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Hugh Raffles Named 2023 Winner of J.I. Staley Prize

SAR is pleased to announce that Hugh Raffles, Professor and Anthropology Department Chair at the New School for Social Research, has been named winner of the 2023 J. I. Staley Prize for The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (New York: Verse Chorus...

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Critical Anthropology Now

1999. Edited by George E. Marcus

Building on the legacy of Writing Culture, Critical Anthropology Now vividly represents the changing nature of anthropological research practice, demonstrating how new and more complicated locations of research – from the boardrooms of multinational corporations to the chat rooms of the Internet – are giving rise to shifts in the character of fieldwork and fieldworker.

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Crumpled Paper Boat

2017. Edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean

Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself.

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Cyborgs & Citadels

1998. Edited by Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit

The authors explore such questions as how science gains authority to direct truth practices, the boundaries between humans and machines, and how science, technology, and medicine contribute to the fashioning of selves.

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Dances of the Tewa Pueblo Indians

2004. Jill D. Sweet

This expanded edition features the voices of Tewa dancers, composers, and others to explain the significance of dance to their understanding of Tewa identity and community.

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Democracy

2008. Edited by Julia Paley

While previous scholars of democracy have proposed one definitive model after another, the authors in this work suggest that democracy is by nature an open ended set of questions about the workings of power—questions best engaged through the dialogical processes of fieldwork and ethnographic writing.

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Demographic Anthropology

1976. Edited by Ezra B. W. Zubrow

The articles in this book explore relationships between demographic variables and culture, emphasizing cultural and biological structures and processes connected to population trends. In addition, the book covers topics dealing with sedentism, kinship, childhood marriage association, and stable and unstable economic growth.

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Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities

2021. Edited by Keith M. Murphy and Eitan Y. Wilf

This volume demonstrates the importance and power of design and its ubiquitous effects on human life. Collectively, the contributors argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography—and of using ethnography to reimagine design—we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

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Development & Dispossession

2009. Edited by Anthony Oliver-Smith

Because there can be no return to land submerged under a dam-created lake or to a neighborhood buried under a stadium or throughway, the solutions devised to meet the needs of people displaced by development must be durable. The contributors to this volume analyze the failures of existing resettlement policies and propose just such durable solutions.

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Dreaming

1992. Edited by Barbara Tedlock

The ten contributors to this book-anthropologists and psychologists-explore the ways in which dreams are remembered, recounted, shared (or not shared), interpreted, and used by people from New Guinea to the Andes.

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The Dying Community

1980. Edited by Art Gallaher, Jr. and Harland Padfield

Developing a conceptual and theoretical framework for examining community decline and dissolution, the book looks at the relationships between the dying community and its natural resource base, the role of outside political authority, and the social and demographical processes associated with community decline.

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Elites

1983. Edited by George E. Marcus

This book is a collection of essays focusing on the role that elites play in shaping modern societies. Critiquing the treatment accorded elites as subjects in recent Western social thought, the essays reflect upon past results and explore directions in the investigation of elite groups by anthropologists.

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The Empire of Things

2002. Edited by Fred R. Myers

Representing a new wave of thinking about material culture studies-a topic long overdue for reevaluation – the essays in this volume take a fresh look at the relationship between material culture and exchange theory and illuminate the changing patterns of cultural flow in an increasingly global economy and the cultural differences registered in “regimes of value.”

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Entrepreneurs in Cultural Context

1979. Edited by Sidney M. Greenfield, Arnold Strickon, and Robert T. Aubey

This book is a collection of essays on business behavior that examine the relationships between business enterprises and family networks. The essays deal with universal subjects that describe the effects of marriage, death, and birth upon the individual and corporate enterprise.

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Exchanging Words

2018. Christopher Ball

Showing ritual as a contributing factor to relationships of development and the politics of indigeneity, Exchanging Words asks how discourse, ritual, and exchange come together to mediate social relations close to home and on a global scale.

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The Fabric of Indigeneity

2016. ann-elise lewallen

The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.

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Fat Planet

2017. Edited by Eileen P. Anderson-Fye and Alexandra Brewis

Fat Planet represents a collaborative effort to consider at a global scale what fat stigma is and what it does to people.

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Figuring the Future

2008. Edited by Jennifer Cole and Deborah DurhamTo address how and why youth and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this book look at the both the spatial relations and the temporal dimensions of globalization in places as far apart as Oakland, California, and Tamatave, Madagascar, in situations as disparate as the idealization of childhood innocence and the brutal lives of street children.

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Fixing the Books

2015. Erin Debenport

This ethnographic study of emergent literacy provides a complex picture of secrecy, intellectual property, and the formation of publics through its examination of the relationships between prevailing linguistic ideologies, intertextual connections, and the contexts surrounding the production of indigenous language texts.

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Forces of Compassion

2011. Edited by Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield

Suffering and charity have a long history. The contributors to Forces of Compassion examine this sector through the lens of anthropology, looking at dominant practices, tensions, and beliefs.

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The Futures of Our Pasts

2012. Edited by Michael A. Adler and Susan Benton Bruning

In the middle of this roiling debate over who has the right to collect and display antiquities, a group of scholars convened to debate differing perspectives on the ethics of antiquities collecting.

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The Gender of Globalization

2008. Edited by Nandini Gunewardena & Ann Kingsolver

The authors in this volume employ feminist, ethnographic methods to examine what free trade and export processing zones, economic liberalization, and currency reform mean to women in Argentina, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ghana, the United States, India, Jamaica, and many other places.

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Global Health in Times of Violence

2009. Edited by Barbara Rylko-Bauer, Linda Whiteford, and Paul Farmer

By investigating the fields of violence that define our modern world, the authors are able to provide alternative global health paradigms that can be used to develop more effective policies and programs.

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Globalization, Water, & Health

2005. Edited by Linda Whiteford and Scott Whiteford

Drawing on expertise in medical and ecological anthropology, the contributors challenge and deepen our understanding of the management, sale, and conceptualization of water as it affects human health. Designed for use by policymakers as well as researchers and students, the essays present complex realities in clear, accessible terms.

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The Global Middle Classes

2012. Edited by Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty

Ethnographically rich and culturally particular, the essays in this volume elucidate middle-class experience and discourse and in so doing add critical nuance to theories of class itself.

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Governing Gifts

2019. Edited by Erica Caple James

The contributors trace the connections among piety, philanthropy, policy, and policing and seek to understand how faith and organized religious charity can be mobilized to govern populations and their practices.

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Gray Areas

2003. Edited by Philip B. Stafford

This volume features ten scholars from anthropology, nursing, sociology, gerontology, human geography, and other disciplines who provide ethnographic case studies exploring critical care decision-making, models of care for people with Alzheimer’s disease, the way residents cope with the limitations, indignities, and opportunities of nursing home life, the roles of family members and nursing home employees, and the formulation of assisted living.

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Half-Lives & Half-Truths

2007. Edited by Barbara Rose Johnston

Activists and anthropologists, the authors of this volume reveal the devastating, complex, and long-term environmental health problems afflicting the people who worked in uranium mining and processing, lived in regions dedicated to the construction of nuclear weapons or participated, often unknowingly, in radiation experiments.

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Historical Ecology

1994. Edited by Carole L. Crumley

In this volume, the authors take a critical step toward establishing a new environmental science by deconstructing the traditional culture/nature dichotomy and placing human/environmental interaction at the center of any new attempts to deal with global environmental change.

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History in Person

2001. Edited by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave

Nine ethnographers address such topics as the politically sexualized transformation of identities of women political prisoners in Northern Ireland; the changing character of political activism across generations in a Guatemala Mayan family; the cultural forms that mediate the struggles of working-class men on shop floors in England; and class and community struggles between the state and grassroots activists in New York.

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How Nature Works

2019. Edited by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette

The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.

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Images That Move

2013. Edited by Patricia Spyer and Mary Margaret Steedly

This volume explores topics ranging from high art to mass media, religious iconography to pornography, and popular photography to political cartoons in a range of contexts and media including photography in early twentieth-century China, art and literature in contemporary South Africa, upscale real estate development in India, occult media images and the aesthetic of appearance in urban Indonesia, and film censorship in Nigeria.

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Imperial Formations

2007. Edited by Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue

Recasting the study of imperial governance, forms of sovereignty, and the imperial state, the authors pay close attention to non-European empires and the active trade in ideas, practices, and technologies among empires, as well as between metropolitan regions and far-flung colonies.

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Katherine Dunham

2014. Edited by Elizabeth Chin

This book explores Katherine Dunham’s contribution to anthropology and the ongoing relevance of her ideas and methodologies, rejecting the idea that art and academics need to be cleanly separated from each other. Drawing from Dunham’s holistic vision, the contributors began to experiment with how to bring the practice of art back into the discipline of anthropology—and vice versa.

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Law & Empire in the Pacific

2004. Edited by Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis

Focusing on the intimate relationship between law, culture, and the production of social knowledge, these essays re-center law in social theory. The authors analyze the transition from chiefdom to capitalism, colonizers’ racial and governmental ideologies, land and labor policies, and contemporary efforts to recuperate indigenous culture and assert or maintain indigenous sovereignty.

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Linking the Histories of Slavery

2015. Edited by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks

This volume has brought together scholars from anthropology, history, psychology, and ethnic studies to share their original research into the lesser known stories of slavery in North America and reveal surprising parallels among slave cultures across the continent.

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Making Disasters

2015. Craig R. Janes and Oyuntsetseg Chuluundorj

The authors analyze a broad range of phenomena that are fundamentally linked to the adverse social and economic consequences of climate change, including urbanization and urban poverty, access to essential health care and education, changes to gender roles (especially for women), rural economic development and resource extraction, and public health more generally.

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Más Que un Indio (More Than an Indian)

2006. Charles R. Hale

This deeply researched and sensitively rendered study raises troubling questions about the contradictions of anti-racist politics and the limits of multiculturalism in Guatemala and, by implication, other countries in the midst of similar reform projects.

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Meaning in Anthropology

1976. Edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby

In recent years, anthropological interest in meaning and symbolism has increased and moved into new types of analysis. This book is a useful array of papers representing some of these.

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Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism

1994. Edited by Rubie S. Watson

Eight anthropologists, sociologists, and historians probe the oppositional narratives created by Chinese rural intellectuals, èmigrè Croats, and organized dissenters such as the Djilas of Yugoslavia who constructed and maintained oppositional histories in state socialist societies.

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Muslim Youth and the 9/11 Generation

2016. Edited by Adeline Masquelier and Benjamin F. Soares

This volume focuses on young Muslims in a variety of settings in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America and explores the distinct pastimes and performances, processes of civic engagement and political action, entrepreneurial and consumption practices, forms of self-fashioning, and aspirations and struggles in which they engage as they seek to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.

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Nature, Science, and Religion

2012. Edited by Catherine M. Tucker

This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect in real settings where people attempt to live in harmony with the physical environment. Scholars of philosophy, religious studies, and science and technology have been at the forefront of critiquing the roles of religion and science in human interactions with the natural world.

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Negotiating Structural Vulnerability in Cancer Control

2019. Edited by Julie Armin, Nancy J. Burke, and Laura Eichelberger

The contributors in this volume explore what it means to be structurally vulnerable; how structural vulnerabilities intersect with cancer risk, diagnosis, care seeking, caregiving, clinical-trial participation, and survivorship; and how differing local, national, and global political contexts and histories inform vulnerability.

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New Landscapes of Inequality

2008. Edited by Jane L. Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, & Brett Williams

Focusing on the United States, this volumes analyze how the globalization of newly untrammeled capitalism has exacerbated preexisting inequalities, how the retreat of the benevolent state and the rise of the punitive, imperial state are related, how neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies are melding, and how recurrent moral panics misrepresent class, race, gendered, and sexual realities on the ground.

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New Perspectives on the Pueblos

1972. Edited by Alfonso Ortiz

This volume, the result of an advanced seminar at the School of American Research, takes a fresh look at Pueblo Indian culture, with chapters on everything from language to religion, prehistory, ecology, and from literature to music.

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One State, Many Nations

2010. Maximilian Viatori

This volume traces the Zápara nationality’s process of self-organization and emergence within Ecuador’s Indigenous movement from 1998 to 2008, to explore the complex role that multiculturalism has played in local Indigenous politics. The paradoxical treatment of Indigenous identity is the subject of this book.

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Orayvi Revisited

1992. Jerrold E. Levy

Challenging the widely held view of the Hopi Indians of Arizona as a sober, peaceful, and cooperative people with an egalitarian social organization, Levy examines the 1906 split in the Third Mesa village of Orayvi.

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Other Intentions

1995. Edited by Lawrence Rosen

The authors argue that although intentionality might appear to be a wholly abstract phenomenon, it is deeply entwined with the nature and distribution of power, the portrayal of events, the assessment of personhood, the interplay of trust and deception, and the assessment of moral and legal responsibility.

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Otros Saberes

2014. Edited by Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

The six research projects that form the core of the Otros Saberes initiative bring together a diverse group of Afro-descendant and indigenous collaborations with academics. The focus of each research project is driven by a strategic priority in the life of the community, organization, or social movement concerned.

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The Origins of Language

1999. Edited by Barbara J. King

In this volume ten primatologists and paleoanthropologists conduct a comprehensive examination of the nonhuman primate data, discussing different views of what language is and suggesting how the primatological perspective can be used to fashion more rigorous theories of language origins and evolution.

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A Pueblo Social History

2014. John A. Ware; foreword by Timothy Earle

This volume offers new perspectives on the pithouse to pueblo transition, Chaco phenomenon, evolution of Rio Grande moieties, Western Pueblo lineages and clans, Katsina cult, great kivas, dynamics of village aggregation in the late prehistoric period, and much more.

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Pharmaceutical Self

2011. Edited by Janis H. Jenkins

An anthropological study that examines both human suffering and its biological realities, Pharmaceutical Self focuses on the social, cultural, and political aspects of the expanding distribution of psychopharmacological drugs.

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Pluralizing Ethnography

2004. Edited by John M.Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer

This volume brings together eight Maya specialists and a prominent anthropological theorist to assess the contrasting historical circumstances and emerging cultural futures of Maya in Mexico and Guatemala.

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Puebloan Societies

2018. Edited by Peter M. Whitely

The contributors draw upon the insights of archaeology, ethnology, and linguistic anthropology to examine social history and practice, including kinship groups, ritual sodalities, architectural forms, economic exchange, environmental adaptation, and political order, as well as their patterns of transmission over time and space.

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The Promise of Infrastructure

2018. Edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel

While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory.

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The Psychology of Women under Patriarchy

2019. Edited by Holly F. Mathews and Adriana M. Manago

The contributors to this volume draw upon field research and in-depth qualitative data from different parts of the world to explore the reasons for women’s varied psychological responses to patriarchy.

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Recapturing Anthropology

1991. Edited by Richard G. Fox

The ten papers in this volume offer different versions of how and where anthropologists might work usefully in today’s world, converging on the issue of how anthropology can best recapture the progressive character its basic concepts, such as “culture,” once had.

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Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

2021. Edited by John P. Hawkins

Drawing on over fifty years of research and data, the book argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed.

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Remaking Life & Death

2003. Edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock

This volume reflects a growing international concern about issues such as organ transplantation, new reproductive and genetic technologies and embryo research, and the necessity of cross-cultural comparison.

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Remapping Bolivia

2011. Edited by Nicole Fabricant and Bret Gustafson

Gathering work from a new generation of anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines who have been doing fieldwork in the “post-Evo” era, Remapping Bolivia reflects shifting paradigms in Latin Americanist and indigenous-related research.

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Roosters at Midnight

2010. Robert Albro

Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years.

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Seduced and Betrayed

2017. Edited by Milford Bateman and Kate Maclean, foreword by James K. Galbraith

The contributors to this multidisciplinary volume consider the origins, evolution, and outcomes of microfinance from a variety of perspectives and contend that it has been an unsuccessful approach to development.

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The Seductions of Community

2006. Edited by Gerald W. Creed

Moving the debate to a deeper level, the contributors to this volume aspire to understand the various ways “community” is deployed and the work it performs in different contexts. They compare the many cases where scholars and activists use “community” generically with instances in which the notion of community is less pervasive or even non-existent.

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Senses of Place

1996. Edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso

In this compelling new volume, eight respected ethnographers explore and lyrically evoke the ways in which people experience, express, imagine, and know the places in which they live. Case studies range from the Apaches of Arizona’s White Mountains to the residents of backwoods “hollers” in Appalachia and the Kaluli people of New Guinea’s rainforests.

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The Shape of Script

2012. Edited by Stephen D. Houston

This book builds on earlier projects about the origins and extinctions of script traditions throughout the world in an effort to address the fundamental questions of how and why writing systems change.

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