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51 books match the query 'Risk' and 4 start with a

cover of A Day in "The Hole": Risk, Loss, and Excess in Downtown Lima

A Day in "The Hole"

Risk, Loss, and Excess in Downtown Lima

Daniella Gandolfo

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A single day in a semilegal market in Lima, Peru, reveals a social world that defies conventional economic logic.

In the heart of Lima’s historic center, the markets of El Hueco (“The Hole”) and sprawling Mesa Redonda pulse with life, with thousands of vendors selling everything from knockoff electronics to religious icons. In A Day in “The Hole,” anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo immerses readers in a single, tumultuous day—the thirty-fourth anniversary of a vendors’ cooperative—while examining the dynamics that sustain these marketplaces.
 
Through a blend of cinematic storytelling and incisive anthropological insight, Gandolfo reveals a world with its own unique codes. She inspects how vendors embrace expenditure over profit and instability over order, and moving through the sights and sounds of El Hueco and Mesa Redonda, she finds a dissident economy that is as much about survival as it is about spectacle. Gandolfo redefines how we think about urban economies and the unexpected ways these defiant communities thrive in this textured portrait of Lima’s markets and the people who animate them.

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cover of A Good Position for Birth: Pregnancy, Risk, and Development in Southern Belize

A Good Position for Birth

Pregnancy, Risk, and Development in Southern Belize

Aminata Maraesa

Vanderbilt University Press, 2018

In order to understand the local realities of health and development initiatives undertaken to reduce maternal and infant mortality, the author accompanied rural health nurses as they traveled to villages accessible only by foot over waterlogged terrain to set up mobile prenatal and well-child clinics. Through sustained interactions with pregnant women, midwives, traditional birth attendants, and bush doctors, Maraesa encountered reproductive beliefs and practices ranging from obeah pregnancy to 'nointing that compete with global health care workers' directives about risk, prenatal care, and hospital versus home birth.

Fear and shame are prominent affective tropes that Maraesa uses to understand women's attitudes toward reproduction that are at times contrary to development discourse but that make sense in the lived experiences of the women of southern Belize.
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cover of An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi

An Epidemic of Uncertainty

Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi

Jenny Trinitapoli

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi that demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known.

An Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Over the duration of a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world.

Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behavior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.
 
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cover of At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States

At the Risk of Being Heard

Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States

Bartholomew Dean and Jerome M. Levi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Leading experts in the analysis of ethnicity and indigenous rights explore the questions of why and how the circumstances of indigenous peoples are improving in some places of the world, while their human rights continue to be abused in others. Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, chapters explore how political organization, natural resource management, economic development, and conflicting definitions over cultural, linguistic, religious, and territorial identity have informed indigenous strategies for empowerment.
Combining rich ethnographic descriptions with clear theoretical analyses, At the Risk of Being Heard considers the paradoxical challenges and opportunities confronting indigenous peoples at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In the face of state-sanctioned violence, indigenous peoples encounter considerable risks when asserting their rights, especially to self-determination. Yet, if they remain silent or absent from new arenas of power, hiding in marginalized homelands or cultural practices, they risk being invisible to those allies that would aid them in their struggles for survival.
At the Risk of Being Heard offers needed insights for individuals working on issues of governance, sustainable development, resource management, globalization, and indigenous affairs. It will undoubtedly appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, history, political science, peace studies, and to those students in courses that explore relationships among postcolonial states, indigenous peoples, and human rights.
Bartholomew Dean is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas. Jerome M. Levi is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
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