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Diva Nation explores the constructed nature of female iconicity. From ancient goddesses and queens to modern singers and writers, each chapter critically reconsiders the female icon, tracing how she has been offered up for emulation, debate, or censure. Diva Nation stems from our curiosity over the insistent presence of female figures who refuse to sit quietly on the sidelines of history but have not been admitted into mainstream scholarship or routine knowledge. Our case studies move beyond archival portraits to consider historically and culturally informed diva imagery and diva lore. We ask how the diva disrupts or bolsters ideas about nationhood, morality, and aesthetics. She is ripe for expansion, fantasy, eroticization, and playful reinvention, yet her unavoidability also makes her a special problem for patriarchal culture. Charting the waxing and waning of the diva story helps illuminate national narratives and assists us in understanding the ways the nation is imbricated with notions of gender, nostalgia, and identity politics.

On May 19, 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks, snipers, and other weapons of war to disperse thousands of protesters who had taken over the commercial center of Bangkok. For the two months, these protesters, known as the Red Shirts, had frozen traffic at the Ratchaprasong intersection, the center of elite consumption as well as economic and physical mobility in the city. The protesters demanded democratic elections and an end to political and economic inequality. Motorcycle taxi drivers were key to this protest; they slowed, filtered, and severed the movement of people, commodities, and information. In so doing, they claimed a prominent role in national politics and control over Bangkok, and they challenged the hegemony of state forces. Four years later, the general who had directed the Red Shirts’ dispersal staged a military coup. This erased all the progress that had been made by the protest and plunged the country into an era of dictatorship and repression. This time, the taxi drivers were silenced and restrained. How could state power be so fragile and open to challenges in 2010 and yet so sturdy four years later? How could motorcycle taxi drivers who fearlessly resisted military violence in 2010 remain silent?Owners of the Map attempts to answer these questions—central to contemporary political mobilizations around the globe—through an ethnographic study of some of the two hundred thousand motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. Exploring the entanglements between their everyday mobility and political mobilization, the author reveals the unresolved tensions in the drivers’ everyday lives, desires, and political demands amid the restructuring of Thai capitalism following the 1997 economic crisis. In so doing, this book explores mobility not just as a strength of contemporary capitalism but also as one of its fragile spots, always prone to disruption by the people who sustain its channels but are excluded from its benefits. In doing so, this book advances an analysis of power that does not focus on the sturdiness of hegemony or the ubiquity of everyday resistance but reveals its potential fragility, as well as the work needed for its maintenance.

Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in the global mass media and on social media. Robo sapiens japanicus casts a critical eye on press releases and PR videos that (mis)represent actual robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental, academic, and popular discourses of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. The granting of “civil rights” to robots is interrogated in tandem with the notion of human exceptionalism. Similarly, how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body is juxtaposed with a deconstruction of the much-invoked theory of the uncanny valley.

The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today is an ethnographic study of China’s Han Clothing Movement, a racial nationalist and neo-traditionalist group that has emerged in cities across China since 2001. The movement’s stated mission is promoting a purportedly ancient style of ethnic clothing for the Han race, to revitalize tradition and thus revitalize the Han and its nation, China. The first half of the book examines the movement’s origins, tracing its emergence within the cracks and contradictions of Han and Chinese identity. Caught between the boundless and romanticized rhetoric of five millennia of traditional culture and the limiting and disillusioning reality of everyday life in China’s metropolises, the Han Clothing Movement and its images of greatness have arisen as a symptom of these tensions within the national experience. The second half of the book demonstrates how this symptom also provides a fleeting cure. The movement’s cultural products aim to transcend the reality of China to realize an imagined “real China”- a land of rites and etiquette where society and life function flawlessly. These aspirations are unfolded through detailed examinations of movement practices surrounding clothing, ritual, etiquette, and, somewhat less predictably, conspiracy theory and digital photography as steps towards the construction and stabilization of an idealized image of Han glory. In their war on reality, the movement’s fantasy image of Han-ness and Chineseness can only ever be realized fleetingly- identity, The Great Han argues, is a paradoxical self-reproducing system fueled by the very affective tensions produced in its failure.

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.

Anthropologists have long looked to animistic forager-cultivator cultures for insights into the spectrum of human lifeways. Yet they have largely failed to appreciate indigenous horizons of concern and, in cross-cultural comparisons, to factor in enormous disparities in population size between these cultures and others. Us, Relatives examines how scalar blindness has limited our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorted the insights these societies offer us. In particular, the book argues that contemporary anthropology’s scale-blind multicultural ethos unleashes the power of large-scale conceptual language—of persons, relations, and ethnic groups—into the study of indigenous peoples and eclipses local modes of living plurally that encompass humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared humanity. Drawing on long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers and emphasizing scaling as a universal and variable human activity, Nurit Bird-David develops this argument through a scale-sensitive ethnography of these foragers’ lifeways and horizons. Through the idea of pluripresence, she reveals a mode of belonging that subverts the modern ontological touchstone of “imagined communities,” a mode that is not rooted in sameness among strangers but in diversity among relatives, whatever their form.

To Be Cared For offers a unique window into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits (“untouchables”), in the south Indian city of Chennai. It focuses on decisions by many women there to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity. Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force, he argues, these conversions serve to integrate the slum community as a whole, Christians and Hindus alike, by addressing hidden moral fault lines in the slum that subtly pit women against one another and render them vulnerable in their own homes. Christians and Hindus in the slum are not in opposed camps; they are united in a shared struggle to survive in a national context that renders Dalits as outsiders in their own country.

Over the past twenty-five years, the Chinese county seat of Zouping has developed from a relatively impoverished town of thirty thousand people to a bustling city of more than 350,000. It has come to contain factories and high-rises, parks, bus routes, shopping malls, hospitals, and its own bureaucracy, school system, and police force. In this book, Andrew Kipnis depicts the transformations of Zouping as a place, the transformations of the lives of the formerly rural residents as they became urban people, and the interrelations between the two. While examining a site that has been industrialized and urbanized and that has undergone a demographic transition and increased integration into national and global markets, Kipnis pays close attention to how practices, imaginaries, ideologies, dreams, and nightmares from the past are reproduced in the present. He develops new ways of theorizing about the transformations typically associated with modernization through the concept of “recombinant urbanization.” While Zouping is clearly prospering, Kipnis does not depict a utopia. He analyzes dynamics of patriarchy, alienation, and anomie, processes of class formation and exclusion, and problems like pollution and traffic jams alongside more positive changes, such as increasing material comfort and growing cosmopolitanism. He gives a moving portrait of the wide variety of people who have come to call Zouping their home, as well as the rich diversity of their hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows.

This book analyzes new configurations of marriage, immigration, and sovereignty emerging in an increasingly mobile Asia where Cold War legacies continue to shape contemporary political struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Focused on marital immigration from China to Taiwan, the book documents how Taiwanese bureaucrats and policymakers produce much-desired sovereignty effects through regulating Chinese spouses’ migration trajectory and managing the threat of similarity they represent. Through tracing parallels between the predicaments of marital immigrants from China and Taiwanese state actors, the book examines the tensions that arise when similarity becomes the starting point from which states craft legal and regulatory remedies to de facto sovereignty. It argues that this group of exceptional immigrants has become necessary to Taiwan’s fragile integrity as a recognized nation-state, and it shows how intimate attachments and affective investments infuse the governmental practices that regulate immigration and produce citizenship and sovereignty. The book exposes the social, political, and subjective consequences of life on the margins of citizenship and sovereignty.

From family to community and politics, relationships establish the social conditions in which health is forged. The inequalities that structure these relationships have left the health of women living in urban poverty chronically vulnerable. Yet for women living in slums, there is no option but to depend on someone. Based on fourteen months of intensive fieldwork in a Delhi slum, this book explores how women respond to the social inequalities that threaten their health by fostering inner well-being. Exploring the centrality of the moral self, this book considers how cultural strategies of resilience can buoy mental health while enabling women to navigate their dubious relationships with family, community, state, and the environment. What was in their hands, women explained, were the boundaries they drew within relationships to maintain their independence and their capacity to define their meaning. Attention to their moral selves left women with a form of well-being beyond the reach of those on whom they depended. Women intertwined religious values of asceticism and endurance with the values of mobility and citizenship endemic in contemporary urban India. When women illuminated the personal strength they used to endure their suffering, they articulated inner well-being as a resource that outlasted present pain. In so doing, women reinterpreted the priorities that both biomedicine and political-economic experts have elaborated for their health.