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Consoling Ghosts is a sustained contemplation of relationships with the dying and the dead as inspired by conversations with emigrants from Laos and Cambodia. Emigrants’ thoughts and stories often refer and defer to spirits, from the wandering souls of the seriously ill to the dangerous ghosts of those who died by violence, and from restless ancestors displaced from their homes to adjudicating spirits of Southeast Asian landscapes. Langford considers how and why such spirits become implicated in remembering and responding to violence, whether the bloody violence of war or the more structural violence of minoritization and poverty. What is at stake, she asks, when spirits break out of their usual semiotic confinement as symbolic figures for history, heritage, or trauma, in order to haunt the corridors of hospitals and funeral homes? Why does it seem that spirits are both those who most required to be consoled and those who offer the most powerful possibilities of consolation? Emigrants’ theories and stories of ghosts, Langford suggests, implicitly question the metaphorical status of spirits, challenging, in the process, both contemporary bioethics of dying and dominant styles of mourning. Emigrants’ perspectives expose the theological assumptions that underwrite both contemporary management of death and prevalent theories of biopolitics, foreclosing recognition of the social existence of ghosts. Ultimately, she suggests, an alternative ontology of ghosts enables different relationships to death and the dead.

In 2006 the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh won the Nobel Peace Prize for its innovative microfinancing operations. This study of gender, grassroots globalization, and neoliberalism in Bangladesh looks critically at the Grameen Bank and three of the leading NGOs in the country. This book offers a new perspective on the practical, and possibly detrimental, realities for poor women inducted into microfinance operations. In a series of ethnographic cases, this book shows how NGOs use social codes of honor and shame to shape the conduct of women and to further an agenda of capitalist expansion. These unwritten policies subordinate poor women to multiple levels of debt that often lead to increased violence at the household and community levels, thereby weakening women’s ability to resist the onslaught of market forces. A compelling critique of the relationship between powerful NGOs and the financially strapped women beholden to them for capital, this book cautions us to be vigilant about the social realities within which women and loans circulate—realities that often have adverse effects on the lives of the very women these operations are meant to help.

Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, epitomizes one of those places. This book explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds. Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both. With particular attention to everyday social realities, the book demonstrates how living on the margin can be both alienating and empowering, as forces that exclude its denizens from power and privilege in the inner city are used to thwart the status quo on the rural edges. More than a local case study of urban change, this work also opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization—transformations instructively linked to trends around the globe.

Tongzhi, which translates into English as “same purpose” or “same will,” was once widely used to mean “comrade.” Since the 1990s, the word has been appropriated by the LGBT community in China and now refers to a broad range of people who do not espouse heteronormativity. Tongzhi Living, the first study of its kind, offers insights into the community of same-sex-attracted men in the metropolitan city of Dalian in northeast China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by Tiantian Zheng, the book reveals an array of coping mechanisms developed by tongzhi men in response to rapid social, cultural, and political transformations in postsocialist China. According to Zheng, unlike gay men in the West over the past three decades, tongzhi men in China have adopted the prevailing moral ideal of heterosexuality and pursued membership in the dominant culture at the same time they have endeavored to establish a tongzhi culture. They are, therefore, caught in a constant tension of embracing and contesting normality as they try to create a new and legitimate space for themselves. Tongzhi men’s attempts to practice both conformity and rebellion paradoxically undercut the goals they aspire to reach, Zheng shows, perpetuating social prejudice against them and thwarting the activism they believe they are advocating.