Browse

This book argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, the author shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, he likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, the author suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society.

This book explores language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in extensive field research on the Hopi Tribe of northeastern Arizona—on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore—this work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence. Like many indigenous legal institutions across North America, the Hopi Tribal Court was created in the image of Anglo-American-style law. However, the book shows that in recent years, Hopi jurists and litigants have called for their courts to develop a jurisprudence that better reflects Hopi culture and traditions. Providing insights into the Hopi and English courtroom interactions through which this conflict plays out, the book argues that tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition both drive Hopi jurisprudence and make it unique. Ultimately, this analyses of the language of Hopi law offer a fresh approach to the cultural politics that influence indigenous legal and governmental practices worldwide.

Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula—a birthing injury that leads to chronic incontinence—to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backwards culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. Beyond Surgery unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation. Through her in-depth ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belonging, shame and delight, and where a host of religious, moral, aesthetic, economic, and political agendas converge. As she chronicles the lived experiences of fistula patients in clinical treatment, Hannig explores the danger of labeling “culture” the culprit, showing how this common argument ignores the larger problem of insufficient medical care in rural Africa. Beyond Surgery portrays the complex social outcomes of surgery in an effort to deepen our understanding of present-day medical missions in Africa, expose cultural biases, and clear the path toward more effective ways of delivering care to those who need it most.

In every culture intimacy between adults and children is subject to regulation, but it is most often only a taboo. In the last half-century in the West such taboos have become explicit objects for legal regulation. In much of the West, however, the focus has shifted from punishment and healing to “rehabilitation” through therapy. In Germany treatment is in fact a legal right and a personal obligation. “Cruel Attachments” is an anthropological account based on ethnographic research in Berlin, Germany, of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders through therapy, often accompanied by short-term imprisonment. Therapy is charged with creating a person who not only avoids a repeating the crime but a self capable of reflection, introspection, and transformation. Through an explication of this modern secular ritual of rehabilitation, John Borneman theorizes the complex relation between a legal system that demands a change of self, a transformation of the inner state of a person, and a public that is extremely skeptical of the success of rehab rituals. Using select case studies, he follows offenders as they experience a sequence of events––from accusation to admission of culpability, through arrest, trial, imprisonment, treatment, release from prison, and either social reincorporation or indefinite surveillance. Tensions and problems in the relationship between law, therapy, and a skeptical public notwithstanding, the author argues that the turn to therapy within the German mode of rehabilitation of child sex molesters presents a more effective alternative to a punitive model such as is practiced in the United States.

This book discusses the unarticulated unconscious and tacit knowledge, termed “dark matter of the mind,” which underlies and enables verbal communication. Humans, when they speak or interpret, make use of a wide variety of skills and distinctions, in grammar, phonetics, organization of information by importance, and assumptions taken for given, for example, which compose this dark matter. The book’s contention is that this unconscious knowledge is not a product of innate human psychology, but rather of cultural influences and experiences. The book draws on the author’s experience attempting to translate the Bible and its cultural context for the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary activity. This missionary activity was hindered by a large number of underlying, largely unspoken, assumptions on the part of the American author on one side and the Pirahãs on the other which it impossible to translate the New Testament in such a way that it would be accessible for the Pirahãs in the same way that is to Americans. The author’s experience as a missionary, along with other studies of cultural conditioning, confirms an understanding of the individual which echoes the Buddhist concept of Anatman, which asserts that there is no innate human nature, but only the self which is entirely composed of memory and experience.

Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, this book is one part memoir and one part ethnography—providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of the author's family's struggles and personal upward mobility, this book reveals the social landscapes of America's industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that the author's family's turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, the book provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored.

This book takes as its object of analysis the relationship between literature and anthropology in France during the twentieth century, a moment that marked ethnography’s rise to prominence as a field science as well as the discipline’s openness to literary modes of writing that stood alongside more conventional anthropological monographs. The book argues that this openness to literature served as a textual counterpart to the institutionalization of anthropology in France, which occurred after the discipline publicly cut its ties with travel writing as a literary genre in order to become a “serious” scientific endeavor. Chapters approach this paradox through a striking observation about ethnographic writing in France beginning in the 1930s: upon their return from fieldwork, many ethnographers produced two written accounts of their research experience, the first being a rather dry, scholarly monograph, and the second a more “literary” text that was much more difficult to classify since it was too aesthetically and philosophically stylized to be a pure ethnographic documentary of everyday life. The book demonstrates how these anthropological “second books” represent a uniquely French phenomenon and bespeak an engagement with a broader conversation between science and literature in France. Chapters engage a variety of texts, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques and Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme to works by Marcel Griaule and Marcel Mauss, ending with a reading of Roland Barthes’s anthropologically inspired criticism that points to how literature and the social sciences in France jointly created and participated in the same intellectual field throughout the twentieth century.

Far Out examines how generations of counterculturally inclined Westerners have imagined Nepal as a land untainted by modernity and its capital, Kathmandu, a veritable synonym of Oriental Mystique. The book examines how the idea of Nepal changes through time in ways that reflect shifting forms of countercultural longing in the West, and how Nepalis have engaged the changing images of Nepal that tourists bring with them. Through three sections that span the post WW II decades of roughly 1950 to 1980 the book examines an early tourism phase in which jet-setting postwar elites came to Nepal in search of Raj-era Oriental fantasies; Nepal’s emergence as an exotic outpost of hippie counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s; and the country’s rebranding as an adventure destination in which tourists pay for packaged renewal, whether on a trekking trail or in a meditation course. Focusing on tourism as encounter, the book asks what tourism meant to both the foreigners who came to Nepal and the Nepalis who had to make sense of some of the most bizarre characters and (counter) cultural trends that the twentieth century produced. Even if the anti-modernist fantasy Nepals came and left with the tourists who imagined them, Nepalis who encountered those fantasies became adept at selling foreigners their own dreams thereby transforming tourism into a domestic industry. Far Out documents the convergence between the deep-seated Western longing for an imagined spirituality located in the remote, high Himalayas, and Nepali desires to tap into global modernity.

How do people make sense of their experiences? How do they understand possibility? How do they limit possibility? These questions are central to all the human sciences. Here, the book offers a powerfully creative new way to think about human experience: the notion of imaginative horizons. Imaginative horizons are the blurry boundaries that separate the here and now from what lies beyond, in time and space. These horizons, this book argues, deeply influence both how we experience our lives and how we interpret those experiences, and this book here sets himself the task of exploring the roles that creativity and imagination play in our experience of the world.

Mushrooming in size and bristling with new construction, Indian cities are being remade to suit a new post-liberalization society of computer engineers, working women, and savvy consumers. Now, alongside open-air markets and crumbling apartment blocks, spacious air-conditioned malls sell Louis Vuitton luggage and Swarovski crystal, condominium towers offer residents gated security and indoor gyms, and glitzy office buildings house international firms. This book explains the violent, sudden, and spectacular growth of India’s cities by focusing on the people who have moved capital into real estate and the stories of growth that they have used to fuel speculation and capital accumulation. It departs from most scholarship on urban change in India which focuses on slum clearances and the disavowal of the poor that justifies them. Instead, this book examines the movements of capital that have precipitated urban restructuring. Looking beyond the facades of India’s glitzy buildings to provide an ethnographic account of the international networks of speculative finance and the events of communication through which they are produced, this book explains how markets and cities are made.