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In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori's increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city's cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. In this book, the author employs an interweaving of essays and field diary entries as she analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city's conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas's writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—this book is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.

Since 2006, Venezuela has had the highest homicide rate in South America and one of the highest levels of gun violence in the world. Former president Hugo Ch൥z, who died in 2013, downplayed the extent of violent crime and instead emphasized rehabilitation. His successor, President Nicolౠ‎Maduro, took the opposite approach, declaring an all-out war on crime (mano dura). What accounts for this drastic shift toward more punitive measures? In Deadline, anthropologist Robert Samet answers this question by focusing on the relationship between populism, the press, and what he calls “the will to security.” Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research alongside journalists on the Caracas crime beat, he shows how the media shaped the politics of security from the ground up. Paradoxically, Venezuela's punitive turn was not the product of dictatorship, but rather an outgrowth of practices and institutions normally associated with democracy. Samet reckons with this apparent contradiction by exploring the circulation of extralegal denuncias (accusations) by crime journalists, editors, sources, and audiences. Denuncias are a form of public shaming or expos矴‎hat channels popular anger against the powers that be. By showing how denuncias mobilize dissent, Deadline weaves a much larger tale about the relationship between the press, popular outrage, and the politics of security in the twenty-first century.

Guerrilla Marketing argues that counterinsurgency and marketing have merged together in Colombia. More specifically the book analyzes a government program to persuade FARC guerrillas to defect from the rebel movement while also rebranding the Colombian army as a humanitarian actor. This program in the Ministry of Defense has partnered with Lowe/SSP3, an advertising firm that has managed the brands of Mazda and RedBull in Colombia. The partnership pitches a new life to guerrilla fighters, one as consumer citizens and entrepreneurial subjects. Those who abandon the insurgency’s ranks are coaxed into informing on their former comrades, providing the military valuable strategic and tactical intelligence. The book develops the concept of brand warfare to describe the fusion of counterinsurgency and consumer culture into an affective assemblage that is key to understanding governance in the early twenty-first century. Guerrilla Marketing follows stories from the perspective of former and active guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), military officers, marketers, peace negotiators in Havana, and exiles living in unexpected places, such as rural Sweden. Testimonials, and their accompanying drawings by Colombian artist Lucas Ospina, separate the chapters. In its conclusion the book analyzes the implications for other war-torn countries, criticizing how Colombia has reframed demobilization in a way that weaponizes the peace-building ethos of the policy. The epilogue contemplates the book’s implications for Colombia’s post-peace accord future by analyzing the FARC’s own guerrilla marketing at its tenth and final conference as a guerrilla army.

Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it remains deeply connected with California by one of the busiest international ports of entry in the world. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Passing probes the US-Mexico border’s influence on senses of self and collectivity here. Two publics, it argues, take shape in the shadow of the border. The clase media or “middle class” strives to enact the ideals of liberal publicity: informed, rational debate grounded in an upstanding “I.” The border, however, destabilizes this public profoundly, for as middle-class subjects seek confirmation of their status in the form of a US visa, they expose themselves to suspicions that reduce their projects of selfhood to interested attempts to pass inspection. In contrast, the pueblo, or “the people” as paradigmatically plebeian, imagines itself as composed of actual and potential “illegal aliens.” Instead of the “we” of liberal publicity, this public takes shape via the third person of hearsay: communication framed as what “they say,” what “everyone” knows and repeats. Passing tracks Tijuana’s two publics as they both face off and intertwine in demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, workplace banter, personal interviews, and more. Through close attention to everyday talk and interaction, it reveals how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition together shape Tijuana’s public sphere, throwing into relief the conundrums of self and collectivity born of an age of at once increased transnational flows and fortified borders.

While so-called transnational migration has occurred between Mexico and the U.S. for over a hundred years, at the turn of the twenty-first century the spaces produced by migration are increasingly defining—and linking—Mexican pueblos and U.S. cities. The movement of people across borders has been paralleled by the flow of capital; money sent from migrants in the U.S. to families in their homelands—remittances—constitutes the largest remittance corridor in the world. Using remittances as a lens to both contribute to and critique contemporary migration discourse, this book unearths the spatial and material practices that define endemic migration as a way of life. Arguing that the physical and social environment produced by migration constitutes a “remittance landscape,” a formal analysis of migrant architecture (homes, public buildings, and infrastructure) is coupled with ethnography to explore how rapidly changing built environments shape migrant experiences. At the state level, countries like Mexico have recognized the importance of this economic flow, harnessing it through formal channels such as the Tres Por Uno (3x1) program. Such government supported migrant development projects comprise a remittance development model that repositions economic migrants as boosters of emigrant villages and towns. Paradoxically, this model demonstrates newfound independence and agency for migrants amid the institutionalization of the distances, ambiguities and ambivalences associated with the geographic and social fragmentation of families and communities. The book concludes with an analysis of migrants’ transborder spatial practices in Chicago, showing how urbanism north of the border is actually composed of, and produced by, processes that span international boundaries.

Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion interrogates the aftermath of Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis. Among the Buenos Aires middle-class, that event quickly came to be recognizable not as rupture, but rather as the uncannily familiar repetition of the country’s long-term history of political-economic crises. It thus entailed a widely shared sense of disillusion, not only with the failed promises of neoliberal capitalism, but also with the promises of crisis itself to enable historical transformation. That dwelling in the negativity of crisis had profound consequences for people’s daily lives as well as for their political imaginations. In this sense, post-crisis middle-class Buenos Aires was structured by a chronotope of routine crisis, with disillusion serving as a generalized meta-stance that people took up as they navigated all manner of interactions. Key to the production and regimentation of this chronotope of routine crisis and stance of disillusion were everyday practices of critique in which people employed suspicious approaches (such as those found in psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories) to interpret the hidden reality structuring social life. Across sites ranging from domestic households to national political discourse, from civil society organizations to neighborhood cafés, Routine Crisis tracks the chains of semiosis through which disillusion came to orient social life, and the unsettling consequences of that orientation.