Hailed by reviewers as “majestic and magisterial,” Nomads and the Outside World was first published in English in 1984. With the author's new introduction and an updated bibliography, this classic is now available in an edition accessible to students.
From reviews of the first edition:
“Magisterial. . . . Combining a phenomenal erudition, a candid judgment, and a subtle sense of irony, Khazanov sets out to challenge the orthodox view of nomadic feudalism and, in the process, has produced the first comparative survey of pastoral societies that can claim to be truly comprehensive, covering their history in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa from the origins of pastoralism to the dawn of the modern era.”—Tim Ingold,
Current Anthropology“This is the best study on pastoral nomadism that the reviewer has ever read. At last we have a major attempt to present the whole phenomenon in historical, ecological, spatial and structural perspective. . . . Superb scholarship. It is the kind of work that can only be produced as a result of years of specific research, much deep thinking . . . and a determination to reject cant.”—John C. Wilkinson,
Geographical Journal“Khazanov's book on pastoral nomadism is a heroic endeavor of a kind no one has seriously attempted before. . . . Particularly valuable to western readers are the materials on the numerous peoples of Central Asia and Siberia . . . and their integration with analysis of more familiar societies such as those of North and East Africa and the Middle East. . . . The insights provided by this book are too numerous to list.”—Caroline Humphrey,
Times Literary SupplementYou see them as faceless shapes on the median or in city parks. You recognize them by their cardboard signs, their bags of aluminum cans, or their weathered skin. But you do not know them.
In Nomads of a Desert City Barbara Seyda meets the gazes of our homeless neighbors and, with an open heart and the eye of an accomplished photographer, uncovers their compelling stories of life on the edge.
Byrdy is a teenager from Alaska who left a violent husband and misses the young daughter her mother now cares for. Her eyes show a wisdom that belies her youth. Samuel is 95 and collects cans for cash. His face shows a lifetime of living outside while his eyes hint at the countless stories he could tell. Lamanda worked as an accountant before an act of desperation landed her in prison. Now she struggles to raise the seven children of a woman she met there. Dorothy—whose earliest memories are of physical and sexual abuse—lives in a shelter, paycheck to paycheck, reciting affirmations so she may continue “to grace the world with my presence.”
They live on the streets or in shelters. They are women and men, young and old, Native or Anglo or Black or Hispanic. Their faces reflect the forces that have shaped their lives: alcoholism, poverty, racism, mental illness, and abuse. But like desert survivors, they draw strength from some hidden reservoir.
Few recent studies on homelessness offer such a revealing collection of oral history narratives and compelling portraits. Thirteen homeless women and men open a rare window to enrich our understanding of the complex personal struggles and triumphs of their lives. Nomads of a Desert City sheds a glaring light on the shadow side of the American Dream—and takes us to the crossroads of despair and hope where the human spirit survives.
Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems.
The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman.
Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U.
The northern and southern borders and borderlands of the United States should have much in common; instead they offer mirror articulations of the complex relationships and engagements between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In North American Borders in Comparative Perspectiveleading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of these three nations.
This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the overportrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives.
Adding to the regional analysis of North American borders and borderlands, this book cuts across disciplinary and topical areas to provide a balanced, comparative view of borders. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners convey perspectives on current research and understanding of the United States’ borders with its immediate neighbors. Developing current border theories, the authors address timely and practical border issues that are significant to our understanding and management of North American borderlands.
The future of borders demands a deep understanding of borderlands and borders. This volume is a major step in that direction.
Contributors
Bruce Agnew
Donald K. Alper
Alan D. Bersin
Christopher Brown
Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly
Irasema Coronado
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
Michelle Keck
Victor Konrad
Francisco Lara-Valencia
Tony Payan
Kathleen Staudt
Rick Van Schoik
Christopher Wilson
Walter E. Klippel came to the University of Tennessee in 1977 as an assistant professor of anthropology. In the forty years that followed, he supervised and mentored countless students in archaeology and biological anthropology, published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters, and assembled a zooarchaeological comparative collection of national significance. During his tenure, Klippel’s important contributions to the field of zooarchaeology would impact not only his students and colleagues but the development of zooarchaeological research as a whole. Even after his retirement in 2017, Klippel’s influence is readily apparent in the studies of his contemporaries. North American Zooarchaeology: Reflections on History and Continuity is their tribute to his work.
Developed by friends, students, and colleagues of Walter Klippel, North American Zooarchaeology presents a wide-ranging collection of essays through the lens of his remarkable career. Each chapter of the volume represents a prevailing theme notable in Klippel’s research, including geological and landscape contexts, taphonomy, and the incorporation of actualistic methodologies and new technologies into zooarchaeological analyses. The diversity of topics represented across the ten chapters showcase just how extensive Klippel’s research interests are and suggest how much contemporary zooarchaeology owes to his vision. The authors take up this broad palette to explore the various ways in which the framework of zooarchaeology can be used and applied in nontraditional settings.
With a foreword by Bonnie Styles and Bruce McMillan, longtime friends and colleagues of Walter Klippel, this volume reflects on the history and continuity of zooarchaeology in North America and honors one of its most notable contemporary contributors. With its multifaceted approach, this volume is sure to appeal to a broad array of practitioners in the field of zooarchaeology.
Originating from a series of workshops held at the Alaska Forum of the Fourth International Polar Year, this interdisciplinary volume addresses a host of current concerns regarding the ecology and rapid transformation of the arctic. Concentrating on the most important linked social-ecological systems, including fresh water, marine resources, and oil and gas development, this volume explores opportunities for sustainable development from a variety of perspectives, among them social sciences, natural and applied sciences, and the arts. Individual chapters highlight expressions of climate change in dance, music, and film, as well as from an indigenous knowledge–based perspective.
Berland explores how understandings of space and time, empire and margin, embodiment and technology, and nature and culture are shaped by broadly conceived communications technologies including pianos, radio, television, the Web, and satellite imaging. Along the way, she provides a useful overview of the assumptions driving communications research on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, and she highlights the distinctive contributions of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Berland argues that electronic mediation is central to the construction of social space and therefore to anti-imperialist critique. She illuminates crucial links between how space is traversed, how it is narrated, and how it is used. Making an important contribution to scholarship on globalization, Berland calls for more sophisticated accounts of media and cultural technologies and their complex “geographies of influence.”
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This comprehensive compilation of Moore's archaeological reports on northwest Florida and southern Alabama and Georgia presents the earliest documented investigations of this region.
When Clarence Bloomfield Moore cruised the rivers of Florida in search of prehistoric artifacts a century ago, he laid the groundwork for archaeological investigations to follow. This volume reflects Moore's fieldwork along the northwest Florida coast, the most archaeologically rich area of the state, as well as Southern Alabama and Georgia.
Here readers will share Moore's first look at the area in 1901-1903 and additional observations made in 1918 during what was to be his last field season. Moore's works reveal ceramics, tools, skeletal remains, and exotic artifacts excavated from the earthen mounds and shell middens built by native peoples over the last two millennia.
In the introduction to this edition, David Brose and Nancy Marie White place Moore's investigations within the context of the science, natural history, and antiquarianism of his day. They document what happened to the sites he explored, tell how his findings fit into the body of his research, and explain how those findings should be interpreted in the context of Southeastern culture history and modern archaeological theory.
Moore was the most knowledgeable Southeastern archaeologist of his time; his writings are a benchmark for anyone studying those areas today.
Traces the movement of both groups and individuals from Norway to the American Midwest and Pacific coast states.
This book tells the story of the migration as it affected both countries and investigates the reasons for “American Fever.” The story ends with a discussion of the ways in which Norwegian-Americans retain their ties to Norway. The book was first published in Norway as Dröm og Dad (Dream and Deed), in observance of the 150th anniversary of the departure of the first emigrant ship for America. This is an excellent way to celebrate one of the strongest ethnic heritages in America.
Much knowledge and understanding can be generated from the experiences of everyday life. In this engaging study, Alvin O. Korte examines how this concept applies to Spanish-speaking peoples adapted to a particular locale, specifically the Hispanos and Hispanas of northern New Mexico. Drawing on social philosopher Alfred Schutz’s theory of typification, Korte looks at how meaning and identity are crafted by quotidian activities. Incorporating phenomenological and ethnomethodological strategies, the author investigates several aspects of local Hispano culture, including the oral tradition, leave-taking, death and remembrances of the dead, spirituality, and the circle of life. Although avoiding a social-problems approach, the book devotes necessary attention to mortificación (the death of the self), desmadre (chaos and disorder), and mancornando (cuckoldry). Nosotros is a vivid and insightful exploration with applications in numerous fields.
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions.
In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims—from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.
“A chilling account of trolling, misogyny, racism, and bad history proliferated online by the Alt-Right… Zuckerberg makes a persuasive case for why we need a new, more critical, and less comfortable relationship between the ancient and modern worlds in this important and very timely book.”
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey
“Explores how ideas about Ancient Greece and Rome are used and misused by antifeminist thinkers today.”
—Time
“Zuckerberg presciently analyzes these communities’…embrace of stoicism as a self-help tool to gain confidence, jobs, and girlfriends. Their adoration of men like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ovid…is founded in a limited and distorted interpretation of ancient philosophy…lending heft and authority to sexism and abuse.”
—The Nation
“Traces the application—and misapplication—of classical authors and texts in online communities that see feminism as a threat.”
—Bitch Media
Raised in the squalor of a New York tenement until he was 10 years old, Nelson Díaz saw his life change when his family moved to a brand-new high-rise project in West Harlem in the 1950s. That experience, along with lessons learned as the only Latino law student at Temple University, would drive him throughout his life as a lawyer and activist, fighting for the expansion of rights for all Americans.
“No soy de aquí ni de allá” is a mantra for Puerto Ricans who feel like foreigners wherever they are and who seek a place for themselves. In his inspiring autobiography, Not from Here, Not from There, Díaz tells the story of his struggles and triumphs as his perspective widened from the New York streets and law school classrooms to the halls of power in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Whether as a leader in economic development, a pioneer in court reform, or a champion of fair housing, Díaz has never stopped advocating for others. Díaz was happy to be the first Latino to “do something,” but he never wanted to be the last. This story of an outsider who worked his way to the inside offers powerful lessons on finding a place in the world by creating spaces where everyone is welcome.
In the late 1990s Angels in America,Tony Kushner’s epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art but not others? Not Here, Not Now, Not That! examines a wide range of controversies over films, books, paintings, sculptures, clothing, music, and television in dozens of cities across the country to find out what turns personal offense into public protest.
What Steven J. Tepper discovers is that these protests are always deeply rooted in local concerns. Furthermore, they are essential to the process of working out our differences in a civil society. To explore the local nature of public protests in detail, Tepper analyzes cases in seventy-one cities, including an in-depth look at Atlanta in the late 1990s, finding that debates there over memorials, public artworks, books, and parades served as a way for Atlantans to develop a vision of the future at a time of rapid growth and change.
Eschewing simplistic narratives that reduce public protests to political maneuvering, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! at last provides the social context necessary to fully understand this fascinating phenomenon.
From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from “indecent” information that might harm their development—whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?
In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of “indecency” laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato’s argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the “harm to minors” argument rests on shaky foundations.
For all the talk about a new postracial America, the fundamental realities of American racism—and the problems facing black political movements—have not changed. Michael C. Dawson lays out a nuanced analysis of the persistence of racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and the ways that whites and blacks continue to see the same problems—the disastrous response to Katrina being a prime example—through completely different, race-inflected lenses. In fact, argues Dawson, the new era heralded by Barack Obama’s election is more racially complicated, as the widening class gap among African Americans and the hot-button issue of immigration have the potential to create new fissures for conservative and race-based exploitation. Through a thoughtful analysis of the rise of the Tea Party and the largely successful “blackening” of President Obama, Dawson ultimately argues that black politics remains weak—and that achieving the dream of racial and economic equality will require the sort of coalition-building and reaching across racial divides that have always marked successful political movements.
Polemical but astute, passionate but pragmatic, Not in Our Lifetimes forces us to rethink easy assumptions about racial progress—and begin the hard work of creating real, lasting change.
The late twentieth century has seen a fantastic expansion of personal, sexual, and domestic liberties in the United States. In Not Just Roommates, Elizabeth H. Pleck explores the rise of cohabitation, and the changing social norms that have allowed cohabitation to become the chosen lifestyle of more than fifteen million Americans.
Despite this growing social acceptance, Pleck contends that when it comes to the law, cohabitors have been, and continue to be, treated as second-class citizens, subjected to discriminatory laws, limited privacy, a lack of political representation, and little hope for change. Because cohabitation is not a sexual identity, Pleck argues, cohabitors face the legal discrimination of a population with no group identity, no civil rights movement, no legal defense organizations, and, often, no consciousness of being discriminated against. Through in-depth research in written sources and interviews, Pleck shines a light on the emergence of cohabitation in American culture, its complex history, and its unpleasant realities in the present day.
How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce.
“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism.
Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor.
Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.
“Impressive…[Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of capitalism.”
—Financial Times
“Offers a penetrating new perspective on abolition in the British Empire by spotlighting a particular cast of characters: the commercial abolitionists in West Africa who fashioned a consumer-focused, business-friendly antislavery ethics. These figures sought to prove the moral and economic superiority of non-slave labor while profiting from the transition away from slavery…Impressive.”
—Jacobin
“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words inscribed on a sugar bowl, nineteenth-century consumers were reminded of their power to change the global economy. Determined to strike at the heart of the slave trade, abolitionist businesses throughout the Atlantic used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to make the case for ethical capitalism.
Consumers became the moral compass of capitalism as companies in West Africa, including Macaulay & Babington and Brown & Ives, developed clever new tactics to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Yet ethical trade was not without its problems. The search for goods “not made by slaves” unwittingly expanded the reach of colonial enterprises in the relentless pursuit of cheap labor. Not Made by Slaves captures the moral dilemmas roiling the early years of global consumer society and is a stark reminder of the unintended consequences of relying on consumer self-interest to transform global capitalism.
Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers” in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace” to the white race, threats that needed to be confined and involuntarily sterilized.
Part historical inquiry and part sociological investigation, Not Quite White demonstrates the power of social categories and boundaries to shape social relationships and institutions, to invent groups where none exist, and to influence policies and legislation that end up harming the very people they aim to help. It illuminates not only the cultural significance and consequences of poor white stereotypes but also how dominant whites exploited and expanded these stereotypes to bolster and defend their own fragile claims to whiteness.
Winner of the Healthy Teen Network’s Carol Mendez Cassell Award for Excellence in Sexuality Education and the American Sociological Association's Children and Youth Section's 2012 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award
For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States, parents aim above all for family cohesiveness, often permitting young couples to sleep together and providing them with contraceptives. Drawing on extensive interviews with parents and teens, Not Under My Roof offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in both countries negotiate love, lust, and growing up.
Tracing the roots of the parents’ divergent attitudes, Amy T. Schalet reveals how they grow out of their respective conceptions of the self, relationships, gender, autonomy, and authority. She provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships. Avoiding caricatures of permissive Europeans and puritanical Americans, Schalet shows that the Dutch require self-control from teens and parents, while Americans guide their children toward autonomous adulthood at the expense of the family bond.
It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements interact as people write.
In this book, McLeod follows a group of students through a semester of writing assignments, tracking the students’ progress and examining the affective elements relevant to their writing. To facilitate future discussion of these phenomena, McLeod also provides suggested definitions for terms in the affective domain.
In a very real sense, this book is the result of a collaboration of three Susans: Susan McLeod, who researched and wrote the book; Sue Hallett, an instructor in Washington State University’s composition program whose classes McLeod observed and who helped provide much of the data; and Susan Parker, a graduate student who observed Hallett’s class and who ran a tutorial connected to that class. To provide a narrative structure, McLeod and her two collaborators have constructed a simulated semester, conflating the year and a half of the study into one semester and creating a class that is a composite drawn from seven classrooms over three semesters.
Although philosophers have had much to say about the affective domain, Notes on the Heart is based for the most part on research from the social sciences. Discussions of pedagogy, while meant to have practical value, are suggestive rather than prescriptive. The goal is to help teachers see their practice in new way.
Teachers will be particularly interested in McLeod’s discussion of teacher affect/effect. This section examines both the issue of the "Pygmalion effect" (students becoming better because the teacher believes they are) and perhaps the more common opposite, the "golem effect" (students becoming less capable because their teachers view them that way).
Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.
How Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world
While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim.
Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West.
Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force.
September 19, 1985: A powerful earthquake hits Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections.
In masterfully weaving together a multiplicity of voices, Poniatowska has reasserted the inherent value and latent power of people working together. Punctuated by Poniatowska's own experiences and observations, these post disaster testimonies speak of the disruption of families and neighborhoods, of the destruction of homes and hospitals, of mutilation and death—the collective loss of a city. Drawing the reader dramatically into the scene of national horror through dozens of personal stories, Poniatowska demonstrates the importance of courage and self-reliance in redeeming life from chaos.
Capitalism is a dynamic system, continually adapting itself to exploit workers in new ways. In Britain today, the gig economy is its newest form, expressed through precarious contracts and the supposed atomization of workers. In this book, Jane Hardy argues that despite capitalism’s best efforts to stop us, we can always find ways to fight it.
Through a range of case studies, from cleaners to university lecturers, Hardy looks at how workers are challenging employers’ assaults in the neoliberal workplace, comparing these new actions to a long history of British working class struggle. She explores the historic role of migrants in the British workforce, from the Windrush generation to more recent arrivals from the European Union, as well as placing womens’ collective action center stage. Analysing the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, she refutes claims that we are entering a post-capitalist society.
Nothing to Lose But Our Chains is an optimistic exploration into the power of the working class, showing that no matter what tools capitalism uses, it can always be resisted.
Capitalism is a dynamic system, continually adapting itself to exploit workers in new ways. In Britain today, the gig economy is its newest form, expressed through precarious contracts and the supposed atomization of workers. In this book, Jane Hardy argues that despite capitalism’s best efforts to stop us, we can always find ways to fight it.
Through a range of case studies, from cleaners to university lecturers, Hardy looks at how workers are challenging employers’ assaults in the neoliberal workplace, comparing these new actions to a long history of British working class struggle. She explores the historic role of migrants in the British workforce, from the Windrush generation to more recent arrivals from the European Union, as well as placing womens’ collective action center stage. Analysing the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, she refutes claims that we are entering a post-capitalist society.
Nothing to Lose But Our Chains is an optimistic exploration into the power of the working class, showing that no matter what tools capitalism uses, it can always be resisted.
Notorious New Jersey is the definitive guide to murder, mayhem, the mob, and corruption in the Garden State. With tabloid punch, Jon Blackwell tells riveting accounts of Alexander Hamilton falling mortally wounded on the dueling grounds of Weehawken; Dutch Schultz getting pumped full of lead in the men’s room of the Palace Chop House in Newark; and a gang of Islamic terrorists in Jersey City mixing the witch’s brew of explosives that became the first bomb to rock the World Trade Center. Along with these dramatic stories are tales of lesser-known oddities, such as the nineteenth-century murderer whose skin was turned into leather souvenirs, and the state senator from Jersey City who faked his death in a scuba accident in the 1970s in an effort to avoid prison.
Blackwell also sheds light on some historical whodunits—was Bruno Hauptmann really guilty of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby? Who was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001? Not forgotten either are notorious characters who may actually be innocent, including Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and those who have never been convicted of wrongdoing although they left office in scandal, including Robert Torricelli and James McGreevey.
Through 100 historic true-crime tales that span over 300 years of history, Blackwell shows readers a side of New Jersey that would make even the Sopranos shudder.
In recent years U.S. public policy has focused on strengthening the nuclear family as a primary strategy for improving the lives of America's youth. It is often assumed that this normative type of family is an independent, self-sufficient unit adequate for raising children. But half of all households in the United States with young children have two employed parents. How do working parents provide care and mobilize the help that they need?
In Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care, Karen V. Hansen investigates the lives of working parents and the informal networks they construct to help care for their children. She chronicles the conflicts, hardships, and triumphs of four families of various social classes. Each must navigate the ideology that mandates that parents, mothers in particular, rear their own children, in the face of an economic reality that requires that parents rely on the help of others. In vivid family stories, parents detail how they and their networks of friends, paid caregivers, and extended kin collectively close the "care gap" for their school-aged children.
Hansen not only debunks the myth that families in the United States are independent, isolated, and self-reliant units, she breaks new theoretical ground by asserting that informal networks of care can potentially provide unique and valuable bonds that nuclear families cannot.
Shaw uses the tools of social movement analysis, including the quantitative analysis of budgets, electoral data, and housing statistics, as well as historical research and personal interviews, to better understand the dilemmas, innovations, and dynamics of grassroots activism. He begins with a history of discriminatory housing practices and racial divisions that deeply affected Detroit following the Second World War and set the stage for the election of the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. By emphasizing downtown redevelopment, Mayor Young’s administration often collided with low-income housing advocates. Only through grassroots activism were those advocates able to delay or derail governmental efforts to demolish low-income housing in order to make way for more upscale development. Shaw then looks at present-day public housing activism, assessing the mixed success of the nationally sponsored HOPE VI project aimed at fostering home ownership in low-income areas. Descriptive and prescriptive, Now Is the Time! traces the complicated legacy of community activism to illuminate what is required for grassroots activists to be effective in demanding public accountability to poor and marginalized citizens.
While research demonstrates how Indigenous populations have been disproportionately affected by the global nuclear production complex, less attention has been given to tactics that have successfully resisted such projects. Danielle Endres’s Nuclear Decolonization shifts the conversation around nuclear colonialism in important ways, offering an account of how the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Skull Valley Goshute peoples and nations prevented two high-level nuclear waste sites from being built on their lands.
Using a decolonial approach, Endres highlights two sets of rhetorical tactics—Indigenous Lands rhetorics and national interest rhetorics—used to fight nuclear colonialism. The book reframes nuclear decolonization as fundamentally a struggle for the return of Indigenous lands while also revealing how Native activists selectively move between Indigenous nationhood and US citizenship in order to resist settler decision-making. Working at the intersection of Indigenous antinuclear advocacy, Indigenized environmental justice, and decolonization, Nuclear Decolonization centers Native activism and voices while amplifying the power and resilience of Indigenous peoples and nations.
Nullius is an award-winning anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a cornerstone of modern law, in the Indian case they are often a spectral presence. Kapila offers a detailed study of paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, misappropriated.
The book examines three forms of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying citizens ownership of their bodies under biometrics). The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of questions of property, exchange, dispossession, law, and sovereignty.
Nullius is the winner of the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Prize, Association of Asian Studies.
“A fascinating book.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review
A Smithsonian Best Science Book of the Year
Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Language & Linguistics
Carved into our past and woven into our present, numbers shape our perceptions of the world far more than we think. In this sweeping account of how the invention of numbers sparked a revolution in human thought and culture, Caleb Everett draws on new discoveries in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics to reveal the many things made possible by numbers, from the concept of time to writing, agriculture, and commerce.
Numbers are a tool, like the wheel, developed and refined over millennia. They allow us to grasp quantities precisely, but recent research confirms that they are not innate—and without numbers, we could not fully grasp quantities greater than three. Everett considers the number systems that have developed in different societies as he shares insights from his fascinating work with indigenous Amazonians.
“This is bold, heady stuff… The breadth of research Everett covers is impressive, and allows him to develop a narrative that is both global and compelling… Numbers is eye-opening, even eye-popping.”
—New Scientist
“A powerful and convincing case for Everett’s main thesis: that numbers are neither natural nor innate to humans.”
—Wall Street Journal
Two structuring concepts have predominated in discussions concerning how Middle Eastern men enact their identity culturally: domination and patriarchy. Nurturing Masculinities dispels the illusion that Arab men can be adequately represented when we speak of them only in these terms. By bringing male perspectives into food studies, which typically focus on the roles of women in the production and distribution of food, Nefissa Naguib demonstrates how men interact with food, in both political and domestic spheres, and how these interactions reflect important notions of masculinity in modern Egypt.
In this classic ethnography, narratives about men from a broad range of educational backgrounds, age groups, and social classes capture a holistic representation of masculine identity and food in modern Egypt on familial, local, and national levels. These narratives encompass a broad range of issues and experiences, including explorations of traditions surrounding food culture; displays of caregiving and love when men recollect the taste, feel, and fragrance of food as they discuss their desires to feed their families well and often; and the role that men, working to ensure the equitable distribution of food, played during the Islamist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2011. At the core of Nurturing Masculinities is the idea that food is a powerful marker of manhood, fatherhood, and family structure in contemporary Egypt, and by better understanding these foodways, we can better understand contemporary Egyptian society as a whole.
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