Underground politics

How Colombian mining communities navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglectIn the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, local and settler miners turn to gold as a means to get by and get ahead on the margins of capitalism. They eke out livelihoods while worrying about the...

Unearthing childhood

Prehistoric children can be seen in footprints and finger daubs, in images painted on rocks and pots, in the signs of play and the evidence of first attempts to learn practical crafts. Readers in archeology and those with interests in childhood will gain new perspectives from this survey of the d...

Unintended revolution

Untrusting

This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble.

Upside-down gods

Human survival requires a reorientation of science away from its exclusive technical and materialist premises focused on control, towards feedback and relational processes of organism-plus-environment. Gregory Bateson’s holistic approach unites culture, communication, psychology, biology and ecol...

Urban ethnography

Showcasing the ideas, analysis, and perspectives of experts in the method conducting research on a wide array of social phenomena in a variety of city contexts, this volume provides a look at the legacies of urban ethnography's methodological traditions and some of the challenges its practitioner...

Uses of a whirlwind

A comprehensive overview of contemporary American social movements—from the people who built them.

Using interactive digital narrative in science and health education

This book offers insight and lessons learned from two pilot studies which used interactive digital narrative (IDN) as educational interventions to effect positive change regarding social issues, looking into interdisciplinary approaches to research and education methods, combining arts and scienc...

Valuing nature at the ends of the world

Patrick M. Gallagher explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.

Village life in hong kong revisited

An anthropological study of how the structure of village life explored in this book is a fading memory for the village residents.

Vine of the soul

Vine of the Soul is an exceptional photographic essay accompanied by detailed descriptions of the Amazonians’ use of medicinal and other sacred plant substances. Over 160 documentary photos, some of the most signifi cant ever taken on the subject, bring the reader along a journey to a world in wh...

Violence

In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges t...

Violent becomings

It is theoretically original in its insistence on radical reading of state formation as related to violence and irreducible to the formal state apparatus. It is a long-term study of transformations – building on fieldwork from 1998 onwards – which surpasses a number of other relevant stu...

Vital diplomacy

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes such as manioc cultivation and cuisine, predatory relations with non-humans, and the interplay of myth and practice, and to consider dynamics of kin, clan, and gender r...

Vodún

Tourists to Ouidah, a city on the coast of the Republic of Bénin, in West Africa, typically visit a few well-known sites of significance to the Vodún religion—the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is worshipped, and King Kpasse's sacred forest, which is the seat of the Vodún deity k...

Voices of the lost children of greece

Voices of the Lost Children of Greece is a collection of essays from Greek-born adoptees in the 1950s after two consecutive wars that ravaged the country. Their stories will strike home the experience of international adoption, whose impact has been lifelong, but has not been properly measured, l...

Vote of faith

A richly cinematic and compelling look at priest-politicians in Brazil and their religious and secular entanglementsWhat does desire have to reveal about the nature of power? Through a detailed focus on the lives and loves of Catholic priests as they enter the profane world of party politics, May...

Waiting at the mountain pass

An intimate meditation on aging and dying in exile among elderly Tibetans in Dharamsala, IndiaIn a Tibetan saying, the journey of life is likened to a climb up to a mountain pass. Upon reaching it, the journey concludes and one must cross over into death and the next rebirth. The impermanence of ...

Waiting town

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town is a formally experimental book about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author’s fieldnotes through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a hi...

Waiting – a project in conversation

What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse g...

War in worcester

War in Worcester explores the experiences of the young in taking a stand against the apartheid regime in the 1980s at the height of the struggle for freedom. It combines an analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s process and findings with a close ethnographic study in ...

Watch me play

A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcastingEvery day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive ...

We are all cannibals

The foremost anthropologist of the twentieth century uses compelling examples from history and contemporary life to challenge the criteria by which we judge others. Claude Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways w...

Weaponizing anthropology

A chilling look at the intelligence community and its use and abuse of the anthropological field.

What a mushroom lives for

How the prized matsutake mushroom is remaking human communities in China—and providing new ways to understand human and more-than-human worldsWhat a Mushroom Lives For pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal...

What is culture for?

What is culture really for? How to find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts. Many people search for the meaning of life through music, film, literature and the visual arts. But how can we synthesize the emotions we feel through art? This book looks at how works of culture were made - tha...

What is political theology?

This field-changing interdisciplinary book brings together three of the leading voices in political theology—a Christian theologian, a critical theorist, and an anthropologist—to offer new entry points to understand religion and politics.

What is religious authority?

An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of JavaThis compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic rel...

What remains

Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from the socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the effects of these artifacts, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday...

When experiments travel

The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate...

When people come first

A people-centered approach to global healthWhen People Come First critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterpris...

When the state winks

When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection...

When things become property

Interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam. Describes how property reforms are no longer miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

When victims become killers

An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide"When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one mi...

Where the gods reign

Where the Gods Reign is a magnificent book by one of the greatest ethnobotanical explorers known to this century. It is an essential for those interested in cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and the Amazon in general.

Why not build the mosque?

An ethnography of a long-unbuilt mosque in Greece that explores government operations and contemporary democracyWhy Not Build the Mosque? tells the story of the Greek state’s centuries-long attempt to build a central mosque. After the fall of Ottoman Empire, Greek Orthodoxy entwined with Greek na...

Why we hate cheap things

How to rethink your consumer habits and feel richer at heart.Our society encourages us to equate expense with value. The more expensive something is, the more we're encouraged to covet it. Yet as its market price falls, our interest and passion tend to fade.This recurrent pattern, The School of L...

Wild profusion

Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nati...

Will to live

Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. But anthropo...

Women and religiosity in orthodox christianity

This volume engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. It critically engages the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social ...

Women’s work

When women have full socioeconomic citizenship as well as equitable and respectful partnerships with men, transformative justice can be sustained in postconflict societiesIn Women’s Work, Jennifer Moore presents a reimagined theory of peacebuilding and transformative justice based on the experien...

Wonderstruck

A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain worldWonder and awe lie at the heart of life’s most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable u...

Work and labor in the digital age

This volume presents the most recent studies of work and labor in the digital age as it unfolds in both Europe and the United States.

Working

Studs Terkel’s classic oral history of Americans’ working lives—and the inspiration for Barack Obama’s new Netflix series about work in the twenty-first century“Reading these stories, I started to consider my own place in the world, and understand how connected we are to one another. [Working] he...

Working misunderstandings

As exemplified by project collaboration across three offices of a multinational consulting firm in India, Frauke Mörike explores how misunderstandings shape the organizational system and why they prove not only necessary but even productive for organizational functioning.