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In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. Romance is not just what lovers do but also what lovers learn through ideology. As an ideology, romance allowed us to privatize our futures, to imagine ourselves as safe and secure tomorrow if only we could find our "one true love" today. But the fairy dust of romance blinded us to what we really need: global movements and structural changes. By traveling through dating apps and spectacular engagements, white weddings and Disney honeymoons, Essig shows us how romance was sold to us and why we bought it. Love, Inc. seduced so many of us into a false sense of security, but it also, paradoxically, gives us hope in hopeless times. This book explores the struggle between our inner cynics and our inner romantic.

Consent is threadbare for sexual-justice politics, argues author Joseph Fischel. Spotlighting sex on the periphery, Screw Consent takes aim at the sex imagined at the center of our moral universe: adult, consensual. Each chapter turns another “screw” on consent, interrogating sex that is unfamiliar, atypical, or weird. Consent, shows Fischel, is alternatively insufficient, inapposite, or riddled with scope contradictions. It therefore cannot scaffold a democratically hedonic sexual culture. Access and autonomy, the author suggests, are more promising idioms for our sexual politics.

Did the Civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties fail to address economic issues and to grasp that class, beyond just race, was the main cleavage and the greater hindrance in American Society? Many historians and social scientists contend that the movement too narrowly circumscribed its mission, deceptively assuming that specific race-based demands were the only way to achieve social equality and racial fairness. This book argues that, despite an inability to hamper a growing class divide, significant members of the Black Liberation movement actually intertwined civil rights to economic issues, some of them defending that class was trumping race when it comes to racial equality. Time has come, they argued, to build an interracial coalition which would bring substantive freedom to the lesser-off of America, Blacks being at rock bottom. This book will demonstrate that Martin Luther King Jr. was profoundly shaped by their conviction that racial equality was embedded in the broader class struggle, as illustrated by the forgotten Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Although carried out postumously, the Poor People’s campaign, presented as much an interracial mass mobilization demanding redistribution as the culmination of King’s comprehension of the entanglement of class and race. It also dovetailed with compelling academic works which, either preceding or following the campaign, have vindicated its framework.

Like electricity, political power travels through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. Electrical Palestine charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid in the interwar period and its implication in the area’s rapid and uneven development. It does so in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the interplay of politics, capital, and technology more broadly. The study follows the coevolution of the power system and Zionist state building efforts in Palestine on the conceptual and material level. Conceptually, the design and construction of the system shaped Palestine as a precisely bounded entity with a distinct political, social, and economic character. Materially, the borders of the mandate were mapped onto the power system and structured an ethno-national division of capital, land, and labor. In 1948, these coevolving forces ultimately carried over into Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness.

Life-sentenced prisoners are a growing proportion of America’s incarcerated population. Too Easy to Keep provides a thorough assessment of the consequences of this monumental shift. It examines the implications of growing numbers of life sentences for both prisoners serving that sentence and the prisons that house them. It draws upon extensive interviews with life-sentenced prisoners and prison staff in two Washington facilities. The data demonstrate that many lifers build lives of considerable purpose and meaning, and devote themselves to improving the circumstances of others. They become, in prison terms, “easy keepers,” and provide considerable stability to the institutions that house them. Yet as they age and decline, life-sentenced prisoners prove harder to accommodate. Prison staff thus struggle to meet the needs of this rapidly-growing population. Too Easy to Keep reviews the challenges that aging prisoners will pose, and thereby provides much cause for a reconsideration of America’s punishment policies.

This book sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this book shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. The book examines the ways in which environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

The book argues that the invention and popularization of the shopping cart from the 1940s onward provided the final link in the chain for the new system of industrialized food flow. First in the United States and then around the world, these carts enabled supermarkets to move their goods even faster off their shelves—in a sense, completing the revolution in mechanized farming, electric refrigeration, and road distribution that had occurred during the 1930s. Yet the cart, a basic machine among modernity’s new systems, also recast the work of food shopping in ways that attracted ambivalence and unease. In urging customers to buy all their groceries at once, it radically accelerated the consumerist experience of self-service, creating a new mode of accelerated shopping on impulse that often felt, ironically, far from “convenient.” Above all, as a host of U.S. cultural responses have suggested, the sheer uniformity of the shopping cart has unsettled the individualistic rhetoric of the supermarket industry. Increasingly omnipresent in online shopping, its basic form, defined as a void waiting to be filled, uncomfortably reveals the parallels that exist between human and nonhuman participants in the modern circuit of food flow.

The world is witnessing a rapid rise in the number of victims of human trafficking and of migrants—voluntary and involuntary, internal and international, authorized and unauthorized. In the first two decades of this century alone, more than 65 million people have been forced to escape home into the unknown. The slow-motion disintegration of failing states with feeble institutions, war and terror, demographic imbalances, unchecked climate change, and cataclysmic environmental disruptions have contributed to the catastrophic migrations that are placing millions of human beings at grave risk. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration fills a scholarly gap by examining the uncharted contours of mass migration. Exceptionally curated, it contains contributions from Jacqueline Bhabha, Richard Mollica, Irina Bokova, Pedro Noguera, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, James A. Banks, Mary Waters, and many others. The volume’s interdisciplinary and comparative approach showcases new research that reveals how current structures of health, mental health, and education are anachronistic and out of touch with the new cartographies of mass migrations. Envisioning a hopeful and realistic future, this book provides clear and concrete recommendations for what must be done to mine the inherent agency, cultural resources, resilience, and capacity for self-healing that will help forcefully displaced populations.

Lost Childhoods focuses on the life-course histories of thirty young men serving time in the adult prison system in Pennsylvania for crimes they committed when they were minors. The narratives of these young men, their friends, and relatives reveal the invisible yet deep-seated connection between the childhood traumas they suffered and the violent criminal behavior they committed during adolescence. By living through domestic violence, poverty, the crack epidemic, and other circumstances, these men were forced to grow up fast, while familial ties that should have sustained them were broken at each turn. The book connects large-scale social policy decisions and their effect on family dynamics, and it demonstrates the limits of punitive justice.

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in relation to the contentious issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory’s thinking on the challenges of the ascetic life through a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre. Exploring his understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation in the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.

Revival from Below tells the story of the Deoband movement, one of the most important Islamic revivalist movements of the modern era. Founded in 1866 in colonial northern India, the movement has expanded globally through the establishment of seminaries (madrasas) that are similar to the original Deobandi seminary, the Dar al-`Ulum in Deoband, India. Today the Deoband movement is best known for the fact that the Taliban emerged from Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan. Because of this connection, comparatively little scholarly work has been done on other, more central, aspects of the movement. This book focuses on the movement’s efforts to regulate and shape Muslim public life, especially through its scholars’ critiques of popular devotional practices (especially celebrations of the prophet Muhammad’s birthday and Sufi saints’ death anniversaries), despite the fact that Deobandi scholars themselves identify as Sufis. The book examines how Deobandi scholars used the publication of short texts to carry out this reformist mission. It then traces how these critiques travel through Indian Muslim networks to South Africa, where they intersect with Muslim publics and politics that are markedly different from the Indian context. Accordingly, this book is the first extensive study of Deobandis beyond South Asia and of their efforts to maintain the centrality of traditionally educated Islamic scholars (the `ulama) in Muslim public life.

This study of some sixty-odd Italian-language music-theater pieces for Holy Week in seventeenth-century Vienna addresses the issues of Habsburg dynastic piety, memory and commemoration, Passion devotion, and political meaning in the works. It further considers some surprising conjunctions of poetic conceptualism in connection with surprising—and theatrical—musical techniques. The pieces were meant to be performed in front of a constructed replica of Christ’s tomb—hence their Italian sobriquet, sepolcri—and often with an additional stage-set. Flourishing during the reign of Emperor Leopold I (1657–1705), the genre was also indebted to the patronage and piety of the women around him, including his stepmother, the Dowager Empress Eleonora, his three wives, and several of his daughters. The libretti, many by the famed Nicolo Minato, show unusual textual strategies in the recollection of Christ’s Passion, as they are imagined to take place after his burial. But they also involve wider realms of the dynastic’s self-image, material possessions, and political ideology. Although both the texts and the music—the latter by a variety of composers, most notably Giovanni Felice Sances and Antonio Draghi, along with Leopold himself—are little studied today, they also combined in performance to provide a sonic enactment of mourning according to the most recent norms of Italian musical dramaturgy.

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.

The American Broadcasting Company division ABC Sports is behind some of network sports television’s most significant practices, personalities, and moments. It created the weekend anthology Wide World of Sports, transformed professional football into a prime-time spectacle with Monday Night Football, and fashioned the Olympics into a mega media event. ABC Sports helped to turn Muhammad Ali, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, and the daredevil Evel Knievel into stars and captured now-iconic instances that include Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s raised fist protest at the 1968 Olympics, the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Games, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union, and the 1999 Women’s World Cup final. Beyond sport, it revolutionized television news and altered the medium’s racial and gender politics. This book offers a cultural and institutional history of ABC Sports from its beginnings to its 2006 rebranding as “ESPN on ABC.” It uses the storied division to examine network sports television’s development in the United States; the aesthetic, cultural, political, and industrial practices that mark it; and the changes it endured, along with the new sports media environment it spawned.

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.

The book investigates how the emperor Julian (361–63 c.e.) uses Jews as ethnic Judeans in his hellenizing project to define Hellenic identity and to disqualify and delegitimize Christian ethnic claims. It concludes by summing up the main takeaways of the book for Jewish, Christian, and Roman historians of late antiquity.

It was a common charge among black radicals in Britain in the 1960s that Britons needed to start “thinking black.” As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, thinking black, they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain’s imperial past. Thinking Black reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. A new history of black activism that retells the formation of New Left politics in Britain, this book shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain. Chapters explore the growth of British black radicalism through the U.S. and Caribbean Black Power movements; how activists negotiated gendered and ethnic difference and sought to utilize and transform new black expressive cultures; the popularization of black critiques of the British state; how black studies reformulated British education politics; and intellectual responses to conflicts between young black people and the police. The book closes with the decline of this politics in the mid-1980s, placing it in its national and international contexts.