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How everyday forms of surveillance threaten undocumented immigrants—but also offer them hope for societal inclusion Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Engage and Evade examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins. Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspec...
“A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” an...
In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures. In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the translations of religious ideas into nonreligious ones. He discusses the claim that liberal conceptions of equality represent earlier Christian ideas translated into secularism; explores the ways that the langu...
'Border Lives' tells the story of former, current, and future border crossers who live in Tijuana and use the border as a resource to construct their livelihoods. Drawing on almost a year and a half of ethnographic data, Sergio Chávez demonstrates the ways in which the border can be both a resource and a constraint on people's lives.
Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history. In States of Belonging, an interdisciplinary team of immigration experts – Tomás R. Jiménez, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Yue...
In this volume of The ANNALS the editors argue that illegal immigration arose as feature of capitalist globalization in the 20th century. The collected research papers explore the origins of undocumented migration in our contemporary global economy, and show the consequences of so-called illegal immigration both for migrants and for a number of host countries. The methodological challenges involved in studying clandestine population movements are also advanced by example.
Drawing on his extensive scholarship in the study of secular and religious traditions as well as his understanding of social, political and anthropological theory and research, Talal Asad questions Western assumptions regarding death and killing.
For more than twenty years, the ruler of Syria, Hafiz al-Asad, has been at the heart of the power struggle in the Middle East. Patrick Seale's portrait of the leader shows a man driven by his personal vision for Syria and the Arab world.
Everyday life as an immigrant in a deportation nation is fraught with risk, but everywhere immigrants confront repression and dispossession, they also manifest resistance in ways big and small. Immigrants Under Threat shifts the conversation from what has been done to Mexican immigrants to what they do in response. From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements.
Part travelogue, part autobiography, "The Road to Mecca" is the compelling story of a Western journalist and adventurer who converted to Islam in the early twentieth century. A spiritual and literary counterpart of Wilfred Thesiger and a contemporary of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Muhammad Asad journeyed around the Middle East, Afghanistan and India. This is an account of Asad's adventures in Arabia, his inner awakening, and his relationships with nomads and royalty alike, set in the wake of the First World War. It can be read on many levels: as a eulogy to a lost world, and as the poignant account of a man's search for meaning. It is also a love story, defying convention and steeped in loss. With its evocative descriptions and profound insights on the Islamic world, "The Road to Mecca" is a work of immense value today.