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On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than a quarter-million people and leaving another two million Haitians homeless. This book is a searing account of the first year after the earthquake. It explores how strong communities and an age-old gift culture have helped Haitians survive in the wake of an unimaginable disaster, one that only compounded the preexisting social and economic distress of their society. The book examines the history that caused such astronomical destruction, and draws in theories of resistance and social movements to scrutinize grassroots organizing for a more just and equitable country. The book offers rich perspectives rarely seen outside Haiti. It takes the reader through displaced persons camps, shantytowns, and rural villages, where they get a view that defies the stereotype of Haiti as a lost nation of victims. It also combines excerpts of more than one hundred interviews with Haitians, historical and political analysis, and investigative journalism. The book investigates and critiques U.S. foreign policy, emergency aid, standard development approaches, the role of nongovernmental organizations, and disaster capitalism. Woven through the text are comparisons to the crisis and cultural resistance in the city of New Orleans, when the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ultimately a tale of hope, the book will give readers a new understanding of daily life, structural challenges, and collective dreams in one of the world's most complex countries.

News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.

This book offers the reader a rare window into homeless life. Spurred by a personal relationship with a homeless man who became the book's co-author, the author takes a compelling look at what it means and what it takes to be homeless. Interviews and encounters with dozens of homeless people lead us into a world that most have never seen. We travel as an intimate observer into the places that many homeless frequent, including a community shelter, a day labor agency, a panhandling corner, a pawn shop, and a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing office. Through these personal stories, we witness the obstacles that homeless people face, and the ingenuity it takes to negotiate life without a home. The book points to the ways that our own cultural assumptions and blind spots are complicit in US homelessness and contribute to the degree of suffering that homeless people face. At the same time, the book shows us how our own sense of connection and compassion can bring us into touch with the actions that will lessen homelessness and bring greater humanity to the experience of those who remain homeless.

End-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. This book speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased attention to care for the elderly, both personal and professional, the book challenges common presumptions about the universal nature of “caring.” The book shows an inseparable link between forms of social organization and forms of care. Unlike most accounts of the quotidian concerns of providing care in a rapidly aging society, the book brings attention to corporeal processes. Moving from vivid descriptions of the embodied routines at the heart of home caregiving to depictions of care practices in more general ways—care for one's group, care of the polity—it develops the argument that religious, social, and political structures are embodied, through habituated action, in practices of providing for others. Under the watchful treatment of the author, care becomes a powerful foil for understanding recent political turmoil and structural change in Thailand, proving embodied practice to be a vital vantage point for phenomenological and political analyses alike.

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? This book describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. This book describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. It shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. The conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As the book shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an “anthropological fact,” bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. It unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.

Between 1999 and 2000, sectarian fighting fanned across the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. What began as local conflicts between migrants and indigenous people over administrative boundaries, spiraled into a religious war pitting Muslims against Christians and continues to influence communal relationships more than a decade after the fighting stopped. This book examines how the individuals actually taking part in the fighting understood and experienced the conflict. Rather than dismiss religion as a facade for the political and economic motivations of the regional elite, the book explores how and why participants came to perceive the conflict as one of religious difference. It examines how these perceptions of religious violence altered the conflict, leading to large-scale massacres in houses of worship, forced conversions of entire communities, and other acts of violence that stressed religious identities. The book's analysis extends beyond the period of violent conflict and explores how local understandings of the violence have complicated the return of forced migrants, efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation.