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When Richard and Sally Price stepped out of the canoe to begin their fieldwork with the Saamaka Maroons of Suriname in 1966, they were met with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, ambivalence, hostility, and fascination. With their gradual acceptance into the community they undertook the work that would shape their careers and influence the study of African American societies throughout the hemisphere for decades to come. In Saamaka Dreaming they look back on the experience, reflecting on a discipline and a society that are considerably different today. Drawing on thousands of pages of field notes, as well as recordings, file cards, photos, and sketches, the Prices retell and comment on the most intensive fieldwork of their careers, evoke the joys and hardships of building relationships and trust, and outline their personal adaptation to this unfamiliar universe. The book is at once a moving human story, a portrait of a remarkable society, and a thought-provoking revelation about the development of anthropology over the past half-century.

Sacred Possessions is an unprecedented collection of thirteen comparative and interdisciplinary essays exploring the cross-cultural dynamics of African-based religious systems in the Caribbean. The contributors analyze the nature and liturgies of Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, Quimbois, and Gaga as they form one central cultural matrix in the region. They ask how these belief systems were affected by differing colonial histories and landscapes, and how they affected other cultural expressions (from the oral tradition to popular art and literature), and how they have been perceived and (mis)represented by the West.

The book is a unique contribution to the study of the Caribbean as a site of multiculturalism, demonstrating the linkages between anthropology, religion, literature, and popular culture. Also included are a stunning photoessay on Cuban Santeria, a glossary of terms, and an insightful introduction by the editors.

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism.  But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria’s south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era.
           
Drawing on materials from thirty archives across six countries, Stein tells the story of colonial imposition on a desert community that had lived and traveled in the Sahara for centuries. She paints an intriguing historical picture—of an ancient community, trans-Saharan commerce, desert labor camps during World War II, anthropologist spies, battles over oil, and the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. Writing colonialism and decolonization into Jewish history and Jews into the French Saharan one, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating exploration not of Jewish exceptionalism but of colonial power and its religious and cultural differentiations, which have indelibly shaped the modern world. 

When an international health initiative succeeded in wiping out river blindness in Burkina Faso, it allowed the settlement of the sparsely populated Volta Valley by the Mossi people--a development plan by which the Burkinabe government sought to relieve population pressure, establish communities, and increase cotton production. Anthropologist Della McMillan followed this visionary plan over twelve years as people relocated communities, founded farms, dealt with officials, entered the market, and in some instances moved on. Her study examines the question of how development occurs or fails to occur and offers unusual insight into how visions of progress--held by developers, settlers, and even researchers--originate and are revised.

Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds.

Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both. With particular attention to everyday social realities, Harms demonstrates how living on the margin can be both alienating and empowering, as forces that exclude its denizens from power and privilege in the inner city are used to thwart the status quo on the rural edges.

More than a local case study of urban change, Harms’s work also opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization—transformations instructively linked to trends around the globe.

Between the two world wars, the retail world experienced tremendous changes. New forms of competition, expanded networks of communication and transportation, and the proliferation of manufactured goods posed challenges to department store and small shopkeeper alike.

In western New York, and in Buffalo and Rochester in particular, retailers were a crucial part of urban life, acting as cultural brokers and civic leaders. They were also cultivators of area pride. Even as they adopted the latest merchandising techniques or stocked the newest items, merchants emphasized their local roots and their ability to put a local spin on national trends and innovations. Regional identity became a powerful selling tool not only during the prosperity of the 1920s but also through the economic crisis of the Great Depression.

Sales and Celebrations explains how local traditions and institutions affected the evolution of American consumer culture. It expands our understanding of American consumerism, demonstrating that local particularities and loyalties could often coexist with, and occasionally challenge, the spread of mass consumption. In her award-winning study, Professor Sarah Elvins provides new insight into the relationship between America’s largest metropolises and its smaller centers. Retailers in Buffalo and Rochester did not simply imitate the practices of their counterparts in Manhattan and Chicago; they highlighted their unique ability to serve the wants and needs of their particular markets.

By drawing attention to this persistent power of the local, Sales and Celebrations illuminates a neglected aspect of the story of American culture in the interwar period.

In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy García describes how local salseras/os gain social status by performing an exoticized L.A.–style salsa that distances them from club practices associated with Mexicanness. Many Latinos in Los Angeles try to avoid "dancing like a Mexican," attempting to rid their dancing of techniques that might suggest that they are migrants, poor, working-class, Mexican, or undocumented. In L.A. salsa clubs, social belonging and mobility depend on subtleties of technique and movement. With a well-timed dance-floor exit or the lift of a properly tweezed eyebrow, a dancer signals affiliation not only with a distinctive salsa style but also with a particular conceptualization of latinidad.

Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military glory during the period of national conquest, of labor strikes and massacres in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and of state detention and violence during World War II and the Cold War. It was also the site of a mass-grave excavation that galvanized the national human rights movement in 1990, during Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Frazier analyzes the creation of official and alternative memories of specific instances of state violence in northern Chile from 1890 to the present, tracing how the form and content of those memories changed over time. In so doing, she shows how memory works to create political subjectivities mobilized for specific political projects within what she argues is the always-ongoing process of nation-state formation. Frazier’s broad historical perspective on political culture challenges the conventional periodization of modern Chilean history, particularly the idea that the 1973 military coup marked a radical break with the past.

Analyzing multiple memories of state violence, Frazier innovatively shapes social and cultural theory to interpret a range of sources, including local and national government archives, personal papers, popular literature and music, interviews, architectural and ceremonial commemorations, and her ethnographic observations of civic associations, women's and environmental groups, and human rights organizations. A masterful integration of extensive empirical research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Salt in the Sand is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on human rights, democratization, state formation, and national trauma and reconciliation.

During the political and economic upheaval that swept El Salvador in the 1980s, as many as 20,000 Salvadorans took refuge in Costa Rica. Despite similarities between the countries, most Salvadorans experienced El Salvador and Costa Rica as very different places; yet some 6,000 chose to remain after the violence in their country ended, re-establishing their lives successfully enough that they claimed that they now "felt Costa Rican." Bridget Hayden examines the ways in which these people integrated into Costa Rican society and the ambiguous sense of identity they developed, exploring their experience of the process and the cultural concepts they used to interpret those experiences.

Salvadorans in Costa Rica: Displaced Lives introduces readers to people from a wide range of class and educational backgrounds who had come to Costa Rica from all over El Salvador. All shared the experience of having become refugees and having settled in a new country under the same circumstances, and when the war in their own country ended, they shared a concern about the issues involved in deciding whether to return there. Their diversity allows Hayden to examine the ways in which the language of national identity played out in different contexts and sometimes contradictory ways.

Drawing on contemporary theories of migration and space, Hayden identifies the discourses, narratives, and concepts that Salvadorans in Costa Rica had in common and then analyzes the ways in which their experiences and their uses of those discourses varied. She focuses on key spatial concepts that Salvadorans used in talking about displacement and re-emplacement in order to show how they constructed the experience of settlement and how such variables as gender and age influenced their experiences. Because "nationality" was an idiom they used to relate their experiences, she pays particular attention to the role of national belonging and national difference—in terms of both the ways in which the Salvadorans were received by Costa Ricans and their reactions to their new lives in Costa Rica. A concluding chapter compares them with Salvadorans who emigrated to other countries.

The story of these displaced Salvadorans, focusing on the lives of real people, can give us a new understanding of how individuals feel a sense of belonging to a sociocultural space. By exploring many meanings of the nation and national belonging for different people under varying conditions, Hayden's study provides fresh insights into the dynamics of migration, gender, and nationalism.

Few cultures have received as much attention in the study of erotic desire, sexuality, and gender as the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. Here, for the first time, is a collection of groundbreaking essays and a new introduction on the Sambia's sexual culture by the renowned anthropologist Gilbert Herdt.

Over the course of 20 years, Herdt made 13 field trips to live with the Sambia in order to understand sexuality and ritual in the context of warfare and gender segregation. Herdt's essays examine Sambia fetish and fantasy, ritual nose-bleeding, the role of homoerotic insemination, the role of the father and mother in the process of identity formation, and the creation of a "third sex" in nature and culture. He also discusses the representation of homosexuality in cross-cultural literature on premodern societies, arguing that scholars have long viewed desires through the tropes of negative western models. Herdt asks us to reconsider the realities and subjective experiences of desires in their own context, and to rethink how the homoerotic is expressed in radically divergent sexual cultures.

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery.

Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.

This fascinating urban anthropological analysis of Sarajevo and its cultural complexities examines contemporary issues of social divisiveness, pluralism, and intergroup dynamics in the context of national identity and state formation. Rather than seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a volatile postsocialist society, the book presents its capital city as a vibrant yet wounded center of multicultural diversity, where citizens live in mutual recognition of difference while asserting a lifestyle that transcends boundaries of ethnicity and religion. It further illuminates how Sarajevans negotiate group identity in the tumultuous context of history, authoritarian rule, and interactions with the built environment and one another.

As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.

In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.

This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.

These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.

Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-­than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.
 

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europeans struggled to understand their identity in the same way we do as individuals: by comparing themselves to others. In Savages, Romans, and Despots, Robert Launay takes us on a fascinating tour of early modern and modern history in an attempt to untangle how various depictions of “foreign” cultures and civilizations saturated debates about religion, morality, politics, and art.
 
Beginning with Mandeville and Montaigne, and working through Montesquieu, Diderot, Gibbon, Herder, and others, Launay traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds. Some of these writers drew caricatures of “savages,” “Oriental despots,” and “ancient” Greeks and Romans. Others earnestly attempted to understand them. But, throughout this history, comparative thinking opened a space for critical reflection. At its worst, such space could give rise to a sense of European superiority. At its best, however, it could prompt awareness of the value of other ways of being in the world. Launay’s masterful survey of some of the Western tradition’s finest minds offers a keen exploration of the genesis of the notion of “civilization,” as well as an engaging portrait of the promises and perils of cross-cultural comparison.

Verrier Elwin (1902-1964) was unquestionably the most colorful and influential non-official Englishman to live and work in twentieth-century India. A prolific writer, Elwin's ethnographic studies and popular works on India's tribal customs, art, myth and folklore continue to generate controversy.

Described by his contemporaries as a cross between Albert Schweitzer and Paul Gauguin, Elwin was a man of contradictions, at times taking on the role of evangelist, social worker, political activist, poet, government worker, and more. He rubbed elbows with the elite of both Britain and India, yet found himself equally at home among the impoverished and destitute. Intensely political, the Oxford-trained scholar tirelessly defended the rights of the indigenous and, despite the deep religious influences of St. Francis and Mahatma Gandhi on his early career, staunchly opposed Hindu and Christian puritans in the debate over the future of India's tribals. Although he was ordained as an Anglican priest, Elwin was married twice to tribal women and enthusiastically (and publicly) extolled the tribals' practice of free sex. Later, as prime minister Nehru's friend and advisor in independent India, his compelling defense of tribal hedonism made him at once hugely influential, extremely controversial, and the polemical focal point of heated discussions on tribal policy and economic development.

Savaging the Civilized is both biography and history, an exploration through Elwin's life of some of the great debates of the twentieth century: the future of development, cultural assimilation versus cultural difference, the political practice of postcolonial as opposed to colonial governments, and the moral practice of writers and intellectuals.

The book focuses on the historical trajectories of Savu, an island in the Nusa Tenggara Timur province, eastern Indonesia. While Savu is a relatively small island, aspects of its society, as well as this study’s blend of anthropology and historical method, makes this book of fundamental relevance to the ongoing comparative examination of Austronesian-speaking populations from Madagascar to Hawaii and from Taiwan to Timor. This book brings together Duggan’s detailed understanding of Savunese society and genealogies with Hägerdal’s deep knowledge of the Dutch and Portuguese archives to understand the overlap between these perspectives on Savu’s past. The text discusses the precolonial period up to the sixteenth century, and then examines how early-colonial encounters with the Portuguese and Dutch (VOC) changed the system of governance. In the nineteenth century, the Savunese embarked on minor colonial enterprises in Timor and Sumba, and were still largely autonomous vis-à-vis the colonial state. Protestant missionaries gained foothold after 1870, though Christianization was a slow process. Colonial rule via a Dutch-appointed raja was introduced in the early twentieth century. The text follows the fate of Savu during the struggle for independence and the postcolonial era, discussing the dilemmas of modernization and the resilience of the unique local culture.

One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films, Gone with the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have. The book was published in June 1936; the film premiered on December 15, 1939. The book has sold 25 million copies, has been translated into twenty-seven languages, and won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize. The film received eight Oscars and has been called the greatest movie ever made. Everyone has heard of GWTW. Most of us have seen the movie or read the novel. In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for the film/novel's success among viewers/readers. The author asked GWTW fans to relate their experiences with the works, to explain their fascination with the story, to describe the impact GWTW has had on their lives. The results are astonishing and illuminating. In the United States and England, where the author conducted her research, women have to a remarkable degree claimed the story Margaret Mitchell wrote as their own. They name their children Rhett and Scarlett. They see in the lives of the men and women of GWTW their own lives, their own restlessness, their own aspirations for something better than marriage and motherhood. Helen Taylor not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The author also looks at the contemporary implications of the work's political conservatism, racism, and--paradoxically--feminism. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for eery fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.

If a religion cannot attract and instruct young people, it will struggle to survive, which is why recreational programs were second only to theological questions in the development of twentieth-century Mormonism. In this book, Richard Ian Kimball explores how Mormon leaders used recreational programs to ameliorate the problems of urbanization and industrialization and to inculcate morals and values in LDS youth. As well as promoting sports as a means of physical and spiritual excellence, Progressive Era Mormons established a variety of institutions such as the Deseret Gymnasium and camps for girls and boys, all designed to compete with more "worldly" attractions and to socialize adolescents into the faith. Kimball employs a wealth of source material including periodicals, diaries, journals, personal papers, and institutional records to illuminate this hitherto underexplored aspect of the LDS church. In addition to uncovering the historical roots of many Mormon institutions still visible today, Sports in Zion is a detailed look at the broader functions of recreation in society.

Scenes from the Shadows challenges one of the most enduring myths of Argentine history: that Afro-Argentines had disappeared by the twentieth century. Bringing together leading scholars of race, culture, and history, the volume demonstrates that Afro-descendant communities remained a vital part of Argentine society even as official narratives, public institutions, and popular memory rendered them increasingly invisible. Drawing on oral histories, community newspapers, family archives, ethnography, and archival research, the contributors recover the lives, organizations, and cultural worlds that persisted beneath the surface of Argentina’s self-image as a White, European nation.

Focusing on Buenos Aires—home to the country’s largest Afro-descendant population and the epicenter of debates over race and national identity—the book situates Argentina within the broader history of the African diaspora in Latin America and examines how ideologies of Whitening (blanqueamiento), racial classification, urban development, and national identity obscured Afro-descendant presence throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore Black celebrity and performance culture, tango, Afro-Porteño associational life, community journalism, public employment, migration, gender, and the formation of Afro-descendant social networks, revealing how Afro-Argentines negotiated exclusion while sustaining vibrant traditions of community, creativity, and belonging.

More than a recovery of forgotten histories, Scenes from the Shadows offers a new interpretation of modern Argentina itself. It shows how race continued to shape social life even in a society that denied its importance and how Afro-descendant communities endured despite powerful pressures toward erasure. A major contribution to Afro-Latin American studies, Argentine history, and diaspora scholarship, the volume restores Afro-Argentines to their place in the story of twentieth-century Argentina and provides a powerful framework for understanding the relationship between race, memory, and nationhood.

Contributors

Paulina L. Alberto
Judith M. Anderson
Laura Colabella
Robert J. Cottrol
Alejandra Egido
Alejandro Frigerio
Lea Geler
Lucas Glasman
Miriam Gomes
Chisu Teresa Ko
Eva Lamborghini
Marta Maffia
Carmen Yannone

To listen to David M. Schneider is to hear the voice of American anthropology. To listen at length is to hear much of the discipline’s history, from the realities of postwar practice and theory to Schneider’s own influence on the development of symbolic and interpretive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schneider on Schneider offers readers this rare opportunity, and with it an engrossing introduction into a world of intellectual rigor, personal charm, and wit.
In this work, based on conversations with Richard Handler, Schneider tells the story of his days devoted to anthropology—as a student of Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. With a master’s sense of the telling anecdote, he describes his education at Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap and among the Mescalero Apache, and his years teaching at the London School of Economics, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Musing on the current state and the future of anthropology, Schneider’s cast of characters reads like a who’s who of postwar social science. His reflections on anthropological field research and academic politics address some of the most pressing ethical and epistemological issues facing scholars today, while yielding tales of unexpected amusement.
With its humor and irony, its wealth of information and searching questions about the state of anthropology, Schneider on Schneider not only provides an important resource for the history of twentieth-century social science, but also brings to life the entertaining voice of an engaging storyteller.

Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. Facing dwindling commercial demand and the gradual disappearance of venues, many aspiring jazz musicians today learn their craft, and find their careers, in one of the many academic programs that now offer jazz degrees. School for Cool is their story. Going inside the halls of two of the most prestigious jazz schools around—at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York—Eitan Y. Wilf tackles a formidable question at the heart of jazz today: can creativity survive institutionalization? 

Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it. 

Offering a broad historical and theoretical reassessment of science fiction, Christine Cornea explores the development of this popular genre in cinema from its very beginnings to the present day. Each chapter offers analyses of particular films, situating them within a wider historical/cultural context while also highlighting a specific key thematic issue. Cornea provides vital and unique perspectives on the genre, including discussions of the relevance of psychedelic imagery, race, the “new woman of science,” generic performance, and the prevalence of “techno-orientalism” in recent films. Enriching the book are new interviews with some of the main practitioners in the field, such as Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, Ken Russell, Stan Winston, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Joe Morton, Dean Norris, and Billy Gray. While American films are Cornea’s main focus, she also engages with a range of examples from other countries and explains why science fiction lends itself well to transnational reception.

Among the many films discussed are The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, The Quatermass Experiment, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Demon Seed, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Wars, Altered States, Alien, Blade Runner, The Brother from Another Planet, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Predator, The One, Dark City, The Matrix, Fifth Element, and eXistenZ.

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.
 
Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.
 
Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

Searching for Africa in Brazil is a learned exploration of tradition and change in Afro-Brazilian religions. Focusing on the convergence of anthropologists’ and religious leaders’ exegeses, Stefania Capone argues that twentieth-century anthropological research contributed to the construction of an ideal Afro-Brazilian religious orthodoxy identified with the Nagô (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomblé leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomblé on anthropologists, reshaping in their own interest narratives of Afro-Brazilian religious practice. The anthropological narratives were then taken as official accounts of religious orthodoxy by many practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Capone draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro as she demonstrates that there is no pure or orthodox Afro-Brazilian religion.

Challenging the usual interpretations of Afro-Brazilian religions as fixed entities, completely independent of one another, Capone reveals these practices as parts of a unique religious continuum. She does so through an analysis of ritual variations as well as discursive practices. To illuminate the continuum of Afro-Brazilian religious practice and the tensions between exegetic discourses and ritual practices, Capone focuses on the figure of Exu, the sacred African trickster who allows communication between gods and men. Following Exu and his avatars, she discloses the centrality of notions of prestige and power—mystical and religious—in Afro-Brazilian religions. To explain how religious identity is constantly negotiated among social actors, Capone emphasizes the agency of practitioners and their political agendas in the “return to roots,” or re-Africanization, movement, an attempt to recover the original purity of a mythical and legitimizing Africa.

 Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed states. This engaging, accessible book by one of the world’s foremost researchers on Africa captures the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social foundations that make Africa what it is today.

Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to fail nor destined to succeed. As he assesses the challenges of African sovereignties, Ellis is not under the illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet, he sees great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones alone has helped to overcome previous gaps in infrastructure, African retail markets are becoming integrated, and banking is expanding. Businesses from China and emerging powers from the West are investing more than ever before in the still land-rich region, and globalization is offering possibilities of enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in charting the future of their continent.

This highly readable survey of the continent today offers an indispensable guide to how money, power, and development are shaping Africa’s future.

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. A massive global health intervention, the scaling up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), saved them and created a generation of people who learned to live with treatment. As clients they joined programs that offered free antiretroviral medicine and encouraged "positive living." Because ART is not a cure but a lifelong treatment regime, its consequences are far-reaching for society, families, and individuals. Drawing on personal accounts and a broad knowledge of Ugandan culture and history, the essays in this collection explore ART from the perspective of those who received second chances. Their concerns about treatment, partners, children, work, food, and bodies reveal the essential sociality of Ugandan life. The collection is based on research undertaken by a team of social scientists including both Western and African scholars.

Contributors. Phoebe Kajubi, David Kyaddondo, Lotte Meinert, Hanne O. Mogensen, Godfrey Etyang Siu, Jenipher Twebaze, Michael A. Whyte, Susan Reynolds Whyte

Over a century after its first stage performance, Peter Pan has become deeply embedded in Western popular culture, as an enduring part of childhood memories, in every part of popular media, and in commercial enterprises.

Since 2003 the characters from this story have had a highly visible presence in nearly every genre of popular culture: two major films, a literary sequel to the original adventures, a graphic novel featuring a grown-up Wendy Darling, and an Argentinean novel about a children's book writer inspired by J. M. Barrie. Simultaneously, Barrie surfaced as the subject of two major biographies and a feature film. The engaging essays in Second Star to the Right approach Pan from literary, dramatic, film, television, and sociological perspectives and, in the process, analyze his emergence and preservation in the cultural imagination.

Gilbert Herdt is Director of the Program in Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, where he is also Professor of Human Sexuality Studies and Anthropology.

Secrecy and Insurgency deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in December 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents.

Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco’s Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change.

The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Petén; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala.

Secrecy and Insurgency will be of interest to social and cultural anthropologists, human geographers, and scholars in Latin American studies, human rights, women’s studies, and gender studies.

Unprecedented crime rates have made Guatemala City one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Following a peace process that ended Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war and impelled the transition from a state-centric economy to the global free market, Guatemala’s neoliberal moment is now strikingly evident in the practices and politics of security. Postwar violence has not prompted public debates about the conditions that permit transnational gangs, drug cartels, and organized crime to thrive. Instead, the dominant reaction to crime has been the cultural promulgation of fear and the privatization of what would otherwise be the state’s responsibility to secure the city. This collection of essays, the first comparative study of urban Guatemala, explores these neoliberal efforts at security. Contributing to the anthropology of space and urban studies, this book brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how postwar violence and responses to it are reconfiguring urban space, transforming the relationship between city and country, and exacerbating deeply rooted structures of inequality and ethnic discrimination.

Contributors. Peter Benson, Manuela Camus, Avery Dickins de Girón, Edward F. Fischer, Deborah Levenson, Thomas Offit, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Kedron Thomas, Rodrigo José Véliz

From the history of state terrorism in Latin America, to state- and group-perpetrated plunder and genocide in Africa, to war and armed conflicts in the Middle East, militarization--the heightened role of organized aggression in society--continues to painfully shape the lives of millions of people around the world.

In Security Disarmed, scholars, policy planners, and activists come together to think critically about the human cost of violence and viable alternatives to armed conflict. Arranged in four parts--alternative paradigms of security, cross-national militarization, militarism in the United States, and pedagogical and cultural concerns--the book critically challenges militarization and voices an alternative encompassing vision of human security by analyzing the relationships among gender, race, and militarization. This collection of essays evaluates and resists the worldwide crisis of militarizationùincluding but going beyond American military engagements in the twenty-first century.