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Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how conflict shapes the establishment and maintenance of political institutions, from small-scale societies to expansive empires. The book examines the material and ideological factors that drive warfare, the organization of combatants, the ways leaders use violence to consolidate power, and how groups resist political domination in times of conflict. By posing critical questions about the efficacy of strategies and the varied outcomes of conflict-driven power struggles, this volume offers profound insights into the dynamics of political control throughout history.

Bringing together case studies from diverse regions and time periods, Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Controlilluminates the multifaceted nature of political violence. The volume includes discussions of human sacrifice, slave-taking, ideological signaling, and military strategy and tactics. The case studies reveal how different forms of political violence influence societal structures. From the fortifications of the Māori in New Zealand to the city walls of early historic India, each contribution provides a detailed analysis of how warfare has been used to both to challenge and to establish political hierarchies. Featuring examples from small foraging communities to large empires across various regions and time periods, the book offers a wide-ranging exploration of how different groups have used and resisted political violence.

This essential work contributes to our understanding of the intersections between conflict and political power, making it a vital resource for scholars of anthropology, archaeology, political science, and history.

In Waste Works, Brenda Chalfin examines Ghana’s planned city of Tema, theorizing about the formative role of waste infrastructure in urban politics and public life. Chalfin argues that at Tema’s midcentury founding, a prime objective of governing authorities was to cultivate self-contained citizens by means of tightly orchestrated domestic infrastructure and centralized control of bodily excrement to both develop and depoliticize the new nation. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how Tema residents pursue novel approaches to urban waste and sanitation built on the ruins of the inherited order, profoundly altering the urban public sphere. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste’s diverse political potentials.

A heterodox compendium of “beasts of waste,” playfully re-imagining the medieval treatise on various kinds of animals.

Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste is a creative exercise that occupies letters, numbers, and symbols of Western academic language to compose a list of thirty-five short entries on the uncomfortable but pressing topic of waste in the contemporary world. The collection is richly illustrated with artwork, photography, collage, and mixed media and conveys the message that various forms of waste and pollution have achieved a beast-like or untamable quality, at times pungently transferring to considerations of “the human,” or humans treated as waste.

How the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s reshaped the lives of young Kichwa men

We Are Important People Now illuminates the trajectories and life experiences of young Napo Kichwa men who have worked as tour guides in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, in the wake of the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s. Anthropologist Ernesto J. Benitez analyzes the socioeconomic situation of these men and the motivations and desires that drive them to seek service-based employment. Benitez discusses how the tour guides go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. The opportunities for self-transformation are at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. They now see their indigeneity as an asset, but their urban lifestyles, pursuits of intimate relationships with foreign tourists, and sometimes-dismissive attitudes toward Kichwa people in rural Ecuador distance them socially from the broader Kichwa population. 

Importantly, the book interrogates the possibilities and limitations that produce—and are produced by—such emergent forms of identity formation, situating the current period within a broader analysis of the colonial and postcolonial history of the area. It pays special attention to how different processes of interaction with and incorporation into colonial and state productive and biopolitical regimes have impacted the historical production and performance of Kichwa ethnic and gendered identities in the Upper Amazon region. A wide swath of anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and gender and Indigenous studies specialists will be edified by this timely and accessible narrative.
 

How disabled people and those around them create inhabitable worlds in an ableist present

In the rush to build a better tomorrow, disability rights advocates often focus their energies on planning for a more inclusive future while critiquing today’s inaccessible society. In We Can’t Wait, Michele Ilana Friedner instead offers a new lens on the current daily acts of worldmaking performed by disabled people, their kin, and nondisabled allies, attending to the joys and complexities that arise within these spaces.

Examining three educational sites in India—a foundation-run school for intellectually disabled children, the complex relationship between a college’s sign language interpreter and the students she works with, and abundant disabled student activism at a university—Friedner’s vivid ethnographic analysis bears witness to the physical, cognitive, and emotional labor with which disabled people and their social circles build inhabitable worlds as they are made to wait for an accessible feature that may never arrive. This practice of antiabandonment distributes agency throughout these communities and stretches social worlds in crucial ways.

Drawing from Alice Wong’s proclamation that disabled people are oracles of our collective futures, We Can’t Wait uplifts affirming approaches to today’s world in which no one is left behind and disabled ways of being can thrive—a care that is needed now, without delay.

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In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. While the Japanese government proposed and enforced infrastructural transformations in the wake of the tsunami, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by the local residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. In doing so, he argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, showing how attempts to “ecologize” safety may offer more sustainable ways of thinking about security, preservation, and infrastructure.

This is a book about death, comprehensive in its discussion of strategies for coping with loss and grief in rural northern Russia. Elizabeth Warner and Svetlana Adonyeva bring forth the voices of those for whom caring for their dead is deeply personal and firmly rooted in practices of everyday life. Thoroughly researched chapters consider lamenting traditions, examine beliefs surrounding natural symbols, and parse sensitive and profound funereal rituals.

“We remember, we love, we grieve” is a common epitaph in this part of the world. As contemporary Russia contends with the Soviet Union’s legacy of dismantling older ways of life, the phrase ripples beyond individual loss—it encapsulates communities’ determination to preserve their customs when faced with oppression. This volume offers insight into a core cultural practice, exploring the dynamism of tradition.

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis.

Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams, VanLandingham finds that on the principal measures of disaster recovery—housing stability, economic stability, health, and social adaptation—the Vietnamese community fared better than other communities. By Katrina’s one-year anniversary, almost 90 percent of the Vietnamese had returned to their neighborhood, higher than the rate of return for either blacks or whites. They also showed much lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than other groups. And by the second year after the flood, the employment rate for the Vietnamese had returned to its pre-Katrina level.

While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other “model minorities”, VanLandingham shows that in fact it was a broad set of factors that fostered their rapid recovery. Many of these factors had little to do with culture. First, these immigrants were highly selected—those who settled in New Orleans enjoyed higher human capital than those who stayed in Vietnam. Also, as a small, tightly knit community, the New Orleans Vietnamese could efficiently pass on information about job leads, business prospects, and other opportunities to one another. Finally, they had access to a number of special programs that were intended to facilitate recovery among immigrants, and enjoyed a positive social image both in New Orleans and across the U.S., which motivated many people and charities to offer the community additional resources. But culture—which VanLandingham is careful to define and delimit—was important, too. A shared history of overcoming previous challenges—and a powerful set of narratives that describe these successes; a shared set of perspectives or frames for interpreting events; and a shared sense of symbolic boundaries that distinguish them from broader society are important elements of culture that provided the Vietnamese with some strong advantages in the post-Katrina environment.

By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.

Although less well known than its much-admired counterparts in Peru and Bolivia, highland Ecuadorian weaving is an Andean tradition that has relationships with these more southern areas. A world away from the industrialized textile manufacturing of Euro-American society, these handmade pieces reflect the history and artistry of an ancient culture.

This comprehensive study, edited by Ann Pollard Rowe, is unrivaled in its detail and includes not only descriptions of the indigenous weaving and dyeing technology, but also an interpretation of its historical significance, as well as hundreds of photographs, drawings, and maps that inform the understanding of the process.

The principal focus is on backstrap-loom weaving, a major pre-Hispanic technology. Ecuadorian backstrap looms, which differ in various ways from those found elsewhere in the Andes, have previously only been treated in general terms. Here, the basic operation of this style of loom is covered, as are a variety of patterning techniques including warp-resist (ikat) dyeing, weaving belts with twill, and supplementary- and complementary-warp patterning. Spanish colonial treadle-loom weaving is also covered. The weaving techniques are explained in detail, so the reader can replicate them if desired.

Textiles have been an important art form among Andean peoples from remote prehistory up to the present. A greater understanding of their creation process can yield a more meaningful appreciation of the art itself.

Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive.

Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters.

This book is the recipient of the 2021 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

Through an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials.
 
Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones—the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, Buddhist altars installed inside the home. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing.

In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral-goods showrooms, neglected cemeteries, and cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Hannah Gould analyzes the lifecycle of butsudan, illuminating how they are made, circulate through religious and funerary economies, mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, and—as the population ages, families disperse, and fewer homes have space for large lacquer cabinets—eventually fall into disuse. What happens, she asks, when a funerary technology becomes obsolete? And what will take its place? Gould examines new products better suited to urban apartments: miniature urns and sleek altars inspired by Scandinavian design, even reliquary jewelry. She visits an automated columbarium and considers new ritual practices that embrace impermanence. At an industry expo, she takes on the role of “demonstration corpse.” Throughout, Gould invites us to rethink memorialization and describes a distinct form of Japanese necrosociality, one based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.

The urge to engage with finitude is increasingly central in our present apocalyptic time of political and ecological turmoil. Aging populations and the rapid development of advanced, but expensive, technologies to ever further postpone death pose significant healthcare challenges for societies around the world. In these times, how do people care when the end of life is near? How do they orient toward death? Do they see death as an absolute end, and if not, what sort of horizon does death present? Questioning taken for granted assumptions about end-of-life care, When Death Is on the Horizon analyzes how people approach death in a wide variety of geographical locations and social contexts. Through in-depth ethnographic case studies, it shows how people orient toward, beyond, and away from death, and how they do so within a world marked by historic and ongoing socio-political and structural inequalities.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

Daniel Ruiz-Serna examines how the devastation caused by war impacts nonhuman inhabitants in the forests and rivers in the traditional lands of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.

In When Women Have Wings, Donna F. Murdock provides an insightful and detailed look at the tensions, contradictions, and positive moments apparent in a women's development project in Medellín, Colombia. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic field research in a working-class women's community center run by a local feminist NGO, this in-depth account illuminates both working- and middle-class women's perspectives on the professionalization of feminist NGOs and provides an unusual ethnographic lens on the process as it unfolds. Using detailed descriptions of the encounters between working- and middle-class women to highlight how the women's center attempts to negotiate the pressures of feminism and professionalization, Murdock depicts the frailty and complexity of cross-class organizing and the ways that this process may be threatened by professionalized NGO styles. Poignant accounts of women's attempts to navigate these challenges amid poverty and civil war show how changing political and economic demands may ultimately compromise feminist NGOs' long-held commitments to sustainable development practice focused on grassroots empowerment. With its clear and vivid style, When Women Have Wings fills a gap for scholars of feminist development, professionalized feminist NGOs, grassroots democracy, and Latin American women's movements and will contribute much-needed insight into the everyday workings of the problems of professionalization and democratic development. "By offering a fine-grained, engaging and provocative account of the workings of feminist nongovernmental organizations and their working-class women constituencies, When Women Have Wings fills a gaping lacuna in the now expansive literature on women's movements in the Global South." -- Sonia E. Alvarez, Department of Political Sciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst "Donna Murdock's in-depth ethnographic account will be an important contribution to the literature on women's movements, Latin American feminisms, and gender identity politics in the context of neoliberalism and political violence." -- Amy Lind, Department of Women's Studies, University of Cincinnati "This remarkable book, full of ethnographic detail and lucid analysis, tells a compelling story of feminist struggles with neoliberalism in Latin America. Murdock takes us into the lives and struggles of working-class women and their feminist allies, illustrating how class divides are painfully exacerbated by shrinking state budgets, rising requirements for citizenship, and the professionalization of social movements. She nonetheless leaves us with the 'fragile wings of hope,' grounded in women's ongoing efforts to confront violence and make their voices heard in the face of difficult odds. This is important reading for feminists, scholars of development, and those concerned with global justice." -- Millie Thayer, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya's Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression.

Heather D. Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.

Copublished with the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University of Albany

In Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? Brent E. Metz explores the complicated issue of who is Indigenous by focusing on the sociohistorical transformations over the past two millennia of the population currently known as the Ch’orti’ Maya. Epigraphers agree that the language of elite writers in Classic Maya civilization was Proto-Ch’olan, the precursor of the Maya languages Ch’orti’, Ch’olti’, Ch’ol, and Chontal. When the Spanish invaded in the early 1500s, the eastern half of this area was dominated by people speaking various dialects of Ch’olti’ and closely related Apay (Ch’orti’), but by the end of the colonial period (1524–1821) only a few pockets of Ch’orti’ speakers remained.
 
From 2003 to 2018 Metz partnered with Indigenous leaders to conduct a historical and ethnographic survey of Ch’orti’ Maya identity in what was once the eastern side of the Classic period lowland Maya region and colonial period Ch’orti’-speaking region of eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador. Today only 15,000 Ch’orti’ speakers remain, concentrated in two municipalities in eastern Guatemala, but since the 1990s nearly 100,000 impoverished farmers have identified as Ch’orti’ in thirteen Guatemalan and Honduran municipalities, with signs of Indigenous revitalization in several Salvadoran municipalities as well. Indigenous movements have raised the ethnic consciousness of many non-Ch’orti’-speaking semi-subsistence farmers, or campesinos. The region’s inhabitants employ diverse measures to assess identity, referencing language, history, traditions, rurality, “blood,” lineage, discrimination, and more.
 
Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? approaches Indigenous identity as being grounded in historical processes, contemporary politics, and distinctive senses of place. The book is an engaged, activist ethnography not on but, rather, in collaboration with a marginalized population that will be of interest to scholars of the eastern lowland Maya region, indigeneity generally, and ethnographic experimentation.