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Offers a new theory of the minority as a political form and shows how majoritarian projects are built through its appropriation.

Around the world, national majorities are telling themselves a potent story: that they are the ones in danger. In the United States and Serbia, Christian and white nationalists warn of “replacement.” In Turkey and Pakistan, Muslim nationalists cast religious “others” as existential threats. In India, Hindu nationalists claim that Hindus are becoming minorities in “their own” land. These movements, and the migration and citizenship policies that accompany them, are not aberrations, but rather expressions of a logic embedded in the modern nation-state—a logic that turns people into numbers, numbers into votes, and difference into enmity.

In The People, in Parts, anthropologist Natasha S. Raheja homes in on a paradox visible along the India-Pakistan border. When Hindus cross into India from Pakistan seeking refuge, they are admitted as minorities in need of protection. Yet in India, their welcome into the putative majority is selective and conditional. How does majority-minority status shift by crossing a border? Drawing on long-term research in the Thar Desert region, across Sindh and Rajasthan, Raheja traces how caste and religion shape people's encounters with the state and argues that this bureaucratic confusion is political machinery. Where liberal democracy treats the minority as a shifting, procedural category, nation-state governance fixes it as a substantive identity. The suffering of minoritized populations becomes raw material for majoritarian projects, converted into demographic justification, electoral arithmetic, and nationalist grievance. The minority form, in other words, does majoritarian work.

The People, in Parts offers not only a searing diagnosis of minority-majority politics and the governance of migration but a reframing: the problem is not simply about who belongs and who does not, but how nationalist belonging crosses state borders, pointing to strains within liberal democracy and the nation-state order.

Eugenics and scientific racism are experiencing a resurgence, and an understanding of the ideas of Aleš Hrdlička can help combat them. Today, the racial science of the early twentieth century is both untenable and contemptible. This book is about an arch figure of that period: Aleš Hrdlička served as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution from 1910 to 1941. Although his ideas about race are today considered pseudoscience, the uncomfortable truth is that he was an internationally respected scientist in his own day.

The Perils of Race-Thinking advances a bold new interpretation of modern racial ideology by exploring Hrdlička’s intellectual world. Using previously untapped Czech-language sources, Brandon irrevocably alters the discussion about this important figure by placing Czech nationalism at the center of his racial thinking. Defying disciplinary categories, Perils of Race-Thinking joins critical analysis of this key American anthropologist with an incisive revisionist perspective of interwar Czechoslovakia to unearth transnational racial presumptions lurking behind the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

At the center of Hrdlička’s race beliefs was his commitment to Czech and Slovak unity and independence. From this center, his next level of concern was what he believed to be a millennial racial struggle between Germans and Slavs. On a global scale, he viewed the Slavs, and especially the Soviet Union, as a eugenic bastion of White strength holding off the “rising tide of color.”

Step by step, Perils of Race-Thinking mercilessly dismantles Hrdlička’s racial system and exposes it as mysticism dressed up in the language of science. Convinced that human individuals belonged “naturally” in racial groups, Hrdlička embraced a revolutionary program of reordering the globe according to a harrowing morality of “Darwinist” struggle. Yet despite a lifetime of measuring body parts, even Hrdlička could not decide how many races there were or how to tell them apart.

An examination of surrealism’s unofficial ethnography of marginalized subjectivities


In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” In The Persistence of Masks, Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years through a close look at the reviews Documents (1929–30) and Minotaure (1933–39) as well as the surrealist writer-turned-ethnographer Michel Leiris’s ethnography of possession. Analyzing surrealist aesthetic criticism, art, poetry, and field research in terms of a common interest in marginalized modes of subjectivity, Cheng argues that the surrealists used the figures of the mask, the veil, the hand, and the hat to radically reconceive the subject as nonhegemonic, nonanthropocentric, and feminine-identified.

Though ethnographic surrealism usually refers to the collaboration between professional ethnologists at the Institut de l’Ethnologie in Paris and Georges Bataille’s so-called dissident circle of surrealists, Cheng demonstrates that surrealism’s unofficial ethnography began long before the founding of the movement. Starting with André Breton’s wartime text “Subject” (1916), written when he was still a young psychiatric intern treating traumatized soldiers, she shows how the future surrealist poet shifted from a clinical to a para-ethnographic approach to subjectivity when adopting his patient’s first-person voice as a textual mask.

Revealing surrealism to be always implicitly ethnographic, Cheng uncovers deep affinities between archrivals Breton and Bataille, highlights psychiatry’s underacknowledged role in surrealism’s lay ethnography, and theorizes the surrealists’ feminine identification as a means of critiquing power. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, The Persistence of Masks offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture.

Focusing on the Bororo people of west-central Brazil, this book addresses the construction of self-identity through interethnic interaction. By presenting the images the Bororo have of themselves as well as the images of others who have interacted with them, Brazilian anthropologist Sylvia Caiuby Novaes argues convincingly that Bororo self-images are constructed with the aid of a peculiar looking-glass—it is in the images of others that they see themselves.

Incorporating contributions from psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and semiotics, Play of Mirrors focuses on symbols, images, discourse, and meanings rather than solely on the problem of acculturation. It thus reflects the thinking of a new generation of Brazilian anthropologists who have shifted their focus from native communities as isolated entities to an examination of their embeddedness within broader national and international arenas.

Jude L. Fernando explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments.

The book examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance.

This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.

Rethinking the state through everyday life in South Sudan

In 2011, after decades of war, South Sudan became the newest nation-state to emerge in the twenty-first century. Independence brought hopes for peace and self-determination, yet those aspirations soon confronted renewed conflict and the challenges of building a nation amid significant political, environmental, and economic uncertainty. The Post-State State is a political and urban ethnography of how South Sudanese people navigate this unsettled moment by imagining and striving for their possible futures in an open-ended state of becoming.

Christian J. Doll explores how residents of the capital, Juba, make and remake urban space through everyday practices of state-making and state-imagining. In a place where civilians’ fear of the state’s violent potential and the limits of territorial sovereignty are particularly extreme, Doll centers the ways South Sudanese people transform uncertainty into possibility. Hope, disappointment, and anticipation emerge not as opposing forces but as intertwined ways of understanding and acting in the world.

Through analyses of political rituals, social infrastructures, ethnic spatial claims, humanitarian governance, and plans for a new capital city, The Post-State State offers a new understanding of how the state is imagined and enacted. In doing so, this book advances broader conversations about state-making, sovereignty, precarity, and futurity in an increasingly uncertain political world.

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This archaeological study of the interactions between Western Shoshone families and Euro-American ranchers in the late nineteenth century helps fill the gap between what is known regarding Late Prehistoric foragers of the American West and ethnohistoric understanding of Native American peoples of the Great Basin.

Pottery Hill, an archaeological site located in Grass Valley, Nevada, northeast of the historic mining town of Austin, represents a small settlement of Native Americans who lived there in the late 1800s. The Grass Valley Shoshone, whose environment and traditional lifeways were disrupted by the arrival of miners and settlers in the 1860s, found work on the ranches and farms in the valley.

Archaeological fieldwork conducted in the 1970s investigated house remains, hearths, and artifacts. A recent analysis of these data, enhanced by the use of archival documents and oral history, provides new insights into the dynamics of late nineteenth-century life in central Nevada. The Pottery Hill Site addresses a critical period in the history of the Grass Valley Shoshone, who adopted and modified Euro-American artifacts and materials while maintaining important aspects of their traditional culture. It gives readers a deeper understanding of the effects of Euro-American settlement on the Shoshone, the history of the western United States, and the reciprocal impacts of cultural contact.

Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians.

Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015

The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.