Browse

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.

This book traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. It explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. The book tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical “fact” a discredited nineteenth-century idea.

This book charts the cultural imagination of Haiti, not only by reconstructing the island's history, but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored, investigating the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. It gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today. In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, the book uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, it uses a diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here—overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions—have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres, are seldom used as historical sources. The book also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. This scholarship is enriched by the insights the author has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years.

This book's analysis of Navajo creation and origin myths shows what other interpretations often overlook: that the Navajo religion is as complete and nuanced an attempt to answer humanity's big questions as the religions brought to North America by Europeans. Looking first at the historical context of the Navajo narratives, the book points out that Navajo society has never during its known history been either homogeneous or unchanging, and goes on to identify in the myths persisting traditions which represent differing points of view within the society. The major transformations of the Navajo people, from a northern hunting and gathering society to a farming, then herding, then wage-earning society in the American Southwest, were accompanied by changes not only in social organization but also in religion. The book sees evidence of internal historical conflicts in the varying versions of the creation myth and their reflection in the origin myths associated with healing rituals. It also compares Navajo answers to the perennial questions about the creation of the cosmos and why people are the way they are with the answers provided by Judaism and Christianity. And, without suggesting that they are equivalent, the book discusses certain parallels between Navajo religious ideas and contemporary scientific cosmology. The possibility that in the future Navajo religion will be as much altered by changing conditions as it has been in the past makes this account all the more timely.

This book on culture and consciousness in history concerns the worldwide transformations of Jewish culture and society, and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language following the waves of pogroms in Russia in 1881, when large numbers of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe redefined their identity as Jews in a new and baffling world.

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.

Drawing on political ecology and science studies perspectives, Life without Lead examines the social, political, and environmental dimensions of a devastating lead-poisoning epidemic. Lead became Uruguay’s first mass contamination event, affecting tens of thousands of children in neighborhoods across the capital, Montevideo, and other cities. Carrying along a deep sense of urgency, the discovery and unfolding of lead contamination raised broad-ranging questions about the nature of urban environmental risk, the fraught and changing relationship between citizens and the state, and the transformative social, economic, and political landscape of a country in crisis. The book situates the Uruguayan case in relation to neoliberal reform, globalization, and the resurgence of the political left in Latin America. It traces the rise of an environmental-justice movement; analyzes the politics of culture, place, organized labor, and class; and examines the local and transnational circulation of environmental ideologies and contested biomedical science. Through fine-grained ethnographic analysis, Life without Lead traverses the realms of material reality and experience, disputed claims to “truth,” and the symbolic and power-laden terrain of collective identities, meaning, and action.

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.

This book examines what it means to be a compassionate, caring person in a place like Russia, which has become a country of stark income inequalities and political restrictions.Through vivid ethnography about a thriving Moscow-based network of religious and secular charitable service providers, the book explores how assistance providers’ efforts to “do the right thing” for their communities produce new modes of social justice and civic engagement. As the experiences and perspectives of the assistance workers, government officials, recipients, and supporters documented here reveal, their work and beliefs are shaped by a practical philosophy of goodness and kindness. Despite the hardships, injustices, and despair these individuals witness on a regular basis, there is a pervasive sense of optimism that human kindness will ultimately prevail over poverty, injury, and injustice. Ultimately, what connects members of this diverse group of individuals and organizations is a shared concern that caring for others is not simply either a practical matter or an idealistic, even utopian vision, but a project of faith and hope. Together care-seekers and care-givers destabilize and remake the meaning of “faith” and “faith-based” by putting into practice a vision of humane-ness and humanitarianism that transcends such boundaries between “state” and “private,” “religious” and secular.”

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.

In this study, the myth of the Noble Savage is an altogether different myth from the one defended or debunked by others over the years. That the concept of the Noble Savage was first invented by Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century in order to glorify the “natural” life is easily refuted. The myth which persists is that there was ever, at any time, widespread belief in the nobility of savages. The fact is, as this book shows, the humanist eighteenth century actually avoided the term because of its association with the feudalist-colonialist mentality that had spawned it 150 years earlier. The Noble Savage reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century, however, when the “myth” was deliberately used to fuel anthropology's oldest and most successful hoax. This book's narrative follows the career of anthropologist John Crawfurd, whose political ambition and racist agenda were well served by his construction of what was manifestly a myth of savage nobility. Generations of anthropologists have accepted the existence of the myth as fact, and the book makes clear the extent to which the misdirection implicit in this circumstance can enter into struggles over human rights and racial equality.

Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yôkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and, until now, understudied material. This book tracks yôkai over three centuries, from their appearance in seventeenth-century natural histories to their starring role in twentieth-century popular media. Focusing on the intertwining of belief and commodification, fear and pleasure, horror and humor, this book illuminates different conceptions of the “natural” and the “ordinary” and sheds light on broader social and historical paradigms—and ultimately on the construction of Japan as a nation.

Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? This book analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. The book suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, “language devotion.” It uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, the book explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. It considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.

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.

In the spring of 1935, at Snaketown, Arizona, two Pima Indians recounted and translated their entire traditional creation narrative. Juan Smith, reputedly the last tribesman with extensive knowledge of the Pima version of this story, spoke and sang while William Smith Allison translated into English and Julian Hayden, an archaeologist, recorded Allison's words verbatim. The resulting document, the “Hohokam Chronicles,” is the most complete natively articulated Pima creation narrative ever written and a rare example of a single-narrator myth. Now this work, composed of thirty-six separate stories, is presented in its entirety. The narrative constitutes a kind of scripture for a native church, beginning with the creation of the universe out of the void and ending with the establishment in the sixteenth century of present-day villages. Central to the story is the murder/resurrection of a god-man, Siuuhu, who summoned the Pimas and Papagos (Tohono O'odham) as his army of vengeance and brought about the conquest of his murderers, the ancient Hohokam. Here, this text has been extensively annotated and is supplemented with other Pima–Papago versions of similar stories. As a social and historic document, this book adds to the growing body of Native American literature and to our knowledge of the development of Pima–Papago culture.

This book is more than a collection of previously unpublished folktales. By combining expertise in English literature and anthropology, it brings to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture. Over the course of several years, the authors have collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated, and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The book acts as a guide to Palestinian culture.

This study argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The quest is not, as most have believed, a rare mystical experience, but a frequent expression of our most basic human impulses. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world. Yet this book is not trying to reduce the quest to an “archetype” or “monomyth.” Instead, it presents the full diversity of the quest in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and especially the Americas. In theorizing about the quest, the book draws on thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson and Jean Piaget, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Charles Sanders Peirce and Karl Popper, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, and Noam Chomsky.

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.

They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers’ daily work and home lives, this book examines uses ethnography to show how U.S. immigration and labor policies have made migrant farmworkers “exceptional workers.” It explores the deeply intertwined political, legal, and social factors that place Latino migrants at particular risk of illness and injury in the fields, and that saddle them with a higher burden of chronic disease at home. It examines the patchwork of health care, disability, and Social Security policies that provide them little succor when they become sick or grow old. The book takes an in-depth look at the work risks faced by migrants at all stages of the life-course: as teens, in their middle-age, and ultimately as elderly workers. By following the lives of a core group of farmworkers over nearly a decade, this book provides a searing portrait of how their precarious immigration and work statuses get under their skin, culminating in preventable morbidity and premature death.

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.