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Baseball has been Japan’s national pastime for over a century, and the Hanshin Tigers have long been the country’s second favorite professional team in its second-largest city. This ethnography, based on multiple years of fieldwork, analyzes Hanshin Tiger baseball as a complex sportsworld, the collective product and the converging actions of the players themselves, demanding coaches, layers of intrusive management, a large and prying media, and millions of passionate and organized fans across the Kansai region. It explains the team’s popularity through decades of futility in the late twentieth century and charts the recent changes that have transformed it into a regularly competitive team. Over these years, the Hanshin Tigers have been a long-running soap opera of workplace melodrama and second-city anxiety, and they illustrate the enduring features and new vulnerabilities of professional baseball in the twenty-first century. The book demonstrates the significance of baseball for modern Japan and the importance of ethnography in critical sport studies.

From the Arab uprisings in 2011 to ISIS's rise in 2014, Egypt's Copts have been at the center of anxious rhetoric surrounding the politics of Christian-Muslim coexistence in the Middle East. Despite the unprecedented levels of violence they have suffered in recent years, the current predicament of Copts signals more durable structures of church and state authoritarianism that challenge the ahistorical kernel of persecution politics and Islamophobia. This book examines the political lives of saints to specify the role that religion has played in the making of national unity and sectarian conflict in Egypt since the 1952 coup. Based on years of fieldwork throughout Egypt, it argues that the public imaginary of saints—the Virgin, martyrs (ancient and contemporary), miracle-workers—has served as a key site of mediating social relations between Christians and Muslims. An ethnographic study, it journeys to the images and shrines where miracles, martyrs, and mysteries have shaped the lived terms of national unity, majority-minority inequality, and sectarian tension on the ground. It further delves into the material aesthetics of Orthodox Christianity to grasp how saintly imaginings broker ties of sacrifice across faiths, reconfigure sacred territory in times of war, and present threats to public order and national security. Above all, it draws attention to the ways in which an authoritarian politics of sainthood shores up Christian-Muslim unity in the aftermath of war, revolution, and coup. In doing so, this book directly counters recurrent and prevalent invocations of Christianity's impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.

What are the moral challenges and consequences of animal research in academic laboratory settings? Animal Ethos considers how the inescapable needs of lab research necessitate interspecies encounters that, in turn, engender unexpected moral responses among a range of associated personnel. Whereas much has been written about the codified, bioethical rules and regulations that inform proper lab behavior and decorum, Animal Ethos, as an in-depth, ethnographic project, probes the equally rich—yet poorly understood—realm of ordinary or everyday morality, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox thought and action evidence concerted efforts to transform animal laboratories into moral, scientific worlds. The work is grounded in efforts to integrate theory within medical anthropology (and, more particularly, on suffering and moral worth), animal studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Contrary to established scholarship that focuses exclusively on single professions (such as the researcher or technician), Animal Ethos tracks across the spectrum of the lab labor hierarchy by considering the experiences of researchers, animal technicians, and lab veterinarians. In turn, it offers comparative insights on animal activists. When taken together, this range of parties illuminates the moral complexities of experimental lab research. The affective qualities of interspecies intimacy, animal death, and species preference are of special analytical concern, as reflected in the themes of intimacy, sacrifice, and exceptionalism that anchor this work.

Propelled by structural conditions of violence and everyday insecurity, each year tens of thousands of people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador leave their homes in search of a more secure future. For those en route to the United States, they must first cross Mexico where transnational and state security regimes funnel them into clandestine routes where they encounter abuse, injury, extortion, police profiling, sexual violence and kidnapping. As unauthorized gendered and racialized others, migrants become implicated within a state-criminal nexus that profits from their plight. Moving beyond scholarship focused on fixed sending and receiving communities or borderlands, Lives in Transit focuses on the liminal spaces between these zones as crucial sites of ethnographic analysis to understand the complexity of contemporary mobilities and the ways structural forms of violence are rearticulated at the local level. Through the powerful testimonies of migrants still in the midst of their journeys and the people on the ground who care for them, this book provides a rare look into the everyday and often gendered logics of mobility, violence, security and intimacy within spaces of transit. From the intimate perspective of daily life in migrant shelters and local communities, it illuminates the strategies, social relations and economies of care that people engage as they negotiate their movements and their lives. It also bears witness to the emerging social movement around migrant rights that connects the intimate labors of individuals and families between and across borders.

Twenty years since the end of Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war, Guatemala City is dominated by both the fact and fear of out-of-control crime. In powerful, haunting prose, Mortal Doubt takes readers inside the making of this new order of violence through the evolution of its most infamous emissary: the maras, or transnational gangs. While maras are widely blamed for the rise of peacetime crime, Anthony W. Fontes argues that they have, in fact, become key figures through which both Guatemalan and global society prop up a sense of order in the face of overwhelming uncertainties about the cause and meaning of so much violence. Through histories of war and peace out of which the maras emerge, into the porous prisons and illicit businesses in which they operate, and out through the brutal spectacles that draw gangs into the global imagination, Mortal Doubt traces how maras’ flesh-and-blood violence has become indissoluble from their symbolic power in social imaginaries, giving cover to a host of actors feeding and feeding off peacetime insecurity. To convey the consequences of the struggle to make sense of senseless suffering, Fontes weaves fantasy and reality together in ways that cannot always be pulled apart, and the doubled image of the gangster who walks the city streets and the gangster infesting strung-out imaginations blend and merge. This figure, in turn, provides a lens through which to witness the making and mooring of collective terror in Guatemala City and beyond. Mortal Doubt is composed of two distinct and complementary chapter forms. Even-numbered chapters are “traditional” scholarly essays, while odd-numbered chapters are ethnographic short stories that provide connective tissue and a narrative arc for the book.

Water rights adjudications happen quietly every day across the western United States, sorting Indian water rights, claims by cities, and use by agriculture. This book argues that these state-driven court procedures change what they purport to merely measure and understand about water within state boundaries. Adjudications have unwittingly brought back to the surface old disputes over the meaning of water and access to it. Because of their adversarial court process and identity cleaving between Indian and non-Indian water rights, the state simultaneously faces resistance and friction over water use. Unsettled Waters uses insights from ethnography, geography, and critical legal perspectives to demonstrate the power of local negotiation in water settlements and to examine the side effects of these legal agreements and lawsuits in New Mexico, a state struggling with water scarcity. As the process unfolded in the twentieth century, new expert measures and cultures of expertise developed into an adjudication-industrial complex. These added layers of bureaucracy and technology complicated the state’s view of water. Water users have also pushed back against the state and have used the glacial pace of adjudication to adapt to changes in water law while making new demands. The process will also now have to account for climate-related water supply shifts and unquantified Indian water rights, as well as the demands endangered species and rivers themselves. Adjudication in the twenty-first century may serve a completely different purpose than what it was designed for over a century ago.

What happens to a community when the majority of young people move away for education? In Nubri, an ethnic Tibetan enclave in the highlands of Nepal, educational migration (the sending of children to distant institutions for schooling) has become a key component of a family management strategy that is driven by the prospect of social and economic rewards but that entails risk, uncertainty, and unforeseen consequences. The authors draw on ethnographic, demographic, and historical research to document how long-standing religious connections shape contemporary migrations and how population growth disparities open new schooling opportunities for Buddhist highlanders. They examine parents’ motives for sacrificing household labor in favor or sending children to distant schools and monasteries, a trend encapsulated in the oft-repeated phrase “better a pen in hand than a rope across the forehead.” The book concludes by investigating dilemmas associated with educational migration, including intergenerational skirmishes over marriage and household succession, threats to the family-based care system for the elderly, and a decline in the level of agricultural production needed to support local religious activities. From a Trickle to a Torrent chronicles a convergence of demographic and social processes that have led a Himalayan society to the brink of irreversible change.

Palestinian refugees’ experience of displacement is among the lengthiest in history. Life Lived in Relief explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts over this long time span to alter their present and future conditions. Even as humanitarian intervention is conceived as crisis-driven and focused on survival, protracted displacement is a common circumstance, necessitating long-term humanitarian presence. The book describes the operational challenges of oscillating between chronic conditions and repeating emergency situations as “punctuated humanitarianism.” Punctuated humanitarianism also means that people move through different relationships with the humanitarian apparatus. Palestinian refugee politics is buffeted between near and far futures, close and distant geographies, and immediate needs and existential claims. This politics is expressed not only in the register of suffering but also as aspiration, existence, and refusal. These multiplicities are often discordant, but they persist together. The “politics of living” in and against humanitarianism is central to what it has meant to be Palestinian since 1948. It also provides new insights into the possibilities of political life in precarious conditions. The story of Palestinians and humanitarianism is illustrative of life and relief in the many circumstances of protracted displacement across the globe.

A War on People takes up two interrelated concerns increasingly of import to political anthropologists and theorists. The first is the seemingly widespread lack of motivation for participating in political activity. The second is the political and intellectual focus on critique rather than on offering alternatives for possible futures. This book addresses these concerns by offering an ethnographically and theoretically rich look at the political and ethical activity of some unlikely political actors—active and former users of heroin and crack cocaine. Despite this unlikelihood, however, this book shows and argues that the globally networked anti–drug war movement—organized and run by drug users—is, in fact, at the forefront of offering an alternative political and social imaginary. In particular, the book focuses on how this anti–drug war imaginary and political activity is enacting nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key ethical-political concepts as community, freedom, and care. Ultimately, A War on People argues that in a contemporary condition increasingly characterized by widely diffused complexity and war as governance, an anthropology of potentiality is needed to discern and creatively conceptualize the emerging not-yet of the worlds we research and inhabit.

Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile explores how Bolivian migrants to Chile experience citizenship across borders in their daily lives. Based on multi-sited ethnography, the book uncovers migrants’ lived realities in Chile and Bolivia. It also does broader conceptual work. It suggests that it is necessary to find new modes of thinking about the shifting and uneven ways that migrants in different parts of the world live citizenship in the everyday. It proposes that one way in which migrants’ citizenship can be comprehended is by considering their relationships to different transnational spaces of citizenship—legal, economic, social, and political. In what ways are migrants—simultaneously and multiply—excluded from or included in these spaces across borders? How are exclusions produced? How do migrants pursue greater inclusion? In addressing these questions, the book suggests that migrants’ experiences of a complex array of shifting inclusions and exclusions across these spaces of citizenship can best be captured through the lens of uncertainty.