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2020 — Ruth Benedict Prize – Association for Queer Anthropology, American Anthropological Association 2020 — Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize – National Women’s Studies Association 2020 — Honorable Mention, Sara A. Whaley Book Prize 2021 — Best Book in Social Sciences – Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex worker...
I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographic stage play, based on fieldwork conducted in Russia with adults with disabilities. The core of the work is the script of the play itself, which is accompanied by a description of the script development process, from the research in the field to rehearsals for public performances. In a supporting essay, the author argues that both ethnography and theatre can be understood as designs for being together in unusual ways, and that both practices can be deepened by recognizing the vibrant social impact of interdependency animated by vulnerability, as identified by disability theorists and activists.
Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses...
In Fragile Kinships, Kathryn E. Goldfarb shows how child welfare systems do not always generate well-being. This is true across the world, as it is in Japan. Policymakers, caregivers, and people with experience in state care endeavor to imagine—and implement—child welfare systems that are genuinely supportive. Yet despite these efforts, social welfare systems too often produce people who are alone. By centering relationality in theorizing social forms of care, Fragile Kinships offers key insights into embodied and socioemotional well-being. Goldfarb analyzes both the feelings and effects of lacking kin, and the transformative energy people invest in creating new forms of kinship and relatedness. Fragile Kinships demonstrates why welfare systems must support relational well-being. In her contributions to anthropological theories of kinship, embodiment, and the field of Japanese studies, Goldfarb also speaks to academics, practitioners, and policymakers in Japan and globally with ethnographically grounded perspectives suggesting ways that child welfare systems might truly achieve wellbeing.
Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets examines indigenous, post-Soviet religious revival in the Republic of Buryatia through the lens of Bakhtin's chronotope. Comparing histories from Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Quijada offers a new lens for analyzing ritual and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know their past.
"Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, and especially small loans, to the world's poor. While credit for the poor has increasingly come under the rubric of commercial banking, Paraguayan solidarity lending offers a window into the tensions between social development and global finance. There, non-profit development programs offer group loans to women. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressure--social collateral--rather than through physical collateral. To understand the broader issues of economic interdependency and its regulatory features, Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border. The story of social collateral cannot be told without an interwoven story about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of gender--from pink-collar financial work, to men's committees, to hard women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and opportunity"--Provided by publisher.
Larisa Jasarevic offers an unforgettable look at the everyday experiences of people living in post-socialist, post-war Bosnia. Not at all existing on the world's margins, Bosnians today are concerned with the good life and are as entangled in consumer debt as everyone else. The insecurities of living in an economy dominated by informal networks of trade, personal credit, and indebtedness are experienced by Bosnians in terms of physical ailments, some not recognized by Western medical science. Jasarevic follows ordinary Bosnians in their search for treatment—from use of pharmaceuticals to alternative medicines and folk healers of various kinds. Financial well-being and health are woven together for Bosnians, and Jasarevic adeptly traces the links between the two realms. In the process, she addresses a number of themes that have been important in studies of life under neoliberalism in other parts of the world.
The Politics of the Near offers a novel approach to social unrest in post-apartheid South Africa. Keeping the noise of demonstrations, barricades, and clashes with the police at a distance, this ethnography of a poor people’s movement traces individual commitments and the mainsprings of mobilization in the ordinary social and intimate life of activists, their relatives, and other township residents. Tournadre’s approach picks up on aspects of activists lives that are often neglected in the study of social movements that help us better understand the dynamics of protest and the attachment of activists to their organization and its cause. What Tournadre calls a “politics of the near” takes shape, through sometimes innocuous actions and beyond the separation between public and domestic spheres. By mapping the daily life of Black and low-income neighborhoods and the intimate domain where expectations and disappointments surface, The Politics of the Near offers a different perspective on the “rainbow nation”—a perspective more sensitive to the fact that, three decades after the end of apartheid, poverty and race are still as tightly interwoven as ever.
Examines the myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture the good life, practice the embodied arts of everyday well-being, and in doing so draw on cultural resources ranging from ancient metaphysics to modern media.