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Until this century, Northern Nigeria was a major center of textile production and trade. Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria examines this dramatic change in textile aesthetics, technologies, and social values in order to explain the extraordinary shift in textile demand, production, and trade.

Textile Ascendancies provides information for the study of the demise of textile manufacturing outside Nigeria. The book also suggests the conundrum considered by George Orwell concerning the benefits and disadvantages of “mechanical progress,” and digital progress, for human existence. While textile mill workers in northern Nigeria were proud to participate in the mechanization of weaving, the “tendency for the mechanization of the world” represented by more efficient looms and printing equipment in China has contributed to the closing of Nigerian mills and unemployment.

Textile Ascendancies will appeal toanthropologists for its analyses of social identity as well as how the ethnic identity of consumers influences continued handwoven textile production. The consideration of aesthetics and fashionable dress will appeal to specialists in textiles and clothing. It will be useful to economic historians for the comparative analysis of textile manufacturing decline in the 21st century. It will also be of interest to those thinking about global futures, about digitalization, and how new ways of making cloth and clothing may provide both employment and environmentally sound production practices.

This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold

Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.” 

The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth  connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative. 

By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.

A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy
 

From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation. 

Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.

For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.

In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways.

The book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe.

The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control.

How religious institutions used landscapes and architecture to express their religious and social ideologies

The Archaeology of Protestant Landscapes focuses on three religious institutions in the US South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: St. Paul’s Parish Church in coastal South Carolina, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in central Alabama, and Cane Hill College in Northwest Arkansas. Drawing from archaeological surveys and excavations, artifact analysis, archival research, geophysical testing, and architectural information on religious structures, Kimberly Pyszka offers case studies of these institutions, which were located in developing communities that varied socially, politically, and economically.

Pyszka uses these case studies to demonstrate that select religious institutions used and modified natural landscape features to create cultural landscapes to express their ideology, identity, goals, and social, religious, and political power. She notes that where those structures were constructed, how they sat on the landscape, their architectural style, and their overall visual appearance were well-considered decisions made by religious leaders to benefit their organizations, communities, and, sometimes, themselves.

Pyszka also uses these case studies to highlight the social roles that religious organizations played in the development of communities. She points to landscape decisions—specifically to how the architectural design of religious structures was used, intentionally or not, to unite people, often those of differing religious backgrounds—as contributing to the creation of a common identity among people living in new and still-growing settlements, aiding in community development. This book contributes to the growing body of work within historical archaeology on churches, churchyards, and cemeteries and to the increasing awareness among archaeologists of how these sites contribute to questions of identity, consumerism, trade, and colonialism.
 

A novel exploration of playing fields as aesthetic and architectural spaces that frame athletes’ creativity and spectators’ evolving experiences of sport.

The playing field is a laboratory of invention, where athletes and coaches create new uses for the human body in response to the constraints and affordance of space. The Architecture of the Playing Field explores the aesthetic and physical experiences of the grounds on which we compete, from translucent squash courts to the NBA three-point line to the city streets adopted by skateboarders.

Richard Cleary digs into the perspectives of spectators, athletes, coaches, and umpires, which have changed along with the shifting configuration of the playing surface and the mediation of the action, from early sports coverage to today’s high-tech TV broadcasts. He shows how rules governing the size, shape, and divisions of the field reflect sports’ entwinement with societies at large, in particular the politics of race and gender. Mindful as well that some sports resist containment, he analyzes the disruptive use of space by snowboarders and parkour athletes. The Architecture of the Playing Field sensitizes us to the interplay of settings and bodies in motion fundamental to the power of sport.

While basketball didn’t take up residence in the White House in January 2009, the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did. In The Audacity of Hoop, celebrated sportswriter Alexander Wolff examines Barack Obama, the person and president, by the light of basketball. This game helped Obama explore his identity, keep a cool head, impress his future wife, and define himself as a candidate. 

Wolff chronicles Obama’s love of the game from age 10, on the campaign trail—where it eventually took on talismanic meaning—and throughout his two terms in office. More than 125 photographs illustrate Obama dribbling, shooting free throws, playing pickup games, cooling off with George Clooney, challenging his special assistant Reggie Love for a rebound, and taking basketball to political meetings. There is also an assessment of Obama’s influence on the NBA, including a dawning political consciousness in the league’s locker rooms. 

Sidebars reveal the evolution of the president’s playing style, “Baracketology”—a not-entirely-scientific art of filling out the commander in chief’s NCAA tournament bracket—and a timeline charts Obama’s personal and professional highlights.

Equal parts biographical sketch, political narrative, and cultural history, The Audacity of Hoop shows how the game became a touchstone in Obama’s exercise of the power of the presidency.  

Most people typically think of armed conflict in physical terms, involving guns and bombs, ships and planes, tanks and missiles. But today, because of mass communication, war and the effort to prevent it are increasingly dependent on non-physical factors—the capacity to persuade combatants and citizens to engage in violence or avoid it, and the packaging of the information on which decision making is based. This book explores the many ways that mass communication has revolutionized international relations, whether the aim is to make war effectively or to prevent it.

Gary Messinger shows that over the last 150 years a succession of breakthroughs in the realm of media has reshaped the making of war and peace. Along with mass newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, radio, television, computer software, and telecommunication satellites comes an array of strategies for exploiting these media to control popular beliefs and emotions. Images of war now arrive in many forms and reach billions of people simultaneously. Political and military leaders must react to crowd impulses that sweep around the globe. Nation-states and nongovernmental groups, including terrorists, use mass communication to spread their portrayals of reality.

Drawing on a wide range of media products, from books and articles to films and television programs, as well as his own research in the field of propaganda studies, Messinger offers a fresh and comprehensive overview. He skillfully charts the path that has led us to our current situation and suggests where we might go next.