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How lawsuits around intellectual property in Brazil and India are impacting the patentability of plants and seeds, farmers’ rights, and the public interest. Over the past decade, legal challenges have arisen in the Global South over patents on genetically modified crops. In this ethnographic study, Karine E. Peschard explores the effects of these disputes on people’s lives, while uncovering the role of power—material, institutional, and discursive—in shaping laws and legal systems. The expansion of corporate intellectual property (IP), she shows, negatively impacts farmers’ rights and, by extension, the right to food, since small farms produce the bulk of food for domestic consumpt...
A radical and urgent new approach to how we can solve the problems of hunger and poverty in the US. Most people think hunger has to do with food: researchers, policymakers, and advocates focus on promoting government-funded nutrition assistance; well-meaning organizations try to get expired or wasted food to marginalized communities; and philanthropists donate their money to the cause and congratulate themselves for doing so. But few people ask about the structural issues undergirding hunger, such as, Who benefits from keeping people in such a state of precarity? In The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, Mariana Chilton shows that the solution to food insecurity lies far beyond food and ...
How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial to feeding the world's growing population; critics oppose them for pushing farmers deeper into ecological and economic distress, and for shoring up the power of agribusinesses. India leads the world in terms of the intensity of democratic engagement with transgenic crops. Anthropologist Aniket Aga excavates the genealogy of conflicts of interest and disputes over truth that animate the ongoing debate in India around the commercial release of transgenic food crops. The debate may well transform agriculture and food irreversibly in a country already witness to widespread agrarian distress, and over 300,000 suicides by farmers in the last two decades. Aga illustrates how state, science, and agrarian capitalism interact in novel ways to transform how democracy is lived and understood, and sheds light on the dynamics of technological change in populous, unequal polities.
How to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from eight countries across the Global North and South. School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that...
The Anthropology of Citizenship introduces the theoretical foundations of and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world, in local, national and global contexts. Key readings provide a cross-cultural perspective on citizenship practices, and an individual citizen’s relationship with the state. Introduces a range of exciting and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world Provides key readings for students and researchers who wish to gain an understanding of citizenship practices, and an individual’s relationship with the state in a global context Offers an anthropological perspective on citizenship, the self and political agency, with a focus on encounters between citizens and the state in education, law, development, and immigration policy Provides students with an understanding of the theoretical foundations of citizenship, as characterized by liberal and civic republican ideas of political belonging and exclusion Explores how citizenship is constructed at different scales and in different spaces Twenty-five key writings identify what is a new and vibrant subfield within politics and anthropological research
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"The prayers of those of us who have long hungered for a comprehensive, historically deep, learned and accessible account of international agrarian movements have finally been answered in full. We will long be in debt to Edelman and Borras for this exceptional and lasting contribution to agrarian scholarship." - James C. Scott, founding Director, Yale University Agrarian Studies Program, author of The Art of Not Being Governed
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.
This volume is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations flying under its broad banner. Despite its large and growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. This collection brings together both longstanding scholars in critical agrarian studies, such as Philip McMichael, Bina Agarwal, Henry Bernstein, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Marc Edelman, as well as a dynamic roster of early- and mid-career researchers. The ultimate aim is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future. This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Bodies and Culture is a collection of contemporary interdisciplinary research on bodies from emerging scholars in the humanities and social sciences disciplines that addresses issues relating to a range of historical and contemporary contexts, theories, and methods. Examining the diversity and capabilities of bodies, this volume focuses on the role of culture in shaping forms and conceptions of the corporeal. In particular, these essays interrogate the role of the body in articulating and reinforcing social differences, especially the effects of racist, colonialist, and other hegemonic ideologies on the agency and diversity of bodies. Bodies and Culture also considers the place of the body in forming identities, images, and narratives of individuals, and the practices of modifying bodies and social roles through physical activities from exercise to artistic performance. This collection will appeal to scholars in a wide range of areas, including literature, anthropology, sociology, art history, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and fat studies.