Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades
2022. Edited by Alex E. Chávez and Gina M. Pérez, with a foreword by Arlene M. Dávila
The contributors to this volume highlight the value of radical inclusion in their research and explore how Latinx ethnographers and interlocutors work together in contexts of refusal, as well as the extraordinary possibilities offered by ethnography and its role in ongoing social transformation.
The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century
2022. Edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese
This book brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. What are the beliefs, values, and ontologies entwined with these emergent death practices? Are we witnessing a shifting relationship between the living and the dead?
Acequia
2006. Sylvia Rodriguez
Every society must have a system for capturing, storing, and distributing water, a system encompassing both technology and a rationale for the division of this finite resource. Today, people around the world face severe and growing water scarcity, and everywhere this vital resource is ceasing to be a right and becoming a commodity. The acequia or irrigation ditch associations of Taos, Río Arriba, Mora, and other northern New Mexico counties offer an alternative.
American Arrivals
2003. Edited by Nancy Foner
Addressing issues of health care, education, and cultural values and practices among Mexicans, Haitians, Somalis, Afghans, and other newcomers to the United States, the authors illuminate the complex ways that immigrants adapt to life in a new land and raise serious questions about the meaning and political uses of ideas about cultural difference.
Anthropology in the Margins of the State
2004. Edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole
Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Peru, Guatemala, India, Chad, Colombia, and South Africa, the contributors examine official documentary practices and their forms and falsifications; the problems that highly mobile mercenaries, currency, goods, arms, and diamonds pose to the state; emerging non-state regulatory authorities; and the role language plays as cultures struggle to articulate their situation.
Artisans and Advocacy in the Global Market
2015. Edited by Jeanne Simonelli, Katherine O’Donnell, and June Nash
The collaborations, cooperatives, and conundrums described in this collection reaffirm ancient traditions even as artisan production and the preservation of cultural identity interact to create a sustainable future that entails new kinds of producer-consumer relations and partnerships. Contributors to this book explore how crafts — pottery, weaving, basketmaking, storytelling — in Middle America and beyond are a means of making an intangible cultural heritage visible, material, and enduring.
Becoming Indian
2011. Circe Sturm
Becoming Indian explores the social and cultural values that lie behind this phenomenon and delves into the motivations of these Americans—from so many different walks of life—to reinscribe their autobiographies and find deep personal and collective meaning in reclaiming their Indianness.
Cash on the Table
2014. Edited by Edward F. Fischer
Anthropologists have historically tended to focus on the corrosive effects of markets on traditional lifeways and the ways in which global markets disadvantage marginalized peoples. Economists often have difficulty recognizing that markets are embedded in particular social and political power structures and that “free” market transactions are often less free than we might think. If anthropologists could view markets a bit more ecumenically and if economists could view them a bit more politically, then great value—cash on the table—could be found in bringing these perspectives together.
Catastrophe & Culture
2002. Edited by Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith
Using a variety of natural and technological disasters-including Mexican earthquakes, drought in the Andes and in Africa, the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Oakland firestorm, and the Bhopal gas disaster-the authors of this volume explore the potentials of disaster for ecological, political-economic, and cultural approaches to anthropology along with the perspectives of archaeology and history.