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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.

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to calls for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy without debt. Based on research in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on ethnographic work that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how experts deploy Islamic finance to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how they seek to create a new "geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center the global system in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

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.

Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between inequality and consciousness at multiple scales—local, national and global. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Alcântara, Maranhão, the book analyzes the conflicts surrounding Brazil’s spaceport—a high-technology project of global transcendence located in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. The spaceport was built in the 1980s in a region principally populated by the descendants of those once enslaved on local cotton plantations, inaugurating a land conflict that continues today. Announced by Brazil’s military government as part of a project to make Brazil a world technomilitary power, the spaceport has been beset by internal and external problems, and is today populated by two Brazilian space programs (one military and the other neoliberal) that differ in their projects to confront global political and economic inequalities. Another project at the site is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race. Mobilizing as escaped-slave descendants (quilombolas), villagers and their allies have organized to resist the expansion of the spaceport and to win the villagers rights of wellbeing and citizenship that have long been denied to them. The spaceport thus stands at the center of competing projects of social and material transformation, different utopias, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales, and in very different ways.

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.

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul. Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation. This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

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.

Starting from the observed fact that humans construct themselves using information carried in two separate channels, one cultural and consisting largely of symbols, the other genetic and consisting largely of DNA, this book explores the consequences for human socio-cultural systems of the relationship between the two components of this dual inheritance model and of the key differences between them. Using a wide array of ethnographic cases, the book shows that while socio-cultural systems vary greatly, any one of them when analyzed will reveal the effects of the necessary tension between the two modes of information transmission across generations. The analysis of the ethnographic material shows that a dual inheritance model does a better job of accounting for distinctive characteristics of human societies than does an account based on either ordinary evolutionary theory or social-cultural construction theory alone. The key distinctions between the modes of transmission of the two types of information are that genetic information cannot produce exact replicas of itself, can only create a small number of close relatives, operates on an agenda based on the logic of inclusive fitness, and must be accomplished by copulation; while cultural information can inform large numbers of replicas of itself that can approximate to identity, operates on an agenda based on the establishment of wide-ranging groups united by symbolic kinship, and is transmitted in a public arena in which copulation is excluded or restricted. These differences generate many observed distinctive forms of human society.

Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecommunication would enhance everything from entrepreneurialism, to democratization, to service delivery, and usher in socio-economic development. Mobile Secrets offers a rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance by revealing how better access to information may in fact be anything but desirable. By engaging with youth in a Mozambican suburb, the book shows how, in their efforts to create fulfilling lives, young men and women rely on mobile communication not only to mitigate everyday uncertainty but also to juggle the demands of intimacy by courting, producing, and sustaining uncertainty. In their hands, the phone has become a necessary tool in a wider arsenal of pretense—a means of creating the open-endedness on which harmonious gender relations depend in postwar postsocialist Mozambique. The chapters explore the tensions between display and disguise, as well as the tensions between love and deceit, authenticity and the commodification of intimacy, and between truth and willful blindness, to argue that Mozambicans have harnessed the technology not only to acquire information but also to subvert regimes of truth and preserve public secrets. If the phone has proven so irresistible, it is in large part owing to how it allows, even if often imperfectly, to juggle the demands of intimacy.

Though New York’s Lower East Side today is heavily gentrified, it spent decades as an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting into something never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the story of that social movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. The squatters had made moral and political claims on urban space that, in a rare turn of events, turned into legal rights. These persistent squatters created almost a dozen low-income, limited equity co-operative buildings in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York but also, more intangibly, a sprawling network of chosen family, a history of struggle, a repertoire of tactics, and a story that continues to inspire others to ask: Is it possible to create a space outside of capitalism? Combining oral history and ethnography, Ours to Lose not only tells a little-known New York City story, it also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

It is the anthropologist's fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, the author celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world. Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, this book is an evocative account of the circuitous path the author's life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. He imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi–Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness. Graced with humor and narrative elegance, this book is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.

Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.

Why do financial analysts exist in the market? Stories of Capitalism seeks to find an anthropological explanation to a question economists have failed to answer. Building on recent developments in anthropology and the social studies of finance, it provides the first full-scale ethnography on financial analysts and their market practices. Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork, Stories of Capitalism looks at financial analysis from three different angles. First, it describes financial analysts as a sub-professional group and focuses on how they differentiate themselves from other bankers to become accepted as a group of experts. Second, it looks at the everyday valuation and forecasting practices of analysts and illustrates how calculative practices, culturally embedded interpretations and social interaction are combined to produce persuasive forecasts. Third, it focuses on the organizational role of financial analysts and shows how they gain influence when interacting with wealth managers and clients. Based on these three empirical parts, Stories of Capitalism illustrates that through processes of differentiation, the performance of expertise, and the creation and circulation of narratives, financial analysts become meaningful actors in the market. Their role in the market is not based on their ability to predict the future, but on their ability to create and circulate narratives that frame financial market movements as meaningful and assessable.

Life is not what it used to be. Synthetic is an anthropological story about how it got that way. Living things bearing genomes streamlined or cobbled together from synthesized DNA now scurry, swim, and flourish in test tubes and bioreactors: viruses named for computer software, bacteria encoding passages of James Joyce, yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from sweet wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools. This bestiary is the creation of synthetic biologists: émigrés from mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science who, in the final years of the twentieth century, resolved that if the aim of biology was to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than would experimentation. They advocate not experiment but manufacture, not reduction but construction, not analysis but synthesis. Anthropologically tracking the growth of synthetic biology over eight years, Synthetic invites readers into bioengineering research laboratories and synthetic biology start-up companies, biohackers’ garages, even to meetings devoted to resurrecting extinct species. Synthetic demonstrates that synthetic biology is the latest instantiation of a centuries-long debate as to whether nature may be known through artifice. Making stuff—synthesis—has become a mode of analysis. Working to engineer the living world, from microbes to mammoths, synthetic biologists smuggle conventional ideas about creation, kinship, property, labor, democracy, and species into their redesigned organisms. These brave new organisms grow, mutate, metabolize, divide, and die. They also speak eloquently of their times, of nature and artifice, analysis and synthesis, life and its limits.