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This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a broader quest for social regeneration that involve negotiations of family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad as well as complicated encounters with state officials and laws hindering or facilitating their journeys. In this migratory process exchange of everything from money, goods and advice to sentiments, phone calls and assurances of belonging are part of transnational circuits that enable, block or control mobility through social networks. We call the circuits that emerge from the sending, withholding and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions affective circuits. We focus especially on how affective circuits operate in the context of contemporary African migration to Europe, following in the footsteps of migrants and their families, husbands, wives, friends, peers and lovers across African countries like Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Congo, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique and European countries like France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Germany and Denmark. Through fieldwork in both Africa and Europe the authors analyze how exchanges work, how they are socially, culturally, morally and historically embedded, and how they regenerate and reshape kin and other intimate formations in our times of worldwide migrations.

Starting with the discovery of a curious plot in which science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, this book tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores what the author calls “the stock exchange modality:” how the production of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to investment and speculation in foreign government debt. This book underscores the crucial role of finance in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. It argues that finance and science were at the heart of that new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister. This new imperialism built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance produced essential technologies of globalization, and formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth century British imperialism

This volume presents CSR as a series of economic and political strategies that are currently shifting the focus of international human rights activism and signaling the rise of new forms of global governance. In as much as the work demonstrates the limitations of CSR and offers a critical perspective on corporate techniques of market domination, it also posits a future for CSR within the human rights movement. This volume's contributors engage directly with the conduct and objectives of corporations, moving beyond discussions of markets and economic policy to examine how particular corporate agents have shaped realities on the ground.

Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases argues that today it is vital to distinguish danger, risk, and uncertainty analytically and anthropologically. In order to do so, it presents a series of concepts and cases that clarify emergent problem spaces as well as to the way these domains are currently addressed—or not addressed—by relevant scholarship. It argues that the scholarly fields previously understood as covering risk are inadequate in part because the world is increasingly being populated by forms, practices and events of uncertainty that cannot be reduced to risk. It makes the case that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appearance of new risks and dangers in the world which no doubt abound, but also on how uncertainty itself should be defined as a problem; and the forms of governing and experience that are emerging in relation to it. The studies in this book, with contributions from various anthropological domains (economics and entrepreneurialism, security and humanitarianism, health and environment), enable consideration of the forms of knowledge and technologies applied to the problem of managing uncertainty, as well as differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to forms of action currently developing beyond risk assessment. The volume brings together recent thinkers whose work, while not ignoring previous scholarship on risk, nevertheless provides ground-breaking attention to the domain of uncertainty providing analytic tools and case studies necessary for understanding that domain.

Mothers on the Move tells the story of Cameroonian migrants in Germany through the lives of women who navigate belonging—in Europe and in Africa—through birthing and caring for children. It explores the social strategies and community resources mothers mobilize when facing dilemmas engendered by migration. Cameroonian mothers sustain their goals of reproduction when they go abroad, although their international migration makes reproduction more difficult. As they say about Berlin, “It’s hard being a mother here.” By reproducing, mothers generate belonging for themselves and their children. Migration complicates belonging, stretching some connections to the breaking point while facilitating new ones. Through vivid case studies based on interviews with and ethnographic fieldwork among Cameroonian mothers, government bureaucrats, and humanitarian service providers, the book explores the strength and tenuousness of these connections. The ties Cameroonian women build are shaped by reproductive successes and insecurities experienced when migrant mothers pursue their ideal modern Cameroonian family while balancing the urban and regulatory demands of life in Berlin. To have and keep their children, Cameroonian mothers switch on and off emotionally-laden network ties—described through the metaphor of electric circuitry—with husbands, kin, co-ethnics, co-nationals, and German state and NGO workers. These networks require careful management, simultaneously facilitating the exchange of support and goods while contributing to women’s insecurity through the possibility of gossip and exposure to the “shadow” of state regulations. Interrelating concepts regarding reproduction, belonging, social networks, and legal conscious, this book offers an uplifting account of African migrants as mothers.

When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the chapters in this book reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, the book shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions.

Although the abundant scientific literature in criminology, sociology, political science, and legal studies on urban policing relies in part on participant observation, ethnography rarely appears as such, except occasionally in the form of short vignettes, and the specific contribution of this method is generally not discussed. Moreover, until recently, anthropologists themselves seem to have been little interested in policing practices. Yet, during the past decade, this situation has begun to change. A renewed interest in fieldwork research has emerged, criminologists have acknowledged the need for qualitative in-depth work, and anthropologists have conducted studies of law enforcement in various parts of the world. The present volume addresses the ethnography of policing from a dual perspective. On the one hand, it explores how ethnography can illuminate the work and role of the police in society; on the other hand, it analyzes how the study of law enforcement sheds light on important questions regarding the practice of ethnography in general. This collective volume is therefore intended to be a contribution to both criminology and anthropology. The case studies presented span five continents (North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe), therefore contributing to a global exploration of policing. Given the growing questioning of law enforcement and its deviances in contemporary societies, especially for what regards the poor and the minorities, this collective endeavor is also a contribution to a much-needed public debate.