AIDS activists are often romanticized as extremely noble and selfless. However, the relationships among HIV support group members highlighted in Landscapes of Activism are hardly utopian or ideal. At first, the group has everything it needs, a thriving membership, and support from major donors. Soon, the group undergoes an identity crisis over money and power, eventually fading from the scene. As government and development institutions embraced activist demands—decentralizing AIDS care through policies of health systems strengthening—civil society was increasingly rendered obsolete. Charting this transition—from subjects, to citizens, and back again—reveals the inefficacy of protest, and the importance of community resilience. The product of in-depth ethnography and focused anthropological inquiry, this is the first book on AIDS activists in Mozambique. AIDS activism’s strange decline in southern Africa, rather than a reflection of citizen apathy, is the direct result of targeted state and donor intervention.

Honorable mention, 2018 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can produce. 

 

Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue of class in India, introducing four people who live in the “second-tier” city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker. Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how class is determined by both subjective perceptions and objective conditions, documenting Madurai residents’ palpable day-to-day experiences of class while also tracking their long-term impacts. By analyzing the intertwined symbolic and economic importance of phenomena like wedding ceremonies, religious practices, philanthropy, and loan arrangements, Dickey’s study reveals the material consequences of local class identities. Simultaneously, this gracefully written book highlights the poignant drive for dignity in the face of moralizing class stereotypes.  

 

Through extensive interviews, Dickey scrutinizes the idioms and commonplaces used by residents to justify class inequality and, occasionally, to subvert it. Along the way, Living Class in Urban India reveals the myriad ways that class status is interpreted and performed, embedded in everything from cell phone usage to religious worship.  

 

Despite the recent economic upswing in many Latin American countries, rural poverty rates in the region have actually increased during the past two decades. Experts blame excessively centralized public administrations for the lackluster performance of public policy initiatives. In response, decentralization reformshave become a common government strategy for improving public sector performance in rural areas. The effect of these reforms is a topic of considerable debate among government officials, policy scholars, and citizens’ groups. This book offers a systematic analysis of how local governments and farmer groups in Latin America are actually faring today.

Based on interviews with more than 1,200 mayors, local officials, and farmers in 390 municipal territories in four Latin American nations, the authors analyze the ways in which different forms of decentralization affect the governance arrangements for rural development “on the ground.” Their comparative analysis suggests that rural development outcomes are systemically linked to locally negotiated institutional arrangements—formal and informal—between government officials, NGOs, and farmer groups that operate in the local sphere. They find that local-government actors contribute to public services that better assist the rural poor when local actors cooperate to develop their own institutional arrangements for participatory planning, horizontal learning, and the joint production of services.

This study brings substantive data and empirical analysis to a discussion that has, until now, more often depended on qualitative research in isolated cases. With more than 60 percent of Latin America’s rural population living in poverty, the results are both timely and crucial.