Browse

Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

The Yunnanese from southwestern China have for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in particular has served as a “back door” to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers. Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have fled to Burma. This book is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Since the 1960s, Yunnanese migrants of Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily consumption goods. The book details the trade's organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use of modern transportation, and reconstructs trading routes while examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants' mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further afield by land, sea, and air.

This book is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. It tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, the book captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. It lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The book tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. This is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the doctors and surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

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.

Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The wide-spread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity poses an intense moral problem; in the “land of dust,” disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. This book considers the results of several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, time spent with the “ninjas,” as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. As such, the book is a well-structured read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. It provides a uniquely up-close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice, and ways of envisioning and experiencing what counts as “value” in the Mongolian gold rush today.

How do specific secular and religious ideologies—such as nationalism, neoliberalism, atheism, Pentecostalism, Tablighi Islam, and shamanism—gain popularity and when do they lose traction? To answer these questions, this book critically examines the trajectories of a range of ideologies as they move into the post-Soviet frontier in Central Asia. Ethnographically rooted in the everyday life of a former mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan, this book shows how residents have dealt with the existential and epistemic crises that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Residents became enchanted by the truths of Muslim and Christian missionaries, embraced the teachings of neoliberal and nationalist ideologues, and were riveted by the visions of shamanic healers. But no matter how much enthusiasm and hope these ideas first engendered, the commitment to any of them rarely lasted very long. The book finds that there is an inverse relationship between the tenacity and the effervescence of collective ideas, between their strength to persist and their ability to trigger committed action. Introducing the concept of pulsation, the book argues that ideational power must be understood in relation to three aspects: the voicing of the idea, its tension with everyday reality, and its reverberation within groups of listeners. The conclusion that the power of conviction is rooted in the instability of sociocultural contexts is a message that has relevance far beyond urban Central Asia.

This book challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although the book takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, it demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through this exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, the book argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state-building projects. Indeed, these projects have thrust together an unlikely gathering of guerilla groups, drug-trafficking paramilitaries, military strategists, technocratic planners, local politicians, and development experts each seeking to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of “the state” in a space in which it supposedly does not exist. By untangling this odd mix, the book reveals how Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient, if not at all benevolent, regimes of rule.

For many Muslims throughout the world, oral preaching provides the most accessible and enjoyable medium for learning about Islam and its meanings for everyday life. This is true in Indonesia’s West Java province, where almost 98% of the population of around forty-three million practices Islam. Despite its popularity, Indonesia’s Islamic elites are concerned about the value of preaching. They see that Islam provides directives and motivations towards progress in areas of social and political concern, but argue that this progress will not be achieved if Muslims are satisfied with the pleasing artifice of clever preachers. Millie spent fourteen months in the company of some of West Java’s most successful Islamic preachers, but also spent time with critics of listening. He described and explores a dichotomy between Islamic speech which succeeds because it is shaped to suit listeners’ social realities, and discourses about Muslim subjectivity that connect media consumption with aspirations for social and political progress, and which portray listening as anachronistic and inefficacious. This detailed analysis sheds light on a question that is increasingly important in efforts to understand contemporary Muslim societies: What is the place of pious listening in the complex societies of today?

This book is an account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India. It examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. The book traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, the book broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the book offers new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a “bloodscape of difference:” different sovereignties, different proportionalities, and different temporalities. These entryways allow exploration of the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.

This book examines novel ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. At the center of the book are rival groups of Indonesian student activists in Indonesia who are behaving in similarly experimental ways. Progressive Muslim activists are reading humanistic and social scientific books and engaging in satire to formulate an inclusive understanding of the religion, while conservative Islamists are using Western techniques of accounting and self-help to develop religious puritanism. These religious practices have been made possible by deposal of President Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998 and the subsequent adoption of democratic systems. At the same time, the Indonesian case study, which occurs in a heightened political context, brings into sharper relief processes happening in Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on not only their scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those that originate in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as adversarial to the West, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell.

India and the Patent Wars examines struggles over patents and access to medicine among pharmaceutical producers, activists and others under a new global intellectual property regime. India, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical exporters, has been at the center of these struggles, and this book explores multiple perspectives in these controversies including those of Indian pharmaceutical companies, which have long offered low-cost medicines to customers around the world, multinational pharmaceutical companies, which pursue patent claims in Indian courts and license drugs to Indian producers, and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, who are concerned about how their knowledge and practices relate to the new patent system.

Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics. This book argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness, and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes. Security concerns often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. The book situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines.

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.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. This book highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The book is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster.

In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosŏnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems but also as a patriotic project of reuniting ethnic Koreans after nearly fifty years of Cold War separation. This book shows that the attempt to bridge the geopolitical divide in the name of Korean kinship proved more difficult than any of the parties involved could have imagined. Discriminatory treatment, artificially suppressed wages, clashing gender logics, and the criminalization of so-called runaway brides and undocumented workers tarnished the myth of ethnic homogeneity and exposed the contradictions at the heart of South Korea's transnational kin-making project. Unlike migrant brides who could acquire citizenship, migrant workers were denied the rights of long-term settlement, and stringent quotas restricted their entry. As a result, many Chosŏnjok migrants arranged paper marriages and fabricated familial ties to South Korean citizens to bypass the state apparatus of border control. The book depicts acts of “counterfeit kinship,” false documents, and the leaving behind of spouses and children as strategies implemented by disenfranchised people to gain mobility within the region's changing political economy.

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.

Grounded in extensive ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery and self-defence, this book explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of ‘the living letter’ may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. One of the book’s central aims is to theorize the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory sensibilities, with an eye to its wider significance for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.

This book explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, the book looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other. The book contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in a sphere of constant and ambivalent connection and separation. The book's frontier in Niger (and beyond) is seen through ideas of space, condition, and project, packed with constraints and possibilities, riddled with ambiguities, and brutally destructive yet profoundly empowering. As the book demonstrates, the tragedy of the frontier becomes as palpable as the true impossibility of police work and bureaucracy.

Millions of people around the world face a real problem: their desperate need for affordable medicines clashes with the core business model of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. In response, patients and activists are aiming to make all essential medicines affordable by reclaiming medicines as a public good and a human right, instead of a profit-making commodity. Their challenge is made more daunting by the perceived complexity of the issues surrounding access to essential medicines. “The problem we have is that there are only a handful of people in the world who know what we are taking about,” one leading medicine activist admits. It doesn’t have to be this way. A Prescription for Change diagnoses our medicines problem and prescribes the cure: it delivers a clear and convincing argument for a complete shift in the global and U.S. approach to developing and providing essential medicines—and a primer on how to make that change happen.