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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.

Exploring how public history creates collective memory of this white ethnic group through memorials
 
Cajuns arrived in southern Louisiana in the 18th century after the British exiled them from eastern Canada. Also known as Acadians, they retain a unique dialect of French, and their distinctive music, food, and other cultural traits characterized them as an ethnic group. Until the 1960s, authorities viewed them as a serious problem, allegedly blocking the state’s progress as they clung to their antiquated ways. Few Cajun residents in the region remembered the remote past of their ancestors, but by the 1970s, organizations ranging from local non-profits to the National Park Service created sites that commemorated their history, such as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, allowing Cajuns to connect their lives to their past and claim it as their own.
 
In Remembering the Cajun Past, anthropologist Marc David studies the cultural and political dynamics that reconfigured Cajun memory and identity. Focusing on St. Martinville and the Acadian Memorial, he explores how authorities changed their minds about Cajuns and demonstrates how Cajuns’ historical memories took shape. Part ethnography and part history, David examines the racial aspects of the Memorial’s creation in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the growth of a new Cajun history, one through which individual Cajuns rejected the label’s connotation of “white trash” and embraced belonging within a storied white ethnic group. Based on decades of fieldwork and deep engagement with public history practices, David explores how historical memory and the historic sites that foster it are intertwined with the politics of civic life.

The South American nation of Colombia has experienced decades of violence involving state, guerrilla, and paramilitary actors, resulting in profound and enduring consequences. Scholars have examined both the violent events and the subsequent truth and reconciliation initiatives addressing this complex history. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá introduces a novel perspective by integrating Black, Indigenous, and memory studies in her analysis of two significant sites of mass violence: Bahia Portete, a Wayuu Indigenous territory in Upper Guajira, and Bojayá, a Black and Embera Indigenous territory in Chocó. By recognizing nonhuman and nonliving community members as actants and foregrounding Indigenous and Black ontologies in collective remembrance, Riaño-Alcalá reveals the processes through which these communities engage in social repair. She demonstrates how they interpret, restore, sustain, and reimagine their identities amid ongoing challenges posed by war and racial capitalism. This work advances scholarship in human rights studies, memory studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and the anthropology of social repair, offering significant new insights into a well-examined historical context.

From the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, haciendas dominated the Latin American countryside. In the Ecuadorian Andes, Runa—Quichua-speaking indigenous people—worked on these large agrarian estates as virtual serfs. In Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, Barry Lyons probes the workings of power on haciendas and explores the hacienda's contemporary legacy.

Lyons lived for three years in a Runa village and conducted in-depth interviews with elderly former hacienda laborers. He combines their wrenching accounts with archival evidence to paint an astonishing portrait of daily life on haciendas. Lyons also develops an innovative analysis of hacienda discipline and authority relations. Remembering the Hacienda explains the role of religion as well as the reshaping of Runa culture and identity under the impact of land reform and liberation theology.

This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the understanding of social control and domination. It will be valuable reading for a broad audience in anthropology, history, Latin American studies, and religious studies.

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. 

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.

Karl Polanyi’s “substantivist” critique of market society has found new popularity in the era of neoliberal globalization. The author reclaims this polymath for contemporary anthropology, especially economic anthropology, in the context of Central Europe, where Polanyi (1886–1964) grew up. The Polanyian approach illuminates both the communist era, in particular the “market socialist” economy which evolved under János Kádár in Hungary, as well as the post-communist transformations of property relations, civil society and ethno-national identities throughout the region.

Hann’s analyses are based primarily on his own ethnographic investigations in Hungary and South-East Poland. They are pertinent to the rise of neo-nationalism in those countries, which is theorized as a malign countermovement to the domination of the market. At another level, Hann’s adaptation of Polanyi’s social philosophy points beyond current political turbulence to an original concept of “social Eurasia”.

An incendiary critique of contemporary American society that also offers concrete solutions for the dilemmas facing progressive politics.

As the political climate of the United States moves rightward, effective and visionary voices from the left become both rarer and more essential. In Resisting State Violence, African American scholar-activist Joy James provides such a voice. Taking the convergence of race, gender, and class as fundamental trajectories, James offers a stimulating and iconoclastic account of a world in which the United States functions as the political-police center.