latin American nations, as well as to fields of comparative literature and politics in general.

Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Alvarro Barros-Lémez, Lisa Block de Behar, Amanda Berenguer, Hiber Conteris, José Pedro Díaz, Eduardo Galeano, Edy Kaufman, Leo Masliah, Carina Perelli, Teresa Porzecanski, Juan Rial, Mauricio Rosencof, Jorge Ruffinelli, Saúl Sosonowski, Martin Weinstein, Ruben Yáñez

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Reproducing Inequities

Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti

Maternowska, M. Catherine

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Residents of Haiti-one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world-face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have sought to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning clinics, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) center in the heart of Cit Soleil. During its height of service in the 1980s and 1990s, the clinic boasted nineteen staff members, an array of modern contraceptives, an accessible location, and convenient hours-but very few clients.

Why did this initiative fail so spectacularly despite surveys finding that residents would like to have fewer children? Why don't poor women heed the message of family planning, when smaller families seem to be in their best interest? In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cit Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Medical anthropologists, she argues, have an important role to play in developing new action plans for better policy implementation. Ethnographic studies in desperate, dangerous locations provide essential data that can point the way to solutions for the dilemmas of contraception in poor communities worldwide.

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Reproduction, Globalization, and the State

New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives

Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control, HIV/AIDS, assisted reproductive technologies, paternity tests, sex work, and humanitarian assistance. The contributors address the methodological challenges of research on globalization, including ways of combining fine-grained ethnography with analyses of large-scale political, economic, and ideological forces. Their essays reveal complex interactions among global and state population policies and politics; public health, human rights, and feminist movements; diverse medical systems; various religious practices, doctrines, and institutions; and intimate relationships and individual aspirations.

Contributors. Aditya Bharadwaj, Caroline H. Bledsoe, Carole H. Browner, Junjie Chen, Aimee R. Eden, Susan L. Erikson, Didier Fassin, Claudia Lee Williams Fonseca, Ellen Gruenbaum, Matthew Gutmann, Marcia C. Inhorn, Mark B. Padilla, Rayna Rapp, Lisa Ann Richey, Carolyn Sargent, Papa Sow, Cecilia Van Hollen, Linda Whiteford

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The Republic of Therapy

Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS

Vinh-Kim Nguyen

Duke University Press, 2010

The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to “break the silence” and “put a face to the epidemic,” international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.

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The Republic Unsettled

Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism

Mayanthi L. Fernando

Duke University Press, 2014

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.

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Rereading Cultural Anthropology

George E. Marcus, ed.

Duke University Press, 1992

During its first six years (1986–1991), the journal Cultural Anthropology provided a unique forum for registering the lively traffic between anthropology and the emergent arena of cultural studies. The nineteen essays collected in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, all of which originally appeared in the journal, capture the range of approaches, internal critiques, and new questions that have characterized the study of anthropology in the 1980s, and which set the agenda for the present.
Drawing together work by both younger and well-established scholars, this volume reveals various influences in the remaking of traditions of ethnographic work in anthropology; feminist studies, poststructuralism, cultural critiques, and disciplinary challenges to established boundaries between the social sciences and humanities. Moving from critiques of anthropological representation and practices to modes of political awareness and experiments in writing, this collection offers systematic access to what is now understood to be a fundamental shift (still ongoing) in anthropology toward engagement with the broader interdisciplinary stream of cultural studies.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Keith H. Basso, David B. Coplan, Vincent Crapanzano, Faye Ginsburg, George E. Marcus, Enrique Mayer, Fred Meyers, Alcida R. Ramos, John Russell, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Melford E. Spiro, Ted Swedenburg, Michael Taussig, Julie Taylor, Robert Thornton, Stephen A. Tyler, Geoffrey M. White

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1: Spring 1981

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 10: Autumn 1985

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 11: Spring 1986

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 12: Autumn 1986

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 13: Spring 1987

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 14: Autumn 1987

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 15: Spring 1988

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 16: Autumn 1988

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 17 & 18: Spring/Autumn 1989

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2: Autumn 1981

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 29 & 30: Spring/Autumn 1996: The Pre-Columbian

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31: Spring 1997: The Abject

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 32: Autumn 1997: Tradition, Translation, Treason

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 33: Spring 1998: Pre-Columbian States of Being

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 34: Autumn 1998: Architecture

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 35: Spring 1999: Intercultural China

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36: Autumn 1999: Factura

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 37: Spring 2000

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 38: Autumn 2000

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39: Spring 2001: African Works

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 40: Autumn 2001: Desedimenting Time

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 41: Spring 2002

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 42: Autumn 2002: West by Nonwest

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 43: Spring 2003: Islamic Arts

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2003

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 44: Autumn 2003

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 45: Spring 2004

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46: Autumn 2004: Polemical Objects

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 47: Spring 2005

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2005

The contents of this issue are: Editorial, "Socrates' death," by Remo Guidieri; "Antimasque, Pageant: Restoration and Bethlem at Moorfields," by Christine Stevenson; "Picturing Madness in 1905: Giacomo Balla's La Pazza and the cycle The Living," by Christine Poggi; "Quoting Eros: Visual culture, irony and anachronism in Thomas Mann," by Filippo Fimiani; "Cosmos and warfare on a Classic Maya vase," by Oswaldo Chinchilla; "Women and political power: The inclusion and exclusion of noblewomen in Aztec pictorial histories," by Lori Boornazian Diel; "Ancestors and commemoration in Igbo Odo masquerades," by Benjamin Hufbauer and Bess Reed; "Style and the standardization of forms in certain arts of the Sepik," by Romain Chambrin; "The modality of time-maps: Quilting in the Pacific from another point of view," by Susanne Kuechler; Lectures, Documents and Discussions: "Slit drums on Atchin;" an unpublished manuscript by John Layard, edited and with an introduction by Haidy Geismar; "Style and meaning: Abelam art through Yolngu eyes," The 1998 Anthony Forge Lecture, by Howard Morphy; "Vodou in the age of mechanical reproduction," by Donald Cosentino; and "Heterosomatics: Remarks of an historian of women's bodies," by Barbara Duden.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 48: Autumn 2005: Permanent/Impermanent

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2005

The contents of this issue are: “Between Creation and Destruction,” by Finbarr Barry Flood and Zoë Sara Strother; “People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern Nigeria,” by Sarah Adams; “Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa,” by Kristina Van Dyke; “Censorship and Iconoclasm—Unsettling Monuments,” by John Peffer; “Recycling Icons and Bodies in Chinese Anti-Buddhist Persecutions,” by Eric Reinders; “Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture,” by Bryan R. Just; “Roman Oscilla: An Assessment,” by Rabun Taylor; “Turning Tale into Vision: Time and Image in the Divina Commedia,” by Gervase Rosser; “Building outside Time in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria,” by Marvin Trachtenberg; and “Restoration as Re-creation at the Sainte-Chapelle,” by Meredith Cohen; and the documents and discussions “The Constitution of Pleasure: François-Joseph Belanger and the Chateau de Bagatelle,” by Taha Al-Douri; “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” by Mauro Carbone; “Diskotel 1967: Israel and the Western Wall in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” by Daniel Bertrand Monk; “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” by Cuauhtémoc Medina; and “Aby Warburg in America Again: With an Edition of His Unpublished Correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927–1928),” by Davide Stimilli.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49/50: Spring/Autumn 2006

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2006

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetic is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 5: Spring 1983

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 51: Spring 2007

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2007

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Volume 51 includes articles by Michael W. Meister, Michele Matteini, Ladislav Kesner, Yukio Lippit, Xavier Urcid, Anna Anquissola, Bissera Pentcheva, Friedrich T. Bach, Daniel Sherer, Noga Arikha, Erika Naginski, Haim Finkelstein, Nuit Banai, Laura Ilea, and Remo Guidieri.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 52: Fall 2007

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2007

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54: Spring and Autumn 2008

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2008

This double volume includes: The value of forgery, Jonathan Hay; Affective operations of art and literature, Ernst van Alphen; Betty’s Turn, Stephen Melville; Richard Serra in Germany, Magdalena Nieslony; Beheadings and massacres, Federico Navarrete; Pliny the Elder and the identity of Roman art, Francesco de Angelis; Between nature and artifice, Francesca Dell’Acqua; Narrative cartographies, Gerald Guest; The artist and the icon, Alexander Nagel; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; Portable ruins, Alina Payne; Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its archi-text, Nebahat Avcioglu; The iconicity of Islamic calligraphy in Turkey, Irvin Cemil Schick; The Buddha’s house, Kazi Khalid Ashraf; A flash of recognition into how not to be governed, Natasha Eaton; Hasegawa’s fairy tales, Christine Guth; The paradox of the ethnographic-superaltern, Anna Brzyski, and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Karen Kurczyncki, Mary Dumett, Emmanuel Alloa, Francesco Pellizzi, and Boris Groys.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56: Absconding

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2009

This volume includes the editorial “The absconded subject of Pop,” by Thomas Crow; “Enlivening the soul in Chinese tombs,” by Wu Hung; “On the ‘true body’ of Huineng,” by Michele Matteini; “Apparition painting,” by Yukio Lippit; “Immanence out of sight,” by Joyce Cheng; “Absconding in plain sight,” by Roberta Bonetti; “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” by Megan E. O’Neil; “Style and substance, or why the Cacaxtla paintings were buried,” by Claudia Brittenham; “The Parthenon frieze,” by Clemente Marconi; “Roma sotterranea and the biogenesis of New Jerusalem,” by Irina Oryshkevich; “Out of sight, yet still in place,” by Minou Schraven; “Behind closed doors,” by Melissa R. Katz; “Moving eyes,” by Bissera V. Pentcheva; “‘A secret kind of charm not to be expressed or discerned,’” by Rebecca Zorach; “Ivory towers,” by Richard Taws; “Boxed in,” by Miranda Lash; “A concrete experience of nothing,” by William S. Smith; “Believing in art,” by Irene V. Small; “Repositories of the unconditional,” by Gabriele Guercio; “From micro/macrocosm to the aesthetics of ruins and waste-bodies,” by Jeanette Zwingenberger; “Are shadows transparent?” by Roberto Casati; “Invisibility of the digital,” by Boris Groys; “Des formes et des catégories,” by Remo Guidieri; and “Further comments on ‘Absconding,’” by Francesco Pellizzi.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 57/58: Spring/Autumn 2010

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2010

This double volume of the renowned international journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics includes “Aesthetics’ non-recyclable ground” by Félix Duque; “Seeing through dead eyes” by Jonathan Hay; “The hidden aesthetic of red in the painted tombs of Oaxaca” by Diana Magaloni; “A consideration of the quatrefoil motif in Preclassic Mesoamerica” by Julia Guernsey; “Hunters, Sufis, soldiers, and minstrels” by Cynthia Becker; “Figures fidjiennes” by Marc Rochette; “A sacred landscape” by Rachel Kousser; “Military architecture as a political tool in the Renaissance” by Francesco Benelli; “The icon as performer and as performative utterance” by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; “Image and site” by Jas’ Elsner; “Untimely objects” by Ara H. Merjian; “Max Ernst in Arizona” by Samantha Kavky; “Form as revolt” by Sebastian Zeidler; “Embodiments and art beliefs” by Filippo Fimiani; “The theft of the goddess Amba Mata” by Deborah Stein; and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Gottfried Semper, Spyros Papapetros, Erwin Panofsky, Megan R. Luke, Francesco Paolo Adorno, and Remo Guidieri.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 59/60: Spring/Autumn 2011

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2011

RES 59/60 includes “The making of architectural types” by Joseph Rykwert; “Traces of the sun and Inka kinetics” by Tom Cummins and Bruce Mannheim; “Inka water management and display fountains” by Carolyn Dean; “Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas” by Lisa Trever; “Peruvian nature up close” by Daniela Bleichmar; and other papers.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 6: Autumn 1983

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 61/62: Spring/Autumn 2012: Sarcophagi

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2013

Res 61/62, Sarcophagi, is guest edited by Wu Hung and Jas Elsner. It includes “Chinese coffins from the first millennium b.c. and early images of the afterworld” by Alain Thote; “Art and personhood” by Björn Ewald; “Western Han sarcophagi and the transformation of Chinese funerary art” by Zheng Yan; “Reading identity on Roman strigillated sarcophagi” by Janet Huskinson; “‘A Tomb Both Great and Blameless’” by Richard Neer; “Funerary Spatiality” by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng; “‘Nero’s Tomb’ and the crisis of the third century” by Edmund Thomas; “Jouissance of death?” by Eugene Wang; “Reading images without texts on Roman sarcophagi” by Paul Zanker; “Decorative imperatives between concealment and display” by Jas Elsner; “Han sarcophagi” by Wu Hung; “Framing the dead on Roman sarcophagi” by Verity Platt; “Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology” by Finbarr Barry Flood; “Death panels” by T. J. Clark; and contributions to Documents and Discussions by Andrew Scherer and Roberta Bonetti. Also included are contributions to Lectures—Color by Alexandre Tokovinine, Cameron L. McNeil, Timothy W. Pugh and Leslie G. Cecil, Leonardo Lopez Lujàn, Douglas K. Charles, and Warren R. DeBoer.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 63/64: Spring/Autumn 2013: Wet/Dry

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2013

RES 63/64, Wet/Dry, includes "Source and trace" by Christopher S. Wood; "Climatic variability and pictorial oscillation" by Whitney Davis; "Timelessness, fluidity, and Apollo's libation" by Milette Gaifman; "A liquid history: Blood and animation in late medieval art" by Beate Fricke; "Drawing blood" by Anne Dunlop; "Guercino's 'wet' drawing" by Nicola Suthor; "Volcano equals head equals kiln equals phallus: Connecting Gauguin's metaphors of the creative act" by Dario Gamboni; "On sources: Mythical and historical thinking in fin-de-siècle Vienna" by Mario Wimmer; "A Neolithic childhood: Children's drawings as prehistoric sources" by Barbara Wittmann; "The form of the indistinct: Picasso and the rise of generic creativity" by Gabriele Guercio; "Source and trace in Walter Benjamin's thought: About a polarity" by Chiara Cappelletto; "Modern architecture and prehistory: Retracing The Eternal Present" by Spyros Papapetros; and "The readymade metabolized: Fluxus in life" by David Joselit. Contributors to Lectures, Documents, and Discussions include Remo Guidieri; Félix Duque; Marvin Trachtenberg; Frank Fehrenbach; Alexander Nemerov; Robert Smithson and Alexander Nagel; Francesco Pellizzi; Jörg Trempler; Aurélie Verdier; Anna Begicheva and Natasha Kurchanova; and D. Graham Burnett, Jac Mullen, and Sal Randolph.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 65/66: 2014/2015

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2015

This 35th anniversary issue includes Francesco Pellizzi, “Editorial: RES at 35”; Remo Bodei, “A constellation of words”; Stephen Houston, Barbara Fash, and David Stuart, “Masterful hands”; Mary Weismantel, “Encounters with dragons”; Guilhem Olivier, “Why give birth to enemies?”; Élodie Dupey García, “The materiality of color in the body ornamentation of Aztec gods”; Cristina Cruz González, “Crucifixion piety in New Mexico”; Duncan Caldwell, “A new ordering of Adena tablets based on a deeper reading of the McKensie Tablet”; Z. S. Strother, “A terrifying mimesis”; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Franchising minkisi in Loango”; Lisa Homann, “Alluring obscurity”; Clemente Marconi, “Pausanias and the figural decoration of Greek sacred architecture”; Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The aesthetics of landscape and icon at Sinai”; Paroma Chatterjee, “The gifts of the Gorgon”; Achim Timmermann, “Vain labor(?)”; Karen Overbey, “Seeing through stone”; Juan José Lahuerta, “The crucifixions of Velázquez and Zurbarán”; Noam Andrews, “The space of knowledge”; Katrin Seyler, “Heritage and artisanal empathy in the Republic of Tools”; Ines G. Županov, “The pulpit trap”; Edward Vazquez, “Antimatter”; Bret Rothstein, “Visual difficulty as a cultural system”; and contributions by Alessandra Russo, Éric Michaud, Maria H. Loh, and Ara H. Merjian; and the essay “Adieux aux armes,” by Remo Guidieri.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 7 & 8: Spring/Autumn 1984

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9: Spring 1985

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 75-76 number 1 (2021)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This is volume 75-76 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 77-78 number 1 (2022)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

This is volume 77-78 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 79-80 number 1 (2023)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

This is volume 79-80 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Rescued from the Nation

Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World

Steven Kemper

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Anagarika Dharmapala is one of the most galvanizing figures in Sri Lanka’s recent turbulent history. He is widely regarded as the nationalist hero who saved the Sinhala people from cultural collapse and whose “protestant” reformation of Buddhism drove monks toward increased political involvement and ethnic confrontation. Yet as tied to Sri Lankan nationalism as Dharmapala is in popular memory, he spent the vast majority of his life abroad, engaging other concerns. In Rescued from the Nation, Steven Kemper reevaluates this important figure in the light of an unprecedented number of his writings, ones that paint a picture not of a nationalist zealot but of a spiritual seeker earnest in his pursuit of salvation.

Drawing on huge stores of source materials—nearly one hundred diaries and notebooks—Kemper reconfigures Dharmapala as a world-renouncer first and a political activist second. Following Dharmapala on his travels between East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, he traces his lifelong project of creating a unified Buddhist world, recovering the place of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, and imitating the Buddha’s life course. The result is a needed corrective to Dharmapala’s embattled legacy, one that resituates Sri Lanka’s political awakening within the religious one that was Dharmapala’s life project.

[more]

Research, Education and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center

Susan C. Ryan

University Press of Colorado, 2023

This volume celebrates and examines the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s past, present, and future by providing a backdrop for the not-for-profit’s beginnings and highlighting key accomplishments in research, education, and American Indian initiatives over the past four decades. Specific themes include Crow Canyon’s contributions to projects focused on community and regional settlement patterns, human-environment relationships, public education pedagogy, and collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities. Contributing authors, deeply familiar with the center and its surrounding central Mesa Verde region, include Crow Canyon researchers, educators, and Indigenous scholars inspired by the organization’s mission to further develop and share knowledge of the human past for the betterment of societies.

Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center guides Southwestern archaeology and public education beyond current practices—particularly regarding Indigenous partnerships—and provides a strategic handbook for readers into and through the mid-twenty-first century.

Open access edition supported by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center King Family Fund and subvention supported in part by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society.

[more]

Researches Into the Physical History of Man

James Cowles Prichard

University of Chicago Press, 1973

Originally published in 1813, James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man was perhaps the most important anthropological work in English of the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century. Attacking the heterodox speculations of "polygenist" writers, Prichard defended the biblically based argument that all mankind was one species. He advanced interesting hypotheses concerning the processes of racial differentiation, and suggested the then daring possibility that the original men were black-skinned.

In his extensive introductory essay, "From Chronology to Ethnology: Prichard and British Anthropology, 1800-1850," George W. Stocking, Jr., uses Prichard's career to illuminate this previously neglected period—the "dark age" between the Victorian evolutionists and their eighteenth-century Scottish precursors. Focusing on the heritage of Christian chronological writing as a source of nineteenth-century anthropological speculation, Professor Stocking shows how Prichard's work gradually transformed this tradition into "ethnology."

Prichard's central problem was to trace to a single source all the races of men from the earliest historical records to the dispersion of mankind after the Deluge. It was in the attempt to solve this "ethnological problem" that the "embracive" tradition of late nineteenth-century English and American anthropology had its roots. As Prichard's work illustrates, every type of evidence—linguistic, cultural, and physical—was brought forth to establish affinities between different human groups.

Expanded in subsequent editions to five volumes, Prichard's Researches was to remain the major compendium of ethnological knowledge in the English language until the second half of the nineteenth century. The present reprinting of the 1813 edition in its entirety should help to reestablish Prichard's reputation as one of the "fathers" of anthropology.

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Researching American Culture

A Guide for Student Anthropologists

Conrad Phillip Kottak, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1982

Conducting original fieldwork is a science and an art. Anthropology students can easily get an A in Aborigines without ever understanding their own tribal behavior. American culture, like all others, has its share of ritual and myths, ranging from singles bars to sports events. This volume guides undergraduate students to correct scientific methods and successful personal approaches in their work.

Researching American Culture covers the universe of ethnography: the researcher’s role, interviewing, questionnaire construction, ethics, coping with the limitations of time and space. Guides for researchers, original research papers by undergraduates, and essays by professional anthropologists are all included. By applying anthropological techniques to today’’s behavior, students learn to be objective about their own culture and skeptical about practices rarely questioned.

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Reshaping Ethnic Relations

Immigrants in a Divided City

Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider

Temple University Press, 1994

What happens when people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds come together to live and work in the same neighborhood? Unlike other examinations of this question that focus on one group, this book looks at the interaction of both old and new immigrant populations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods.

In this ethnographic study, which is a result of the Ford Foundation-funded Changing Relations: Newcomers and Established Residents in Philadelphia Project, the authors consider five primary groups—whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, and Eastern Europeans—in Olney, Kensington, and Port Richmond. Focusing on the interaction of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in schools, organized community celebrations and social events, the workplace, shopping areas, and neighborhood politics, the authors show that the contradictions of individual beliefs, actions, and strategies of power are not easily resolved.

By examining the local, citywide, and national economy and government, previous human relations efforts, changing immigration patterns, community-level power structures, real estate turnover, and gentrification, the authors evaluate current strategies to create harmony in communities with an ever-changing mix of established residents and newly arrived immigrants. Through their findings, Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider develop better alternatives that will encourage understanding and cooperation among different racial and ethnic groups sharing their lives and neighborhoods.

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Reshaping the World

Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies

Ana Díaz

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Reshaping the World is a nuanced exploration of the plurality, complexity, and adaptability of Precolumbian and colonial-era Mesoamerican cosmological models and the ways in which anthropologists and historians have used colonial and indigenous texts to understand these models in the past. Since the early twentieth century, it has been popularly accepted that the Precolumbian Mesoamerican cosmological model comprised nine fixed layers of underworld and thirteen fixed layers of heavens. This layered model, which bears a close structural resemblance to a number of Eurasian cosmological models, derived in large part from scholars’ reliance on colonial texts, such as the post–Spanish Conquest Codex Vaticanus A and Florentine Codex.

By reanalyzing and recontextualizing both indigenous and colonial texts and imagery in nine case studies examining Maya, Zapotec, Nahua, and Huichol cultures, the contributors discuss and challenge the commonly accepted notion that the cosmos was a static structure of superimposed levels unrelated to and unaffected by historical events and human actions. Instead, Mesoamerican cosmology consisted of a multitude of cosmographic repertoires that operated simultaneously as a result of historical circumstances and regional variations. These spaces were, and are, dynamic elements shaped, defined, and redefined throughout the course of human history. Indigenous cosmographies could be subdivided and organized in complex and diverse arrangements—as components in a dynamic interplay, which cannot be adequately understood if the cosmological discourse is reduced to a superposition of nine and thirteen levels.

Unlike previous studies, which focus on the reconstruction of a pan-Mesoamerican cosmological model, Reshaping the World shows how the movement of people, ideas, and objects in New Spain and neighboring regions produced a deep reconfiguration of Prehispanic cosmological and social structures, enriching them with new conceptions of space and time. The volume exposes the reciprocal influences of Mesoamerican and European theologies during the colonial era, offering expansive new ways of understanding Mesoamerican models of the cosmos.

Contributors:
Sergio Botta, Ana Díaz, Kerry Hull, Katarzyna Mikulska, Johannes Neurath, Jesper Nielsen, Toke Sellner Reunert†, David Tavárez, Alexander Tokovinine, Gabrielle Vail

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Resilience and the Localisation of Trauma in Aceh, Indonesia

Catherine Smith

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

Aceh is a region that is no stranger to violent conflict and tragedy. This special territory of Indonesia has faced occupation, fallen into civil war, and was brutalized by the deadly 2004 tsunami. While these forces have altered the lives of the Aceh people, their very experiences of suffering and recovery have changed thanks to the globalization of psychiatry.

In this book, Catherine Smith examines the global reach of the contested, yet compelling, concept of trauma. She explores how what is considered “trauma” has expanded well beyond the bounds of therapeutic practice to become a powerful cultural idiom shaping the ways people understand the effects of violence and imagine possible responses to suffering. In Aceh, conflict survivors have incorporated the ideas of trauma into their local languages, healing practices, and political imaginaries. The appearance of this idiom of distress into the Acehnese medical-moral landscape provides an ethnographic perspective on suffering and recovery, and contributes to our contemporary debates about the international reach of psychiatry and the cultural consequences as it spreads beyond the domain of medicine.

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Resisting State Violence

Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture

Joy James

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Resisting Work

The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents

Peter Fleming

Temple University Press, 2015

A job is no longer something we "do," but instead something we "are." As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday.

In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power-biopower-where "life itself" is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes--from our consumer tastes, "downtime," and sexuality--into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor.

Fleming then suggests that the corporation turns to communal life-what he calls "the common"-in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.

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Resonance

Beyond the Words

Unni Wikan

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Resonance gathers together forty years of anthropological study by a researcher and writer with one of the broadest fieldwork résumés in anthropology: Unni Wikan. In its twelve essays—four of which are brand new—Resonance covers encounters with transvestites in Oman, childbirth in Bhutan, poverty in Cairo, and honor killings in Scandinavia, with visits to several other locales and subjects in between. Including a comprehensive preface and introduction that brings the whole work into focus, Resonance surveys an astonishing career of anthropological inquiry that demonstrates the possibility for a common humanity, a way of knowing others on their own terms.

Deploying Clifford Geertz’s concept of “experience-near” observations —and driven by an ambition to work beyond Geertz’s own limitations—Wikan strives for an anthropology that sees, describes, and understands the human condition in the models and concepts of the people being observed. She highlights the fundamentals of an explicitly comparative, person-centered, and empathic approach to fieldwork, pushing anthropology to shift from the specialist discourses of academic experts to a grasp of what the Balinese call keneh— the heart, thought, and feeling of the real people of the world. By deploying this strategy across such a range of sites and communities, she provides a powerful argument that ever-deeper insight can be attained despite our differences.

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The Resonance of Unseen Things

Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny

Susan Lepselter

University of Michigan Press, 2016

The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory.

“We really don’t have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author’s semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University

“Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood.”
—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

“An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West.”
—Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan

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Resource Radicals

From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador

Thea Riofrancos

Duke University Press, 2020

In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.

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The Restless Anthropologist

New Fieldsites, New Visions

Edited by Alma Gottlieb

University of Chicago Press, 2012

What does a move from a village in the West African rain forest to a West African community in a European city entail? What about a shift from a Greek sheep-herding community to working with evictees and housing activists in Rome and Bangkok? In The Restless Anthropologist, Alma Gottlieb brings together eight eminent scholars to recount the riveting personal and intellectual dynamics of uprooting one’s life—and decades of work—to embrace a new fieldsite.

Addressing questions of life-course, research methods, institutional support, professional networks, ethnographic models, and disciplinary paradigm shifts, the contributing writers of The Restless Anthropologist discuss the ways their earlier and later projects compare on both scholarly and personal levels, describing the circumstances of their choices and the motivations that have emboldened them to proceed, to become novices all over again. In doing so, they question some of the central expectations of their discipline, reimagining the space of the anthropological fieldsite at the heart of their scholarly lives.

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Retelling Trickster in Naapi's Language

Nimachia Howe

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language is an examination of Nitsitapiisinni (Blackfoot) origin stories about one of the most powerful and unpredictable of the early creators in Niitsitapii consciousness and chronology: Naapi. Through in-depth linguistic analysis, Nimachia Howe reinterprets the earliest references to Naapi, offering a more authentic understanding of his identity and of the meanings and functions of the stories in which he appears.

Naapi is commonly and inaccurately categorized by Western scholars as a trickster figure. Research on him is rife with misnomers and repeated misinterpretations, many resulting from untranslatable terms and concepts, comparisons with the binary tenets of “good” vs. “bad,” and efforts by Niitsitapii storytellers to protect the stories. The five stories included in their entirety in this volume present Naapi’s established models of reciprocity, connection, kinship, reincarnation, and offerings, shown in descriptions of, and predictions for, the balance between life and death, the rising and setting of planets, wind directions and forces, and the cyclical nature of animals, birds, plants, glaciers, and rivers.

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language will be of interest to students and scholars of Native American studies, ethnography, folklore, environmental philosophy, and Indigenous language, literature, and religion.

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RETHINKING HISTORY

Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past

Edited by Jonathan D. Hill

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Rethinking History and Myth explores narrative and ritual expressions of mythic and historical modes of consciousness among indigenous peoples of the Andean, Amazonian, and intermediate lowland regions of South America. Focusing on indigenous perspectives of South American interaction with Western colonial and national societies, the authors trace the interrelationships between myth and history to demonstrate how these peoples have developed a dynamic interpretive framework that enables them to understand their past.

Examining specific cultural and linguistic traditions that shape the social consciousness of native South Americans, the authors show that historical and mythic consciousness work together in forming new symbolic strategies that allow indigenous peoples to understand their societies as at least partially autonomous groups within national and global power structures. This complex process is used to interpret the history of interethnic relations, allowing both individuals and groups to change themselves and alter their own circumstances.

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Rethinking Japan's Modernity

Stories and Translations

M. William Steele

Harvard University Press, 2024

History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future.

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Rethinking Pastoralism In Africa

Gender, Culture, and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist

Dorothy L. Hodgson

Ohio University Press, 2001

The dominant trend in pastoralist studies has long assumed that pastoralism and pastoral gender relations are inherently patriarchal. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, use diverse analytic approaches to demonstrate that pastoralist gender relations are dynamic, relational, historical, and produced through complex local-translocal interactions. Combining theoretically sophisticated analysis with detailed case studies, this collection will appeal to those doing research and teaching in African studies, gender studies, anthropology, and history. Among the topics discussed are pastoralism, patriarchy, and history among Maasai in Tanganyika; women’s roles in peacemaking in Somali society; the fertility of houses and herds; gender, aging, and postchildbearing experience in a Tuareg community; and milk selling among Fulani women in Northern Burkina Faso.

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Rethinking Sustainability

Power, Knowledge, and Institutions

Jonathan Harris, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Bringing together the thoughts of economists, political scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and agricultural policy professionals, this volume focuses on the issues of sustainability in development. Examining such topics as international trade, political power, gender roles, legal institutions, and agricultural research, the contributors focus on the missing links in theory and practice that have been barriers to the achievement of truly sustainable development.
Any theory of sustainable development must take into account economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Until recently, the question "What is development?" was often answered predominantly from the economist's perspective, with high priority being assigned to expansion of economic output. Social, political, institutional, and ethical aspects have often been neglected. But now that sustainable development has become a broadly accepted concept, it is impossible to maintain a narrowly economistic view of development. For this reason, the varied perspectives offered by the contributors to this volume are crucial to understanding the process of development as it relates to environmental sustainability and human well-being.
The selection of articles is meant to be stimulating and provocative rather than comp-rehensive. They are roughly divided between those dealing with broad theoretical issues concerning the economic, political, and social aspects of development (Part I) and those presenting more applied analysis (Part II). The common thread is a concern for examining which factors contribute to making development socially just and environmentally sound.
Rethinking Sustainability will be of interest to economists and social scientists, development professionals, and instructors seeking to offer their students a broad perspective on development issues.
Jonathan Harris is Senior Research Associate, Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of International Economics at Tufts University Fletcher School of Law.

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Rethinking the Aztec Economy

Edited by Deborah L. Nichols, Frances F. Berdan, and Michael E. Smith

University of Arizona Press, 2017

With its rich archaeological and historical record, the Aztec empire provides an intriguing opportunity to understand the dynamics and structure of early states and empires. Rethinking the Aztec Economy brings together leading scholars from multiple disciplines to thoroughly synthesize and examine the nature of goods and their movements across rural and urban landscapes in Mesoamerica. In so doing, they provide a new way of understanding society and economy in the Aztec empire.

The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 synthesizes our current understanding of the Aztec economy and singles out the topics of urbanism and provincial merchant activity for more detailed analysis. Part 2 brings new data and a new conceptual approach that applies insights from behavioral economics to Nahua and Aztec rituals and social objects. Contributors also discuss how high-value luxury goods, such as feather art, provide insights about both economic and sacred concepts of value in Aztec society. Part 3 reexamines the economy at the Aztec periphery. The volume concludes with a synthesis on the scale, integration, and nature of change in the Aztec imperial economy.

Rethinking the Aztec Economy illustrates how superficially different kinds of social contexts were in fact integrated into a single society through the processes of a single economy. Using the world of goods as a crucial entry point, this volume advances scholarly understanding of life in the Aztec world.

Contributors:

Frances F. Berdan
Laura Filloy Nadal
Janine Gasco
Colin Hirth
Kenneth G. Hirth
Sarah Imfeld
María Olvido Moreno Guzmán
Deborah L. Nichols
Alan R. Sandstrom
Pamela Effrein Sandstrom
Michael E. Smith
Barbara L. Stark
Emily Umberger

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Retracing Inca Steps

Adventures in Andean Ethnoarchaeology

Dean E. Arnold

University of Utah Press, 2021

Dean Arnold takes readers on a journey into the Andes, recounting the adventures of his 1960s research in the village of Quinua, Peru. Arnold’s quest to understand how contemporary pottery production reflected current Quinua society as well as its ancient Inca and pre-Inca past is one of the earliest studies in what later became known as ethnoarchaeology.

This first-person narrative reveals the challenges of living and working in another culture and the many obstacles one can encounter while doing field research. Arnold shares how his feelings of frustration and perceived failure led him to refocus his project, a shift that ultimately led to an entirely new perspective on pottery production in the Andes. Masterfully weaving details about Peru’s geography, ecology, history, prehistory, and culture into his story, he chronicles his change from small-town Midwesterner to a person of much broader vision, newly aware of his North American views and values.

Retracing Inca Steps is an excellent read for the lay person wishing to learn about the environment, prehistory, history, and culture of Peru as well as for students wanting to know more about the joys and rigors of fieldwork.

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Return from the World

Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil

Gregory Duff Morton

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An anthropologist’s investigation of why some Brazilians choose to leave behind a booming economy and return to their villages.

In Return from the World, anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton traces the migrations of Brazilian workers who leave a thriving labor market and return to their home villages to become peasant farmers. Morton seeks to understand what it means to turn one’s back deliberately on the promise of economic growth.

Giving up their positions in factories, at construction sites, and as domestic workers, these migrants travel thousands of miles back to villages without running water or dependable power. There, many take up subsistence farming. Some become activists with the MST, Brazil’s militant movement of landless peasants. Bringing their stories vividly to life, Morton dives into the dreams and disputes at play in finding freedom in the shared rejection of growth.

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Return

Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia

Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota, eds.

Duke University Press, 2013

Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the changing relations between nation-states and transnational mobility. Taking into account illegally trafficked migrants, deportees, temporary laborers on short-term contracts, and highly skilled émigrés, the contributors argue that the figure of the returnee energizes and redefines nationalism in an era of increasingly fluid and indeterminate national sovereignty. They acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and instability of reverse migration, while emphasizing its discursive, policy, and political significance at a moment when the tensions between state power and transnational subjects are particularly visible. Taken together, the essays foreground Asia as a useful site for rethinking the intersections of migration, sovereignty, and nationalism.

Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh

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Return to Casablanca

Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist

André Levy

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In this book, Israeli anthropologist André Levy returns to his birthplace in Casablanca to provide a deeply nuanced and compelling study of the relationships between Moroccan Jews and Muslims there. Ranging over a century of history—from the Jewish Enlightenment and the impending colonialism of the late nineteenth century to today’s modern Arab state—Levy paints a rich portrait of two communities pressed together, of the tremendous mobility that has characterized the past century, and of the paradoxes that complicate the cultural identities of the present.

Levy visits a host of sites and historical figures to assemble a compelling history of social change, while seamlessly interweaving his study with personal accounts of his returns to his homeland. Central to this story is the massive migration of Jews out of Morocco. Levy traces the institutional and social changes such migrations cause for those who choose to stay, introducing the concept of “contraction” to depict the way Jews deal with the ramifications of their demographic dwindling. Turning his attention outward from Morocco, he goes on to explore the greater complexities of the Jewish diaspora and the essential paradox at the heart of his adventure—leaving Israel to return home.

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Return to Ixil

Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town

Mark Z. Christensen

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Return to Ixil is an examination of over 100 colonial-era Maya wills from the Yucatec town of Ixil, presented together and studied fully for the first time. These testaments make up the most significant corpus of Maya-language documents from the colonial period. Offering an unprecedented picture of material and spiritual life in Ixil from 1738 to 1779, they are rare and rich sources for the study of Maya culture and history.

Supplemented with additional archival research, the wills provide new and detailed descriptions of various aspects of life in eighteenth-century Ixil. In each chapter, authors Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall examine a different dimension of Ixil’s colonial history, including the role of notaries, Maya participation in a coastal militia, economy and modes of production, religious life and records, and the structures and patterns of familial relationships. These details offer insight into the complex network of societies in colonial Yucatan, colonial Mesoamerica, and colonial Latin America.

Including an appendix presenting the original Maya texts as well as translations by Christensen and Restall, Return to Ixil not only analyzes the largest body of substantive wills in any Mayan language known today but also provides a rare closeup view of the inner workings of a colonial Maya town and the communal and familial affairs that made up a large part of the Maya colonial experience. It will be of great interest to Mayanists as well as to students and scholars of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and social history.

The publication of this book is supported in part byBrigham Young University and Penn State University.

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Return to Nisa

Marjorie Shostak

Harvard University Press, 2000

The story of two women—one a hunter-gatherer in Botswana, the other an ailing American anthropologist—this powerful book returns the reader to territory that Marjorie Shostak wrote of so poignantly in the now classic Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Here, however, the ground has perceptibly shifted. First published in 1981, Nisa served as a stirring introduction to anthropology’s most basic question: Can there be true understanding between people of profoundly different cultures?Diagnosed with breast cancer, and troubled by a sense of work yet unfinished, Shostak returned to Botswana in 1989. This book tells simply and directly of her rediscovery of the !Kung people she had come to know years before—the aging, blunt, demanding Nisa, her stalwart husband Bo, understanding Kxoma, fragile Hwantla, and Royal, translator and guide. In Shostak’s words, we clearly see !Kung life, the dry grasslands, the healing dances, the threatening military presence. And we see Shostak herself, passionately curious, reporting the discomforts and confusion of fieldwork along with its fascination. By turns amused and frustrated, she describes the disappointments—and chastening lessons—that inevitably follow when anthropologists (like her younger self) romanticize the !Kung.Throughout, we observe a woman of threatened health but enormous vitality as she pursues the promise she once discovered in the !Kung people and, above all, in Nisa. At the core of the book is the remarkable relationship between these two women from different worlds. They are often caught off guard by the limits of their mutual understanding. Still, their determination to reach out to each other lingers in the reader’s mind long after the story ends—providing an eloquent response to questions that Nisa so memorably posed.

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A Return to Servitude

Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún

M. Bianet Castellanos

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancún, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved in the production of transnational capital but also forms an integral part of the state's modernization plan for rural, indigenous communities. Indeed, Maya migrants make up over a third of the city's population.

A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula, M. Bianet Castellanos examines how Cancún came to be equated with modernity, how this city has shaped the political economy of the peninsula, and how indigenous communities engage with this vision of contemporary life. More broadly, she demonstrates how indigenous communities experience, resist, and accommodate themselves to transnational capitalism.

Tourism and the social stratification that results from migration have created conflict among the Maya. At the same time, this work asserts, it is through engagement with modernity and its resources that they are able to maintain their sense of indigeneity and community.

[more]

A return to the village

community ethnographies and the study of Andean culture in retrospective

Edited by Francisco Ferreira and Billie Jean Isbell

University of London Press, 2016

This edited volume brings together several scholars who have produced outstanding ethnographies of Andean communities, mostly in Peru but also in neighbouring countries. These ethnographies were published between the 1970s and 2000s, following different theoretical and thematic approaches, and they often transcended the boundaries of case studies to become important reference works on key aspects of Andean culture: for example, the symbolism and ritual uses of coca in the case of Catherine J. Allen; agricultural rituals and internal social divisions in the case of Peter Gose; social organisation and kinship in the case of Billie Jean Isbell; the use of khipus and concepts of literacy in the case of Frank Salomon; and the management and ritual dimensions of water and irrigation in the case of Ricardo Valderrama and Carmen Escalante. In their chapters the authors revisit their original works in the light of contemporary anthropology, focusing on different academic and personal aspects of their ethnographies. For example, they explain how they chose the communities they worked in; the personal relations they established there during fieldwork; the kind of links they have maintained; and how these communities have changed over time. They also review their original methodological and theoretical approaches and findings, reassessing their validity and explaining how their views have evolved or changed since they originally conducted their fieldwork and published their studies. This book also offers a review of the evolution and role of community ethnographies in the context of Andean anthropology. These ethnographies had a significant influence between the 1940s and 1980s, when they could be roughly divided – following Olivia Harris – between ‘long-termist’ and ‘short-termist’ approaches, depending on predominant focuses on historical continuities or social change respectively. However, by the 1990s these works came to be widely considered as too limited and subjective in the context of wider academic changes, such as the emergence of postmodern trends, and reflective and literary turns in anthropology. Overall, the book aims to reflect on this evolution of community ethnographies in the Andes, and on their contribution to the study of Andean culture.

[more]

Returns

Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

James Clifford

Harvard University Press, 2013

Returns explores homecomings—the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world.

It was once widely assumed that native, or tribal, societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the work of destruction set in motion by culture contact and colonialism. But many aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization and progress. History, Clifford invites us to observe, is a multidirectional process, and the word “indigenous,” long associated with primitivism and localism, is taking on new, unexpected meanings.

In these probing and evocative essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are understood to be participants in a still-unfolding process of transformation. This involves ambivalent struggle, acting within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Returns to ancestral land, performances of heritage, and maintenance of diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called “traditional futures.” With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people today are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. The third in a series that includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), this volume continues Clifford’s signature exploration of late-twentieth-century intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

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The Returns of Fetishism

Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea

Charles de Brosses, Rosalind C. Morris, and Daniel H. Leonard

University of Chicago Press, 2017

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses’s term “fetishism” has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to “magic,” but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses’s term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy.

The product of de Brosses’s autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses’s work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Böhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.

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Revelations of Humanity

Anthropological Dimensions of Theological Controversies

Richard Schenk, OP

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Revelations of Humanity brings together essays into the history and actuality of how our searches for God and for our own humanity are interwoven. They argue that the revelation of God is possible only when accompanied by a revelation of what it means to be a human being. Revelation implies that the truth is not fully evident in either case. This quest is aided in many of the essays by a recollection of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. As opposed to simple memory, recollection implies that memory has been lost or become clouded, here by the misrepresentation of Thomas’ view of humanity’s relation to God as harmonistic, at best semi-Pelagian, often even naturalistic. This difficult recovery is made possible by historical research that alone can escape the easy systematic alienation that supporters and critics of Thomas have often brought to their interpretation of his works. Thomas’s sense of a real but finite capacity of human beings for God, his grace and revelation, anticipates in more ways than is commonly known much of contemporary suspicion about human capacities, but in ways that are open to God. That programmatic insight into the historical Thomas, keenly aware of human entanglements, limits and hopes, offers on many contemporary issues a ressourcement of systematic thought. Revelations of Humanity revolves around three clusters of issues. The first asks about the reality and limits of the human capacity for truth: in metaphysical, moral and political matters and in relation to the disputed issues of analogous reason and faith. The second cluster is structured around the four involvements that the Second Vatican Council identified as the human face of genuine Christian existence: participation in the legitimate joys, hopes, sorrows and fears of the contemporary world. These are refracted in the broken light of the human proprium of risibility, the abiding uncertainty addressed by hope, the disputed question of a suffering God and the recollection of Christ’s anxiety in the face of death. The final cluster brings together anthropological dimensions of current ecumenical and interreligious disputes: the need to complement affirmation with admonition in ecumenical conversation, exemplified by the ambivalence towards sacrifice in a genuinely Catholic theology and the need to avoid the excesses of univocity, equivocity or an all too facile analogy in the determination of interreligious relationalities.

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Reversed Gaze

An African Ethnography of American Anthropology

Mwenda Ntarangwi

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Deftly illustrating how life circumstances can influence ethnographic fieldwork, Mwenda Ntarangwi focuses on his experiences as a Kenyan anthropology student and professional anthropologist practicing in the United States and Africa. Whereas Western anthropologists often study non-Western cultures, Mwenda Ntarangwi reverses these common roles and studies the Western culture of anthropology from an outsider's viewpoint while considering larger debates about race, class, power, and the representation of the "other." Tracing his own immersion into American anthropology, Ntarangwi identifies textbooks, ethnographies, coursework, professional meetings, and feedback from colleagues and mentors that were key to his development.

Reversed Gaze enters into a growing anthropological conversation on representation and self-reflexivity that ethnographers have come to regard as standard anthropological practice, opening up new dialogues in the field by allowing anthropologists to see the role played by subjective positions in shaping knowledge production and consumption. Recognizing the cultural and racial biases that shape anthropological study, this book reveals the potential for diverse participation and more democratic decision making in the identity and process of the profession.

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Reversing the Gaze

What If the Other Were You?

Geneviève Makaping

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Tired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other. Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses.

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Revisioning Italy

National Identity and Global Culture

Beverly Allen

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Explores Italian national identity.

More than any other nation, Italy—from its imperial past to its subordinate present, from its colonial forays to its splendid isolation—embodies the myriad and contradictory historical forms of nationhood. This volume covers a range of subjects drawn from Italy and abroad to study the historical and contemporary formations of Italian national identity. In doing so, the work illuminates Italy past and present as well as the local and global dimensions of national identity in general.

Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, these essays reveal how cultural identity is constructed and manipulated-an issue made urgent by the influx of African, Indochinese, and Eastern European immigrants into Italy today. Exile, nationalism, and imagined communities are the topics of several essays, including Antonio Negri’s reflection on his own experience of political militancy and exile. Others focus on Italy’s colonial “unconscious,” Mussolini’s adventures in North Africa, and racism from the late nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing Italy’s European and Mediterranean identities, its highly regional character, its north-south economic imbalance, and its ethnic complexity, this truly interdisciplinary volume resists the hierarchizing and monumentalizing of traditional Italian studies in the United States. It will inform and redirect our understanding of what constitutes “Italy.”Contributors: Mohamed Aden; John Agnew, Syracuse U; Ayele Bekerie, Cornell U; Elaine K. Chang, Rutgers U; Antonio Marazzi, U of Padua, Italy; Francesca Miller, U of California, Davis; Antonio Negri, U of Paris VIII, France; Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College; Karen Pinkus, Northwestern U; Paul Robinson, Stanford U; Pasquale Verdicchio, U of California, San Diego; Marguerite R. Waller, U of California, Riverside; and David Ward, Wellesley College.

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Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age

Koenig, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2008

With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions of race and identity.

Essays explore a range of topics that include drug development and the production of race-based therapeutics, the ways in which genetics could contribute to future health disparities, the social implications of ancestry mapping, and the impact of emerging race and genetics research on public policy and the media.

As genetic research expands its reach, this volume takes an important step toward creating a useful interdisciplinary dialogue about its implications.

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Revitalization Lexicography

The Making of the New Tunica Dictionary

Patricia M. Anderson

University of Arizona Press, 2020

In a linguistic climate that is hyperaware of so-called language death, dictionaries have been touted as stalwarts for language preservation. When wielded by communities undertaking language revitalization, dictionaries can be designed to facilitate reversing language shift and fostering linguistic innovation. Indeed, dictionaries’ reputation as multifunctional reference materials make them adaptable to a wide variety of community needs.

Revitalization Lexicography provides a detailed account of creating a dictionary meant to move a once-sleeping language into a language of active daily use. This unique look under the hood of lexicography in a small community highlights the ways in which the dictionary was intentionally leveraged to shape the Tunica language as it inevitably changes throughout revitalization. Tunica, one of the heritage languages of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Marksville, Louisiana, has been undergoing active revitalization since 2010. The current generation of speakers began learning Tunica, a once-sleeping language, through written documentation. Now enough Tunica speakers to confer amongst themselves when questionable language use arises.

Marrying both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary, this book discusses complex lexicographic tasks in a manner accessible to both academic and community readers. This work is firmly backdropped in a fieldwork approach that centers the community as owners of all aspects of their revitalization project. This book provides concrete and practical considerations for anyone attempting to create a dictionary. Contrasting examples from Tunica and English dictionaries, this book challenges readers to rethink their relationship to dictionaries in general. A must-read for anyone who has ever touched a dictionary.

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Revolt of the Saints

Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy

John F. Collins

Duke University Press, 2015

In 1985 the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador, Brazil was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over the next decades, over 4,000 residents who failed to meet the state's definition of "proper Afro-Brazilianness" were expelled to make way for hotels, boutiques, NGOs, and other attractions. In Revolt of the Saints, John F. Collins explores the contested removal of the inhabitants of Brazil’s first capital and best-known site for Afro-Brazilian history, arguing that the neighborhood’s most recent reconstruction, begun in 1992 and supposedly intended to celebrate the Pelourinho's working-class citizens and their culture, revolves around gendered and racialized forms of making Brazil modern. He situates this focus on national origins and the commodification of residents' most intimate practices within a longer history of government and elite attempts to "improve" the citizenry’s racial stock even as these efforts take new form today. In this novel analysis of the overlaps of race, space, and history, Collins thus draws on state-citizen negotiations of everyday life to detail how residents’ responses to the attempt to market Afro-Brazilian culture and reimagine the nation’s foundations both illuminate and contribute to recent shifts in Brazil’s racial politics.

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