Results by title

Nachituti’s Gift challenges conventional theories of economic development with a compelling comparative case study of inland fisheries in Zambia and Congo from pre- to postcolonial times. Neoclassical development models conjure a simple, abstract progression from wealth held in people to money or commodities; instead, Gordon argues, primary social networks and oral charters like “Nachituti’s Gift” remained decisive long after the rise of intensive trade and market activities. Interweaving oral traditions, songs, and interviews as well as extensive archival research, Gordon’s lively tale is at once a subtle analysis of economic and social transformations, an insightful exercise in environmental history, and a revealing study of comparative politics.

“A powerful portrayal of the complexity, fluidity, and subtlety of Lake Mweru fishers’ production strategies . . . . Natchituti’s Gift adds nuance and evidence to some of the most important and sophisticated conversations going on in African studies today.”—Kirk Arden Hoppe, International Journal of African Historical Studies

“A lively and intelligent book, which offers a solid contribution to ongoing debates about the interplay of the politics of environment, history and economy.”—Joost Fontein, Africa

“Well researched and referenced . . . . [Natchituti’s Gift] will be of interest to those in a wide variety of disciplines including anthropology, African Studies, history, geography, and environmental studies.”—Heidi G. Frontani, H-SAfrica

In this volume, which has been hailed as a major breakthrough in understanding the meaning of the elaborate kinship systems currently existing in Australian Aboriginal societies, C. G. von Brandenstein argues that such systems refer to an archaic theory of "world order" common to all these societies. This controversial conclusion is based on native testimony and on a sophisticated linguistic analysis of a vast quantity of data collected by the author and others.

Though the author has restricted the results of his research to Aboriginal Australia, his methodological approach is generalizable. Hence this work will be of importance to specialists in many areas.

What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.
    Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.

Naming the World examines language shift among the Northern Arapaho of the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, and the community’s diverse responses as it seeks social continuity. Andrew Cowell argues that, rather than a single “Arapaho culture,” we find five distinctive communities of practice on the reservation, each with differing perspectives on social and more-than-human power and the human relationships that enact power.

As the Arapaho people resist Euro-American assimilation or domination, the Arapaho language and the idea that the language is sacred are key rallying points—but also key points of contestation. Cowell finds that while many at Wind River see the language as crucial for maintaining access to more-than-human power, others primarily view the language in terms of peer-oriented identities as Arapaho, Indian, or non-White. These different views lead to quite different language usage and attitudes in relation to place naming, personal naming, cultural metaphors, new word formation, and the understudied practice of folk etymology.

Cowell presents data from conversations and other natural discourse to show the diversity of everyday speech and attitudes, and he links these data to broader debates at Wind River and globally about the future organization of indigenous societies and the nature of Arapaho and indigenous identity.
 

Narrating Love and Violence is an ethnographic exploration of women’s stories from the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, in the region of Himachal Pradesh, India, focusing on how both, love and violence emerge (or function) at the intersection of gender, tribe, caste, and the state in India. Himika Bhattacharya privileges the everyday lives of women marginalized by caste and tribe to show how state and community discourses about gendered violence serve as proxy for caste in India, thus not only upholding these social hierarchies, but also enabling violence.
 
The women in this book tell their stories through love, articulated as rejection, redefinition and reproduction of notions of violence and solidarity. Himika Bhattacharya centers the women’s narratives as a site of knowledge—beyond love and beyond violence. This book shows how women on the margins of tribe and caste know both, love and violence, as agents wishing to re-shape discourses of caste, tribe and community.
 

The most common social phenomenon of Western societies is the organization, yet those
involved in real-world managing are not always willing to reveal the intricacies of their
everyday muddles. Barbara Czarniawska argues that in order to understand these uncharted
territories, we need to gather local and concrete stories about organizational life and subject
them to abstract and metaphorical interpretation.

Using a narrative approach unique to organizational studies, Czarniawska employs literary
devices to uncover the hidden workings of organizations. She applies cultural metaphors to
public administration in Sweden to demonstrate, for example, how the dynamics of a
screenplay can illuminate the budget disputes of an organization. She shows how the
interpretive description of organizational worlds works as a distinct genre of social analysis,
and her investigations ultimately disclose the paradoxical nature of organizational life: we follow
routines in order to change, and decentralize in order to control. By confronting such
paradoxes, we bring crisis to existing institutions and enable them to change.

How is the internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria Bernal creatively combines media studies, ethnography, and African studies to explore this new political paradigm through a striking analysis of how Eritreans in diaspora have used the internet to shape the course of Eritrean history.
           
Bernal argues that Benedict Anderson’s famous concept of nations as “imagined communities” must now be rethought because diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. She traces the development of Eritrean diaspora websites over two turbulent decades that saw the Eritrean state grow ever more tyrannical. Through Eritreans’ own words in posts and debates, she reveals how new subjectivities are formed and political action is galvanized online. She suggests that “infopolitics”—struggles over the management of information—make politics in the 21st century distinct, and she analyzes the innovative ways Eritreans deploy the internet to support and subvert state power. Nation as Network is a unique and compelling work that advances our understanding of the political significance of digital media. 

In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies.

Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.

This volume investigates the concepts of nation, identity, and culture as they have evolved within the contexts of exile and as a result of the consolidation of the ethnic and the political. The contributors explore various theoretical issues involved in reconfiguring these concepts since the nineteenth century, as well as the manifestations of these issues in specific regions of the world.
Examining the degree to which twentieth-century representations of colonization, revolution, and modernity are nineteenth-century constructs, Nations, Identities, Cultures locates contemporary political thought in an ethos of exile, nostalgic for bygone places and cultures of the nineteenth century. The contributors interrogate the significance of changes in the way the political is conceptualized and the impact of shifting representations of political society on our understanding of nation, identity, and culture. Approaches to these issues range from broad perspectives on global culture, civil society, liberalism, and dialectical identity to specific case studies on the politics of Quebec, the Russian muzhik, Israel’s borders, the ancient Greek origins of European culture, Kongo nationalism, the women of Lebanon, and the Danish/Swedish border.

Contributors. Martin Bernal, Dominique Colas, Miriam Cooke, Daphna Golan, Thomas Lahusen, Jocelyn Létourneau, Anders Linde-Laursen, Wyatt MacGaffey, John McCumber, V. Y. Mudimbe, Kenneth Surin, Immanuel Wallerstein

Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across Native American cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities--from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala--to show their role in sociocultural transformation.

These studies take up such active issues as "insiderness" in Cherokee language ideologies, contradictions of space-time for the Northern Arapaho, language socialization and Paiute identity, and orthography choices and language renewal among the Kiowa. The authors--including members of indigenous speech communities who participate in language renewal efforts--discuss not only Native Americans' conscious language ideologies but also the often-revealing relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use as embedded in community practice.

The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in Native American speech communities. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities--notably the emergent ideological process of iconization between a language and various national, ethnic, and tribal identities.

As fewer Native Americans continue to speak their own language, this timely volume provides valuable grounded studies of language ideologies in action--those indigenous to Native communities as well as those imposed by outside institutions or language researchers. It considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's Indian Country as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.

The study of legends has long been a critical component of cultural anthropological analysis.  In Native American Legends of the Southeast, George E. Lankford has compiled and analyzed a collection of unique and rare legends that will continue to appeal to scholars and students of Native American culture and the study of legends in general.

This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert.

This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.

Most Native Americans in the United States live in cities, where many find themselves caught in a bind, neither afforded the full rights granted U.S. citizens nor allowed full access to the tribal programs and resources—particularly health care services—provided to Native Americans living on reservations. A scholar and a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Renya K. Ramirez investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is, in effect, a transnational existence. Through an ethnographic account of the Native American community in California’s Silicon Valley and beyond, Ramirez explores the ways that urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand conventional notions of citizenship.

Ramirez’s ethnography revolves around the Paiute American activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the “hub,” a space that allows for the creation of a sense of belonging away from a geographic center. Ramirez describes “hub-making” activities in Silicon Valley, including sweat lodge ceremonies, powwows, and American Indian Alliance meetings, gatherings at which urban Indians reinforce bonds of social belonging and forge intertribal alliances. She examines the struggle of the Muwekma Ohlone, a tribe aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay area, to maintain a sense of community without a land base and to be recognized as a tribe by the federal government. She considers the crucial role of Native women within urban indigenous communities; a 2004 meeting in which Native Americans from Mexico and the United States discussed cross-border indigenous rights activism; and the ways that young Native Americans in Silicon Valley experience race and ethnicity, especially in relation to the area’s large Chicano community. A unique and important exploration of diaspora, transnationalism, identity, belonging, and community, Native Hubs is intended for scholars and activists alike.

Many indigenous Hawaiian men have felt profoundly disempowered by the legacies of colonization and by the tourist industry, which, in addition to occupying a great deal of land, promotes a feminized image of Native Hawaiians (evident in the ubiquitous figure of the dancing hula girl). In the 1990s a group of Native men on the island of Maui responded by refashioning and reasserting their masculine identities in a group called the Hale Mua (the “Men’s House”). As a member and an ethnographer, Ty P. Kāwika Tengan analyzes how the group’s mostly middle-aged, middle-class, and mixed-race members assert a warrior masculinity through practices including martial arts, woodcarving, and cultural ceremonies. Some of their practices are heavily influenced by or borrowed from other indigenous Polynesian traditions, including those of the Māori. The men of the Hale Mua enact their refashioned identities as they participate in temple rites, protest marches, public lectures, and cultural fairs.

The sharing of personal stories is an integral part of Hale Mua fellowship, and Tengan’s account is filled with members’ first-person narratives. At the same time, Tengan explains how Hale Mua rituals and practices connect to broader projects of cultural revitalization and Hawaiian nationalism. He brings to light the tensions that mark the group’s efforts to reclaim indigenous masculinity as they arise in debates over nineteenth-century historical source materials and during political and cultural gatherings held in spaces designated as tourist sites. He explores class status anxieties expressed through the sharing of individual life stories, critiques of the Hale Mua registered by Hawaiian women, and challenges the group received in dialogues with other indigenous Polynesians. Native Men Remade is the fascinating story of how gender, culture, class, and personality intersect as a group of indigenous Hawaiian men work to overcome the dislocations of colonial history.

For too long, the Gulf Coast of Mexico has been dismissed by scholars as peripheral to the Mesoamerican heartland, but researchers now recognize that much can be learned from this region’s cultures. Peoples of the Gulf Coast—particularly those in Veracruz and Tabasco—share so many historical experiences and cultural features that they can fruitfully be viewed as a regional unit for research and analysis.

Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico is the first book to argue that the people of this region constitute a culture area distinct from other parts of Mexico. A pioneering effort by a team of international scholars who summarize hundreds of years of history, this encyclopedic work chronicles the prehistory, ethnohistory, and contemporary issues surrounding the many and varied peoples of the Gulf Coast, bringing together research on cultural groups about which little or only scattered information has been published.

The volume includes discussions of the prehispanic period of the Gulf Coast, the ethnohistory of many of the neglected indigenous groups of Veracruz and the Huasteca, the settlement of the American Mediterranean, and the unique geographical and ecological context of the Chontal Maya of Tabasco. It provides descriptions of the Popoluca, Gulf Coast Nahua, Totonac, Tepehua, Sierra Ñähñu (Otomí), and Huastec Maya. Each chapter contains a discussion of each group’s language, subsistence and settlement patterns, social organization, belief systems, and history of acculturation, and also examines contemporary challenges to the future of each native people.

As these contributions reveal, Gulf Coast peoples share not only major cultural features but also historical experiences, such as domination by Hispanic elites beginning in the sixteenth century and subjection to forces of change in Mexico. Yet as contemporary people have been affected by factors such as economic development, increased emigration, and the spread of Protestantism, traditional cultures have become rallying points for ethnic identity.

Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico highlights the significance of the Gulf Coast for anyone interested in the great encuentro between the Old and New Worlds and general processes of culture change. By revealing the degree to which these cultures have converged, it represents a major step toward achieving a broader understanding of the peoples of this region and will be an important reference work on these indigenous populations for years to come.

For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. In this exemplary contribution to the “new imperial history,” Gregory Mann argues that this shared military experience between France and Africa was fundamental not only to their colonial relationship but also to the reconfiguration of that relationship in the postcolonial era. Mann explains that in the early twenty-first century, among Africans in France and Africa, and particularly in Mali—where Mann conducted his research—the belief that France has not adequately recognized and compensated the African veterans of its wars is widely held and frequently invoked. It continues to animate the political relationship between France and Africa, especially debates about African immigration to France.

Focusing on the period between World War I and 1968, Mann draws on archival research and extensive interviews with surviving Malian veterans of French wars to explore the experiences of the African soldiers. He describes the effects their long absences and infrequent homecomings had on these men and their communities, he considers the veterans’ status within contemporary Malian society, and he examines their efforts to claim recognition and pensions from France. Mann contends that Mali is as much a postslavery society as it is a postcolonial one, and that specific ideas about reciprocity, mutual obligation, and uneven exchange that had developed during the era of slavery remain influential today, informing Malians’ conviction that France owes them a “blood debt” for the military service of African soldiers in French wars.

Nature in Translation is an ethnographic exploration in the cultural politics of the translation of knowledge about nature. Shiho Satsuka follows the Japanese tour guides who lead hikes, nature walks, and sightseeing bus tours for Japanese tourists in Canada's Banff National Park and illustrates how they aspired to become local "nature interpreters" by learning the ecological knowledge authorized by the National Park. The guides assumed the universal appeal of Canada’s magnificent nature, but their struggle in translating nature reveals that our understanding of nature—including scientific knowledge—is always shaped by the specific socio-cultural concerns of the particular historical context. These include the changing meanings of work in a neoliberal economy, as well as culturally-specific dreams of finding freedom and self-actualization in Canada's vast nature. Drawing on nearly two years of fieldwork in Banff and a decade of conversations with the guides, Satsuka argues that knowing nature is an unending process of cultural translation, full of tensions, contradictions, and frictions. Ultimately, the translation of nature concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included and excluded in the society as a legitimate subject.
 

Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, Donald Martin Carter raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, he explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants.

 

Carter examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, Carter shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of his analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. Carter also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.

 

Whether focusing on historical photographs, television, print media, and graffiti scrawled across urban walls or identifying the critique of colonialism implicit in African films and literature, Carter reveals a protean and peopled world in motion.

Rival claims of ownership or control over various aspects of culture are a regular feature of our twenty-first-century world. Such debates are shaping disciplines as diverse as anthropology and archaeology, art history and museum studies, linguistics and genetics.

This provocative collection of essays—a series of case studies in cultural ownership by scholars from a range of fields—explores issues of cultural heritage and intellectual property in a variety of contexts, from contests over tangible artifacts as well as more abstract forms of culture such as language and oral traditions to current studies of DNA and genes that combine nature and culture, and even new, nonproprietary models for the sharing of digital technologies. Each chapter sets the debate in its historical and disciplinary context and suggests how the approaches to these issues are changing or should change.

One of the most innovative aspects of the volume is the way each author recognizes the social dimensions of group ownership and demonstrates the need for negotiation and new models. The collection as a whole thus challenges the reader to reevaluate traditional ways of thinking about cultural ownership and to examine the broader social contexts within which negotiation over the ownership of culture is taking place.

In addition to Laetitia La Follette, contributors include David Bollier, Stephen Clingman, Susan DiGiacomo, Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Margaret Speas, Banu Subramaniam, Joe Watkins, and H. Martin Wobst.

The citrus industry in Belize could be said to exist primarily to satisfy the needs of people in other countries. A business that is highly dependent on global markets and the geopolitics of international trade, it comprises some 500 farmers, many hundreds of wage laborers, and two processing companies that produce frozen juice concentrate for export. This new study examines how those farmers, laborers, and companies define and pursue shared interests, and how they respond differently to the impact of national development strategies and global economic and political forces. Laurie Kroshus Medina analyzes the development of the citrus industry in Belize over fifteen years to explore the relationship between the production of collective identities and the negotiation of development policies at the interface of global and local processes. She shows how citrus farmers and workers, processing companies, and politicians compete to construct shared identities, how they mobilize collective actors, and how their collective action shapes the goals, policies, and practices associated with development. Taking an ethnographic approach, Medina describes how the Belizean citrus industry responds to cycles of boom and bust, and the implications of such cycles for workers and growers. She offers a close look at the major actors—workers, union members, small and large growers, and politicians—as they respond to global changes in the citrus industry. Her analysis is made more compelling through an account of two open struggles in the industry over the formation of a rival union and the attempt to buy the processing company, owned by the multinational corporation Nestlé. She also includes a discussion of the impact of NAFTA on the industry. Medina's research demonstrates how collective agency in Belize has pushed the citrus industry's development in directions that simultaneously conform to and diverge from the trajectories laid out by foreign agencies. Negotiating Economic Development provides a bridge from old to new studies of Latin American social movements as it offers key insights into competing forms of identity for a wide range of social scientists concerned with the human and social aspects of development issues and globalization.

Despite great ethnic and racial diversity, ethnicity in Brazil is often portrayed as a matter of black or white, a distinction reinforced by the ruling elite’s efforts to craft the nation’s identity in its own image—white, Christian, and European. In Negotiating National Identity Jeffrey Lesser explores the crucial role ethnic minorities from China, Japan, North Africa, and the Middle East have played in constructing Brazil’s national identity, thereby challenging dominant notions of nationality and citizenship.
Employing a cross-cultural approach, Lesser examines a variety of acculturating responses by minority groups, from insisting on their own whiteness to becoming ultra-nationalists and even entering secret societies that insisted Japan had won World War II. He discusses how various minority groups engaged in similar, and successful, strategies of integration even as they faced immense discrimination and prejudice. Some believed that their ethnic heritage was too high a price to pay for the “privilege” of being white and created alternative categories for themselves, such as Syrian-Lebanese, Japanese-Brazilian, and so on. By giving voice to the role ethnic minorities have played in weaving a broader definition of national identity, this book challenges the notion that elite discourse is hegemonic and provides the first comprehensive look at Brazilian worlds often ignored by scholars.
Based on extensive research, Negotiating National Identity will be valuable to scholars and students in Brazilian and Latin American studies, as well as those in the fields of immigrant history, ethnic studies, and race relations.

In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba’s hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island’s ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation. Situating hip hop within a long history of Cuban racial politics, Perry discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges between raperos and North American rappers and activists, and their relationships with older Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African American political exiles. He also examines critiques of Cuban patriarchy by female raperos, the competing rise of reggaetón, as well as state efforts to incorporate hip hop into its cultural institutions. At this pivotal moment of Cuban-U.S. relations, Perry's analysis illuminates the evolving dynamics of race, agency, and neoliberal transformation amid a Cuba in historic flux. 

In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult.
Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture.
A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.

Evolutionary psychology claims to be the authoritative science of "human nature." Its chief architects, including Stephen Pinker and David Buss, have managed to reach well beyond the ivory tower to win large audiences and influence public discourse. But do the answers that evolutionary psychologists provide about language, sex, and social relations add up? Susan McKinnon thinks not.
Far from being an account of evolution and social relations that has historical and cross-cultural validity, evolutionary psychology is a stunning example of a "science" that twists evolutionary genetics into a myth of human origins. As McKinnon shows, that myth is shaped by neo-liberal economic values and relies on ethnocentric understandings of sex, gender, kinship, and social relations. She also explores the implications for public policy of the moral tales that are told by evolutionary psychologists in the guise of "scientific" inquiry.
Drawing widely from the anthropological record, Neo-liberal Genetics offers a sustained and accessible critique of the myths of human nature fabricated by evolutionary psychologists.

Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization.

In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.

In Neutral Accent, A. Aneesh employs India's call centers as useful sites for studying global change. The horizon of global economic shift, the consequences of global integration, and the ways in which call center work "neutralizes" racial, ethnic, and national identities become visible from the confines of their cubicles. In his interviews with call service workers and in his own work in a call center in the high tech metropolis of Gurgoan, India, Aneesh observed the difficulties these workers face in bridging cultures, laws, and economies: having to speak in an accent that does not betray their ethnicity, location, or social background; learning foreign social norms; and working graveyard shifts to accommodate international customers. Call center work is cast as independent of place, space, and time, and its neutrality—which Aneesh defines as indifference to difference—has become normal business practice in a global economy. The work of call center employees in the globally integrated marketplace comes at a cost, however, as they become disconnected from the local interactions and personal relationships that make their lives anything but neutral.

Bringing together historically and ethnographically grounded studies of the social and political life of Brazil and Mexico, this collection of essays revitalizes resistance as an area of study. Resistance studies boomed in the 1980s and then was subject to a wave of critique in the 1990s. Covering the colonial period to the present day, the case studies in this collection suggest that, even if much of that critique was justified, resistance remains a useful analytic rubric. The collection has three sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction. A section focused on religious institutions and movements is bracketed by one featuring historical studies from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and another gathering more contemporary, ethnographically-based studies. Introducing the collection, the anthropologist John Gledhill traces the debates about resistance studies. In the conclusion, Alan Knight provides a historian’s perspective on the broader implications of the contributors’ findings.

Contributors. Helga Baitenmann, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Guillermo de la Peña, John Gledhill, Matthew Gutmann, Maria Gabriela Hita, Alan Knight, Ilka Boaventura Leite, Jean Meyer, John Monteiro, Luis Nicolau Parés, Patricia R. Pessar, Patience A. Schell, Robert Slenes, Juan Pedro Viqueira, Margarita Zárate

During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia’s indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in southeastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Bilingual education was a component of education reform linked to foreign-aid development mandates, and foreign aid workers figure in New Languages of the State, as do teachers and their unions, transnational intellectual networks, and assertive indigenous political and intellectual movements across the Andes.

Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.

Over many millennia, farmers across the world have domesticated literally thousands of species and developed tens of thousands of varieties of these plants. Despite the astonishing agricultural diversity that existed long ago, the world’s current food base has narrowed to a dangerous level. By studying the long and dynamic history of farming in the ancient past, archaeology can play a part in helping ensure the stability of the human food supply by identifying once-important crops and showing where and how such crops were grown in the past. Thanks to this work, extinct crops might even be redomesticated from their wild progenitors.

New Lives for Ancient and Extinct Crops profiles nine plant species that were important contributors to human diets and had medicinal uses in antiquity: maygrass, chenopod, marshelder, agave, little barley, chia, arrowroot, little millet, and bitter vetch. Each chapter is written by a well-known scholar, who illustrates the global value of the ancient crop record to inform the present. From eastern and western North America, Mesoamerica, South America, western Asia, and south-central Asia, the contributors provide examples of the unexpected wealth of information available in the archaeological record about ancient and extinct crops.

On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper in China’s Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women were returning home from their jobs in one of China’s large cities. As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the “transformation of migrant women”; the women’s “transformation” was signaled by their status as consumers. New Masters, New Servants is an ethnography of class dynamics and the subject formation of migrant domestic workers. Based on her interviews with young women who migrated from China’s Anhui province to the city of Beijing to engage in domestic service for middle-class families, as well as interviews with employers, job placement agencies, and government officials, Yan Hairong explores what these migrant workers mean to the families that hire them, to urban economies, to rural provinces such as Anhui, and to the Chinese state. Above all, Yan focuses on the domestic workers’ self-conceptions, desires, and struggles.

Yan analyzes how the migrant women workers are subjected to, make sense of, and reflect on a range of state and neoliberal discourses about development, modernity, consumption, self-worth, quality, and individual and collective longing and struggle. She offers keen insight into the workers’ desire and efforts to achieve suzhi (quality) through self-improvement, the way workers are treated by their employers, and representations of migrant domestic workers on television and the Internet and in newspapers and magazines. In so doing, Yan demonstrates that contestations over the meanings of migrant workers raise broad questions about the nature of wage labor, market economy, sociality, and postsocialism in contemporary China.

Focusing on the two major areas of the Southwest that witnessed the most intensive and sustained colonial encounters, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta compares how different forms of colonialism and indigenous political economies resulted in diverse outcomes for colonists and Native peoples. Taking a holistic approach and studying both colonist and indigenous perspectives through archaeological, ethnohistoric, historic, and landscape data, contributors examine how the processes of colonialism played out in the American Southwest.

Although these broad areas—New Mexico and southern Arizona/northern Sonora—share a similar early colonial history, the particular combination of players, sociohistorical trajectories, and social relations within each area led to, and were transformed by, markedly diverse colonial encounters. Understanding these different mixes of players, history, and social relations provides the foundation for conceptualizing the enormous changes wrought by colonialism throughout the region. The presentations of different cultural trajectories also offer important avenues for future thought and discussion on the strategies for missionization and colonialism.

The case studies tackle how cultures evolved in the light of radical transformations in cultural traits or traditions and how different groups reconciled to this change. A much needed up-to-date examination of the colonial era in the Southwest, New Mexico and the Pimería Alta demonstrates the intertwined relationships between cultural continuity and transformation during a time of immense change and highlights contemporary thought on the colonial experience.

Contributors: Joseph Aguilar, Jimmy Arterberry, Heather Atherton, Dale Brenneman, J. Andrew Darling, John G. Douglass, B. Sunday Eiselt, Severin Fowles, William M. Graves, Lauren Jelinek, Kelly L. Jenks, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Phillip O. Leckman, Matthew Liebmann, Kent G. Lightfoot, Lindsay Montgomery, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Robert Preucel, Matthew Schmader, Thomas E. Sheridan, Colleen Strawhacker, J. Homer Thiel, David Hurst Thomas, Laurie D. Webster

New Organs Within Us is a richly detailed and conceptually innovative ethnographic analysis of organ transplantation in Turkey. Drawing on the moving stories of kidney-transplant patients and physicians in Istanbul, Aslihan Sanal examines how imported biotechnologies are made meaningful and acceptable not only to patients and doctors, but also to the patients’ families and Turkish society more broadly. She argues that the psychological theory of object relations and the Turkish concept of benimseme—the process of accepting something foreign by making it one’s own—help to explain both the rituals that physicians perform to make organ transplantation viable in Turkey and the psychic transformations experienced by patients who suffer renal failure and undergo dialysis and organ transplantation. Soon after beginning dialysis, patients are told that transplantable kidneys are in short supply; they should look for an organ donor. Poorer patients add their names to the state-run organ share lists. Wealthier patients pay for organs and surgeries, often in foreign countries such as India, Russia, or Iraq. Sanal links Turkey’s expanding trade in illegal organs to patients’ desires to be free from dialysis machines, physicians’ qualms about declaring brain-death, and media-hyped rumors of a criminal organ mafia, as well as to the country’s political instability, the privatization of its hospitals, and its position as a hub in the global market for organs.