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This book brings together the research into regional development and social change carried out in highland Peru by a team of British and Latin American social anthropologists and sociologists. The area studied—the Mantaro Valley of central Peru—is one of the most densely populated and economically differentiated of highland zones; it is also notable for its community-based forms of cooperation and its high level of peasant political activity.

The book presents a series of case studies that examine cooperative forms of organization in relation to developments in the regional economy and to changes in national policy. The analysis attempts to avoid interpreting local processes merely as responses to externally initiated change. It stresses instead the need to consider the interplay of local and national forces, because local groups and processes themselves affect the pattern of regional and national development. The case studies cover a range of political and economic topics, from peasant movements to the achievements and shortcomings of government-sponsored agricultural and manufacturing cooperatives. The concluding chapter, by the editors, explores the theoretical implications of these studies.

Based on extended interviews at the Culiprán fundo in Chile with peasants who recount in their own terms their political evolution, this is an in-depth study of peasants in social and political action. It deals with two basic themes: first, the authoritarian structure within a traditional latifundio and its eventual replacement by a peasant-based elected committee, and second, the events shaping the emergence of political consciousness among the peasantry. Petras and Zemelman Merino trace the careers of local peasant leaders, followers, and opponents of the violent illegal land seizure in 1965 and the events that triggered the particular action.

The findings of this study challenge the oft-accepted assumption that peasants represent a passive, traditional, downtrodden group capable only of following urban-based elites. The peasant militants, while differing considerably in their ability to grasp complex political and social problems, show a great deal of political skill, calculate rationally on the possibility of success, and select and manipulate political allies on the basis of their own primary needs. The politicized peasantry lend their allegiance to those forces with whom they anticipate they have the most to gain—and under circumstances that minimize social costs. The authors identify the highly repressive political culture within the latifundio—reinforced by the national political system—as the key factor inhibiting overt expressions of political demands.

The emergence of revolutionary political consciousness is found to be the result of cumulative experiences and the breakdown of traditional institutions of control. The violent illegal seizure of the farm is perceived by the peasantry as a legitimate act based on self-interest as well as general principles of justice—in other words, the seizure is perceived as a “natural act,” suggesting that perhaps two sets of moralities functioned within the traditional system.

The book is divided into two parts: the first part contains a detailed analysis of peasant behavior; the second contains transcriptions of peasant interviews. Combined, they give the texture and flavor of insurgent peasant politics.

Throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World, profound social problems are growing in response to burgeoning populations and unstable economic and political systems. In Peru, terrorist acts by the Shining Path guerilla movement are the most visible manifestation of social discontent, but rapid economic and religious changes have touched the lives of almost everyone, radically altering traditional lifeways. In this twenty-year study of the community of Quinua in the Department of Ayacucho, William Mitchell looks at changes provoked by population growth within a severely limited ecological and economic setting, including increasing conversion to a cash economy and out-migration, the decline of the Catholic fiesta system and the rise of Protestantism, and growing poverty and revolution.

When Mitchell first began his field studies in Quinua in 1966, farming was still the Quinueños' principal means of livelihood. But while the population was increasing rapidly, the amount of arable land in the community remained the same, creating increased food shortfalls. At the same time, government controls on food prices and subsidies of cheap food imports drove down the value of rural farm production. These ecological and economic factors forced many people to enter the nonfarm economy to feed themselves.

Using a materialist approach, Mitchell charts the new economic strategies that Quinueños use to confront the harsh pressures of their lives, including ceramic production, wage labor, petty commerce, and migration to cash work on the coat and in the eastern tropical forests. In addition, he shows how the growing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism is also an economic strategy, since Protestant ideology offers acceptable reasons for redirecting the money that used to be spent on elaborate religious festivals to household needs and education.

The twenty-year span of this study makes it especially valuable for students of social change. Mitchell's unique, interdisciplinary approach, considering ecological, economic, and population factors simultaneously, offers a model that can be widely applied in many Third World areas. Additionally, the inclusion of an entire chapter of family histories reveals how economic and ecological forces are played out at the individual level.

The contributors describe ways of building communities within and beyond academic programs and examine what it means to engage in community-building work and action across institutional boundaries. In Part One, the essayists focus on the centrality of community building and reinterpreting bodies of knowledge with students, staff, faculty, and community members. Part Two looks at bringing transnational approaches to feminist collaborations in ways that challenge the classroom’s central place in knowledge production. Part Three explores organic collaborations in and beyond the classroom.

A practical and much-needed resource, Pedagogies of Interconnectedness offers cutting-edge ideas for collaboration in pedagogy, education justice, community-based activities, and liberatory worldmaking.

Contributors: Jordyn Alderman, Leen Al-Fatafta, Meryl Altman, María Claudia André, Andrea N. Baldwin, Carolyn Beer, Luisa Bieri, Rebecca Dawson, Misty De Berry, Danielle M. DeMuth, Emily Fairchild, Sara Youngblood Gregory, Letizia Guglielmo, Jeremy Hall, K. Melchor Hall, Linh U. Hua, Christine Keating, Charlotte Meehan, Brayden Milam, Isis Nusair, Montserrat Pérez-Toribio, Andrea Putala, Ariella Rotramel, Ann Russo, Kimberly Sanchez, Barbara L. Shaw, M. Gabriela Torres, Ayana K. Weekley, and Sharon R. Wesoky

The pressures Asian Americans feel to be socially and economically exceptional include an unspoken mandate to always be healthy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the expectation for Asian Americans to enter the field of medicine, principally as providers of care rather than those who require care. Pedagogies of Woundedness explores what happens when those considered model minorities critically engage with illness and medicine whether as patients or physicians. 

James Kyung-Jin Lee considers how popular culture often positions Asian Americans as medical authorities and what that racial characterization means. Addressing the recent trend of writing about sickness, disability, and death, Lee shows how this investment in Asian American health via the model minority is itself a response to older racial forms that characterize Asian American bodies as diseased. Moreover, he pays attention to what happens when academics get sick and how illness becomes both methodology and an archive for scholars. 

Pedagogies of Woundedness also explores the limits of biomedical “care,” the rise of physician chaplaincy, and the impact of COVID. Throughout his book and these case studies, Lee shows the social, ethical, and political consequences of these common (mis)conceptions that often define Asian Americans in regard to health and illness.

The revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oregon in the early 1920s. With more than sixty chapters established in both large and small communities like Portland, Medford, Astoria, and La Grande, the Klan’s power escalated in the region. Klan salesmen, working on commission, successfully enlisted Oregonians with a message of religious prejudice and racism. At the Klan’s peak, Portland was home to the sixth largest chapter in the country and there were more members per capita in Oregon than in any other state except one.

In Peddlers of Hate, journalist Steve Law draws on published and unpublished sources, new research, and interviews with leading scholars to provide a comprehensive account of how Oregon became one of the Klan’s strongest outposts. Representing the Klan as merely a fraternal lodge, Klan recruiters were trained to vilify Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. They gained wide support, toppling an incumbent governor and congressman, persuading voters to ban Catholic schools, and winning control of the legislature and several local governments. From stories of “escaped nuns” to fiery crosses at mass Klan rallies at Salem’s state fairgrounds and Portland’s Mount Tabor Park, Law examines this divisive and forgotten time in Oregon’s history. He shows how it was finally greed, hypocrisy, and corruption that spurred the hate group’s demise—providing historical lessons that will resonate today.

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging: peer to peer.

What is peer to peer? Why is it essential for building a commons-centric future? How could this happen? These are the questions this book tries to answer. Peer to peer is a type of social relations in human networks, as well as a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible. Thus, peer to peer enables a new mode of production and creates the potential for a transition to a commons-oriented economy.

An ethnography focusing on a Pentecostal church community and their pursuit of healing marriages and prosperity

Pentecostalism in Urban Oaxaca is a timely feminist ethnography set in a Pentecostal church community in Oaxaca de Juarez. Based on extensive fieldwork, Michelle Ramirez skillfully melds medical anthropology with cultural analysis to reveal the Pentecostal movement’s dynamics in the contexts of faith healing, marital relations, and economic prosperity.

Ramirez takes stock of the problematic ways that Pentecostalism has played out for Mexican women today but also reminds readers of some of its successes. Within the context of Mexican patriarchy, some women parishioners in abusive relationships see the church as a way to improve their lot. Pentecostalism seeks to rupture with Mexico’s colonial heritage, and Ramirez provides novel ways for the reader to consider how Pentecostalism can provide healing for even the “endlessness of addiction.” One case study portrays a former abusive alcoholic womanizer who underwent a spiritual transformation as a result of his conversion. Through this example and more, Ramirez examines the complex relationship between gender, modernity, and Indigeneity in the context of marriage. The book also addresses the #MeToo movement as encountered in the Pentecostal church.

Finally, Ramirez investigates how Pentecostalism addresses the “curses” of illness and poverty, highlighting the paradoxical relationship between faith healing and curanderismo. The gospel of economic prosperity holds promise for a better life, breaking free from the “disease” of poverty. To this end, Ramirez profiles some parishioners’ involvement with Omnilife, a multilevel marketing company selling vitamins and natural health products that propounds ideals similar to those of Pentecostal Christianity.

 
 

How the American military-industrial complex has invaded our consciousness to create consent for its programs

“We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity?” —E. L. Doctorow

--Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Community Service Organization and National Farm Workers Association
--Nicholas von Hoffman and the Woodlawn Organization
--Tom Gaudette and the Northwest Community Organization
--Ed Chambers, Richard Harmon, and the Industrial Areas Foundation
--Shel Trapp, Gale Cincotta, and National People's Action
--Heather Booth, Midwest Academy, and Citizen Action
--Wade Rathke and ACORN

Weaving classic texts with interviews and their own context-setting commentaries, the editors of People Power provide the first comprehensive history of Alinsky-based organizing in the tumultuous period from 1955 to 1980, when the key organizing groups in the United States took form. Many of these selections--previously available only on untranscribed audiotapes or in difficult-to-read mimeograph or Xerox formats--appear in print here for the first time.

Using the rich and vital Australian Aboriginal understanding of country as a model, People and Places of Nature and Culture affirms the importance of a sustainable relationship between nature and culture. While current thought includes the mistaken notion—perpetuated by natural history, ecology, and political economy—that humans have a mastery over the Earth, this book demonstrates the problems inherent in this view. In the current age of climate change, this is an important appraisal of the relationship between nature and culture, and a projection of what needs to change if we want to achieve environmental stability.

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World. While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the transatlantic slave trade’s ruling elites and overseas merchants, the practices that shaped the region’s political and cultural dynamics, especially those that dealt with other kinds of trade, have yet to be thoroughly examined.

Sandra T. Barnes offers a history focused on the Benin Region’s patchwork of small states and ports that saw a constant movement of people and goods for centuries. As such, this book widens the lens of scholarship to include people of all social levels behind the political rivalries and dynamic changes that marked the period. Barnes concentrates on protective relationships and the violence people were forced to endure during a fast-moving, tumultuous period of history, examining how they organized their lives and why this mattered. The result is a refreshingly original work that challenges long-held assumptions about West Africa’s past, explaining what life was like for people on the coast during the transatlantic slave trade.

A stunning photographic portrayal of the Ho-Chunk people during a challenging period that presents the resilience of a community whose story continues to this day.

People of the Big Voice tells the visual history of Ho-Chunk families at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond as depicted through the lens of Black River Falls studio photographer Charles Van Schaick. The family relationships among those who sat for the photographer are clearly visible in these images. Sisters, friends, families, and young couples appear and reappear, fleshing out a narrative of the period, from 1879 to 1942, referred to as "the dark ages” in First Nations tribal history.

Following introductory essays from three of the authors are more than three hundred beautifully detailed photographs. Unique to the project are captions that identify over ninety percent of the individuals pictured—made possible by the continuing efforts of tribal members and genealogists—and include both English and Ho-Chunk names.

Also featured are candid shots of Ho-Chunk people on the streets of Black River Falls, outside family dwellings, and at powwows. As author and Ho-Chunk tribal member Amy Lonetree writes, "A significant number of the images were taken just a few short years after the darkest, most devastating period for the Ho-Chunk. Invasion, diseases, warfare, forced assimilation, loss of land, and repeated forced removals from our beloved homelands left the Ho-Chunk people in a fight for their culture and their lives."

A significant contribution to the history of Native peoples, People of the Big Voice is a breathtaking portrayal of a resilient community whose story continues today.

 Since its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, People’s Pornography offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship, pornography, and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved.

Discover how ancient peoples and plants shaped one another across generations and landscapes.

People, Plants, and Landscapes showcases the potential of modern paleoethnobotany, an interdisciplinary field that explores the interactions between human beings and plants by examining archaeological evidence. Using different methods and theoretical approaches, the essays in this work apply botanical knowledge to studies of archaeological plant remains and apply paleoethnobotany to nonarchaeological sources of evidence. The resulting techniques often lie beyond the traditional boundaries of either archaeology or botany.

With this ground-breaking work, the technically and methodologically enhanced paleoethnobotany of the 1990s has joined forces with ecological and evolutionary theory to forge explanations of changing relationships between human and plant populations.

An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship

The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces. 

Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field. 

This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future.  

Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College.