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In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, the author contends that to make sense of the contemporary, anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative mentors: Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, the author poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them. This spirit of collaboration animates this book, as the author assesses the last ten years of his career, largely spent engaging in a series of intensive experiments in collaborative research and often focused on cutting-edge work in synthetic biology. He candidly details the successes and failures of shifting his teaching practice away from individual projects, placing greater emphasis on participation over observation in research, and designing and using websites as a venue for collaboration. Analyzing these endeavors alongside his efforts to apply an anthropological lens to the natural sciences, the author lays the foundation for an ethically grounded anthropology ready and able to face the challenges of our contemporary world.

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema, who, over the course of a fifty-year career, completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Rouch's practical filmmaking methods, which he developed while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvization by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, the author reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch's pioneering career, the author examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch's cinematographic legacy.

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.

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed? The essays in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.

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 argues that HIV/AIDS policy has been a venue through which the South African government has attempted to balance the contradictory demands of postcolonial nation-building: forced to satisfy the demands of neoliberal global capital and meet the needs of its poorest populations. It suggests that one of the primary ways in which this ‘postcolonial paradox’ is managed is through the re-signification of the tropes of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ – both within the public sphere and in the discourses and ideologies of people living with HIV/AIDS. The book traces the politics of AIDS in South Africa from 1994 through 2010, analyzing: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle between ‘AIDS denialists’ and treatment activists over the signification of HIV/AIDS, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. As such, it draws connections between the macro and micro levels – insisting therefore, not only on the reciprocal nature of causality, but also on the often complex and contradictory relationship between global processes, national policies and local practices. This bio-political history is positioned within the squatter camp, considering HIV/AIDS politics from the perspective of those in whose name these battles are fought but who have been rendered voiceless in its telling. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in informal settlements on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the book details what it is like to live with and die of AIDS in South Africa’s urban slums.

What does it mean to live a life that is knotted with other lives for better or worse? This ethnography of everyday multispecies relationships in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayan region traces how human pasts, presents, and futures come to be bound up with those of the many nonhuman animals who share this world with them, creating ties of relatedness between them that trouble the “naturalness” of categories such as human and animal, nature and culture, kinship and biology. This multispecies relatedness does not erase the differences and hierarchies that exist between different animals in the social world of the Central Himalayas, but leads individuals to constantly and carefully negotiate their difference from one another through shifting turns to love, care, neglect, avoidance, and violence. Questions of interspecies ethics and justice, the book argues, are not imagined as transcendental, but are situated in this complicated world of everyday relatedness across difference. The book traces how such everyday forms of relatedness are shaped by and engage the broader political, religious, and environmental currents at work in contemporary India. At a time when people’s relationships with animals have become the subject of strident political and cultural debate in India, this book demonstrates how through their everyday encounters, people and animals create intense knots of relatedness that complicate and enrich our understandings of the nature of mutuality, ethics, and love.

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

With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there that the battle lines of today's “culture wars” were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of “freak shows,” the author demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies.

Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as this book reveals, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race. Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, this book examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the country's political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.

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.

Organizations strive to create campaign messages that yield clear, consistent, and resonant interpretations that motivate people to buy their product, support their cause, vote for their candidate, or take active steps to improve or protect their health. However, once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate through public space, people interpret and use campaigns in ways the designers never intended. Best Laid Plans explains why these instrumental-rational attempts to persuade the public through culture and media often fail. To explain these failures, the book identifies mechanisms that encourage “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. To develop the concept of cultural entropy, the book analyzes HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana. AIDS organizations in Accra, and throughout the world, seek to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. They develop campaigns based on models of “Behavior Change Communication” that purport to use media to change sexual practices. AIDS organizations attempt to control the message by routinizing best practices like evidence-based design, involving opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. Despite their best efforts to persuade the public, campaigns rarely work as intended, disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. These cultural misfires are not random. Rather, these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable, indicative of a broader and important-to-understand process of cultural entropy.

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.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. The authors present here a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, they analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. The authors also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A corrective to previous historical accounts, the book is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

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.

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 1999, a whaling crew from the Makah Indian Nation hunted and killed a gray whale off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The hunt marked the return of a centuries-old tradition and, predictably, set off a fierce political and environmental debate. This book examines the Makah whaling conflict, its implications for Makah identity and sovereignty, the spiritual discourse of whalers, and the motives and strategies of antiwhaling activists. The two sides’ competing interpretations of whales and whaling culminate in attempts by both to translate their agendas into the authorized, bureaucratic language of federal fisheries management. One of the main arguments of this book is that we cannot understand the Makah whaling conflict—and, especially, these efforts at translation—without attending to its moral dimension, or the differing ideas about how humans ought to treat whales. Despite shifting public sentiments toward whales and dolphins in the US over the last fifty years, the US federal government continues to manage whales as if they were large fish. The conception of gray whales as countable, harvestable “stocks” enables Makah officials to claim affinities with the authorized discourse of the state. In order to have a seat at the table, anti-whaling activists must do the same, thus tacitly affirming that it is morally acceptable to kill whales. These findings call into question anthropological expectations regarding who benefits from the exercise of state power in environmental conflicts, especially where indigenous groups are involved.

Most women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason—to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, this book explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, the book produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives.

American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book explores Lutherans’ efforts to institute an aid alliance that departs from the inequalities of the earlier mission work on the island. Focusing on a 30-year-old medical aid program between Lutherans in Madagascar (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy) and the U.S. (after 1988, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), it provides a close analysis of the tensions among humanitarian activity, capitalism and global religious fellowship. Since the early 1980s, Lutherans have pursued an increasingly common aid model that entails sending from Minneapolis to Antananarivo the often unused medical discards of the U.S. medical establishment, created primarily by planned obsolescence or biomedical innovation. The book draws upon twenty-four months of primary ethnographic research in the Midwest U.S. and shorter research periods in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, aid workers, volunteer laborers, healer-evangelists and former missionaries. It develops an approach to Christian aid spaces as “conversionary sites,” or under-analyzed cultural spaces that operate as busy moral crossroads between past and present, as well as between geographically dispersed religious communities and global commodity chains. The book therefore maintains that contemporary biomedical aid from the United States to Madagascar is a multifaceted cultural and historical transaction; it is an ongoing, incomplete conversion of the moral foundation, practices and ways of knowing tied to the colonial legacy.