front cover of Bombay Brokers
Bombay Brokers
Lisa Björkman, editor
Duke University Press, 2021
A political party worker who produces crowds for electoral rallies. A “prison specialist” who serves other people’s prison sentences in exchange for a large fee. An engineer who is able to secure otherwise impossible building permits. These and other dealmakers—whose behind-the-scenes expertise and labor are often invisible—have an intrinsic role in the city's functioning and can be indispensable for navigating everyday life in Bombay, one of the world’s most complex, dynamic, and populous cities. Bombay Brokers collects profiles of thirty-six such “brokers.” Written by anthropologists, artists, city planners, and activists, these character sketches bring into relief the paradox that these brokers’ knowledge and labor are simultaneously invisible yet essential for Bombay’s functioning. Their centrality reveals the global-scale paradoxes and gaps that these brokers mediate and bridge. In this way, Bombay Brokers prompts a reconsideration of what counts as legitimate and valuable knowledge and labor while offering insight into changing structures of power in Bombay and around the globe.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Sarthak Bagchi, Tobias Baitsch, Sangeeta Banerji, Srimati Basu, Tarini Bedi, Amita Bhide, Lisa Björkman, Uday Chandra, Simon Chauchard, Ka-Kin Cheuk, Michael Collins, Daisy Deomampo, Maura Finkelstein, Ajay Gandhi, Rupali Gupte, Kathryn C. Hardy, Lalitha Kamath, Prasad Khanolkar, Bhushan Korgaonkar, Ratoola Kundu, Ken Kuroda, Annelies Kusters, Lisa Mitchell, Shailaja Paik, Gautam Pemmaraju, Lubaina Rangwala, Llerena Guiu Searle, Atreyee Sen, Prasad Shetty, Rohan Shivkumar, Edward Simpson, David Strohl, Rachel Sturman, R. Swaminathan, Aneri Taskar, Yaffa Truelove, Sahana Udupa, Lalit Vachani, Leilah Vevaina
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God and Caesar at the Rio Grande
Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion
Hilary Cunningham
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

front cover of The Insecure City
The Insecure City
Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut
Monroe, Kristin V
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.
 
While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger concerns about social, political, and economic life. It was not only violence that threatened Beirut’s ordinary residents, but also class dynamics that made life even more precarious. For instance, the installation of checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic—set up for the security of the elite—forced the less fortunate to alter their lives in ways that made them more at risk. Similarly, the ability to pass through security blockades often had to do with an individual’s visible markers of class, such as clothing, hairstyle, and type of car. Monroe examines how understandings and practices of spatial mobility in the city reflect social differences, and how such experiences led residents to be bitterly critical of their government.
 
 
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Jerusalem 1900
The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities
Vincent Lemire
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Perhaps the most contested patch of earth in the world, Jerusalem’s Old City experiences consistent violent unrest between Israeli and Palestinian residents, with seemingly no end in sight. Today, Jerusalem’s endless cycle of riots and arrests appears intractable—even unavoidable—and it looks unlikely that harmony will ever be achieved in the city. But with Jerusalem 1900, historian Vincent Lemire shows us that it wasn’t always that way, undoing the familiar notion of Jerusalem as a lost cause and revealing a unique moment in history when a more peaceful future seemed possible.
 
In this masterly history, Lemire uses newly opened archives to explore how Jerusalem’s elite residents of differing faiths cooperated through an intercommunity municipal council they created in the mid-1860s to administer the affairs of all inhabitants and improve their shared city. These residents embraced a spirit of modern urbanism and cultivated a civic identity that transcended religion and reflected the relatively secular and cosmopolitan way of life of Jerusalem at the time. These few years would turn out to be a tipping point in the city’s history—a pivotal moment when the horizon of possibility was still open, before the council broke up in 1934, under British rule, into separate Jewish and Arab factions. Uncovering this often overlooked diplomatic period, Lemire reveals that the struggle over Jerusalem was not historically inevitable—and therefore is not necessarily intractable. Jerusalem 1900 sheds light on how the Holy City once functioned peacefully and illustrates how it might one day do so again.
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The Lowell Experiment
Public History in a Postindustrial City
Cathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
In the early nineteenth century, Lowell, Massachusetts, was widely studied and emulated as a model for capitalist industrial development. One of the first cities in the United States to experience the ravages of deindustrialization, it was also among the first places in the world to turn to its own industrial and ethnic history as a tool for reinventing itself in the emerging postindustrial economy. The Lowell Experiment explores how history and culture have been used to remake Lowell and how historians have played a crucial yet ambiguous role in that process.

The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowell's new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women's history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—a field that links the work of professionally trained historians with many different kinds of projects in the public realm.

The Lowell Experiment takes an anthropological approach to public history in Lowell, showing it as a complex cultural performance shaped by local memory, the imperatives of economic redevelopment, and tourist rituals—all serving to locate the park's audiences and workers more securely within a changing and uncertain new economy characterized by growing inequalities and new exclusions.

The paradoxical dual role of Lowell's public historians as both interpreters of and contributors to that new economy raises important questions about the challenges and limitations facing academically trained scholars in contemporary American culture. As a long-standing and well-known example of "culture-led re-development," Lowell offers an outstanding site for exploring questions of concern to those in the fields of public and urban history, urban planning, and tourism studies.
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front cover of Materializing Identities in Socialist and Post-Socialist Cities
Materializing Identities in Socialist and Post-Socialist Cities
Edited by Jaroslav Ira and Jirí Janác
Karolinum Press, 2017
Following the so-called “Material Turn” of historiography, this book explores the materialization of identity in urban space—specifically in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Urban spaces played an important role in the formation of national identities in post-socialist successor states across the region, while at the same time the articulation of national identities markedly affected the appearance of these post-socialist cities. Beginning with an overview of socialist and post-socialist cities in recent urban history, contributors trace the post-socialist intertwining of space and identities in case studies that include Astana and Almaty in Kazakhstan, Chișinău and Tiraspol in Moldova, and Skopje in Macedonia, while also linking this phenomenon to socialist urbanism, as in postwar Minsk, Belarus.
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The Modernist City
An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia
James Holston
University of Chicago Press, 1989
The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.
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Monrovia Modern
Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia
Danny Hoffman
Duke University Press, 2017
In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of the challenges Monrovia's residents face. The transient lives of these buildings' inhabitants, many of whom are ex-combatants, prevent them from making place-based claims to a right to the city and hinder their ability to think of ways to rebuild and repurpose their built environment. Featuring nearly 100 of Hoffman's color photographs, Monrovia Modern is situated at the intersection of photography, architecture, and anthropology, mapping out the possibilities and limits for imagining an urban future in Monrovia and beyond.
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front cover of Pyramids and Nightclubs
Pyramids and Nightclubs
A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers
By L. L. Wynn
University of Texas Press, 2007

2008 — Leeds Honor Book in Urban Anthropology – Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology

Living in Egypt at the turn of the millennium, cultural anthropologist L. L. Wynn was struck by the juxtapositions of Western, Gulf Arab, and Egyptian viewpoints she encountered. For some, Egypt is the land of mummies and pharaohs. For others, it is a vortex of decadence, where nightlife promises a chance to salivate over belly dancers and maybe even glimpse a movie star. Offering a new approach to ethnography, Pyramids and Nightclubs examines cross-cultural encounters to bring to light the counterintuitive ways in which Egypt is defined.

Guiding readers on an armchair journey that introduces us to Russian and Australian belly dancers on Nile cruise ships, Egyptian rumors about an Arab prince and his royal entourage, Saudi girls looking for a less restrictive dating scene, and other visitors to this "antique" land, Wynn uses the lens of travel and tourism to depict a fascinating and often surprising version of Egypt, while exploring the concept of stereotype itself. Tracing the history of Western and Arab fascination with Egypt through spurious hunts for lost civilizations and the new economic disparities brought about by the oil industry, Pyramids and Nightclubs ultimately describes the ways in which moments of cultural contact, driven by tourism and labor migration, become eye-opening opportunities for defining self and other.

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Saigon’s Edge
On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City
Erik Harms
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds.

Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both. With particular attention to everyday social realities, Harms demonstrates how living on the margin can be both alienating and empowering, as forces that exclude its denizens from power and privilege in the inner city are used to thwart the status quo on the rural edges.

More than a local case study of urban change, Harms’s work also opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization—transformations instructively linked to trends around the globe.
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front cover of Theorizing the City
Theorizing the City
The New Urban Anthropology Reader
Low, Setha M.
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. The New Urban Anthropology Reader corrects this omission by presenting 12 cross-cultural case studies focusing on the analysis of space and place.

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