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Agitating Images explores the early history of Communist organization among small dispersed groups of indigenous Evenki peoples of Central Siberia. It draws this history into an examination of the destabilizing role of photographs in the production of history. While documenting the development of Soviet Nationalities policy in context of people who were considered to be socially and technologically ‘backwards,’ the project is resolutely committed to the demonstration of what I call photographic agitation. It performs this agitation all the while presenting a ‘nervous’ history of the momentous encounter between Soviet socialism and indigenous peoples in the Siberian North. This book will have broad appeal. Not only is it the first book to present a comprehensive treatment of the remote soviet outpost called the Culture Base but it adds to a lively historical and ethnological discourse on the colonial experience of the indigenous minorities of the Siberian North. Scholars working on histories of soviet socialism will be interested in this book for its counter-narrative of socialist modernity. For scholars interested in photography’s colonial histories, Agitating Images demonstrates the muddy role of photography in producing coherent scopic regimes.

This book offers a depth of ethnographic work that makes the following theoretical interventions: (a) to emphasize the significance of Brazil in the formation of the African Diaspora with specific attention to black women as social and political agents; (b) to highlight the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts oftentimes represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt; and (c) to offer a corrective perspective on how we think about politics by focusing on grassroots social movements in neighborhoods as key sites of struggle. The book describes in great detail the neighborhood association in Gamboa de Baixo located on the coast in the city-center of the northeastern city of Salvador. Local activists have been key in the city-wide movement for land and housing rights, and the geographic location of the neighborhood is crucial for understanding the gendered racial aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. It makes connections between the local, national and international politics of race, gender and the modernization of global cities and provides an example of the kinds of resistance movements that have emerged as a result.

Building a House in Heaven uses Islamic charity as a lens through which to understand the relations between the economy, state and religion in Mubarak era Egypt. My approach links questions of governance, authority, economy and polity with questions of identity, subjectivity and ways of knowing. The first geographical account of its kind, it considers how Islamic associations enact Islamic economic practices and how these practices changed relations between the state, voluntary and private sectors. I explore the practices of Islamic charities and their associated sites, neighborhoods, ideology, sources of funding, projects, and broad social networks. Throughout the book, I map the landscape of charity and development in Egypt, moving back and forth between ethnographic stories of specific organizations and reflections on patterns across the sector. I chart numerous factors that changed the nature of Egyptian charitable practices including: the state’s intervention in social care and religion, an Islamic revival, political economic trends that intensified economic pressures on the poor, and the emergence of the private sector as a key development actor.

This book represents the first scholarly engagement with shababiyya, the genre of popular music that dominates consumption in the Arab world in general and Egypt in particular. This genre is hugely popular among the contemporary youth generation of Egypt, yet scorned and ignored by their elders and scholars alike. The book analyzes the changing trends in musical tastes in Egypt over the last fifty years, and reveals a shift in the underlying aesthetic criteria of music reception that influences, among other things, the kind of political rhetoric to which these youth are receptive. The book is the most thickly ethnographic study to date of the relationship between mass-mediated popular music, modernity, and nationalism in the Arab world. The book is the first of its kind to be based upon sustained ethnographic research among a large number of youthful music listeners in the Arab world. It is also one of the earliest anthropological monographs to be published based on ethnographic research conducted amid the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The book is targeted primarily at cultural anthropologists, but also to other social scientists who study the Middle East and the Arab world.

For two years, fieldwork was carried out in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. This book tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts. Citizens’ media are most effective, the book posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. The book demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects. Ultimately, the book shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.

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.

Larasati elucidates the complex, often paradoxical relationships between the dancing body and the Indonesian state since 1965. In the brief period from late 1965 to early 1966, approximately 1 million Indonesians, including a large percentage of the country’s musicians, dancers, and artists were killed, arrested, or disappeared as then-general Suharto took control of the nation, implanting his “New Order” regime, which would rule for the next thirty years. Looking back on the New Order from the context of the present, Larasati interrogates the specific ways in which female dancing bodies have been dealt with by the state: vilified, punished, then replaced with idealized, state aligned bodies. Drawing on critical ethnography and the theorization of dance as methodological approaches, the book analyses the relationship of corporeal punishment and the political economics of display to cultural production in the context of East-West cultural exchange, tourism, state diplomatic “culture missions,” and world/ ethnic dance as defined by its peripheral relationship to Europe and the US. Within this framework, Larasati seeks to expand understandings of the moving, dancing body as deployed by state power: a dual-edged rhetorical strategy that enacts the erasure of historical violence, while simultaneously providing access to mobility and a certain space for the negotiation of identity and female citizenship.

Downed by Friendly Fire examines the ubiquity of violence and the need to rehabilitate its prevailing physical classification, especially as it relates to gender. The book seeks to change the meaning of violence by redefining it to include intended, nonphysical harm cloaked in the presumed banality of normality. Specifically, it looks at the social practices that dehumanize or are exploitative—either emotionally or physically—, which compels individuals to endure shame, humiliation, starvation, exclusion, marginalization, health disparities poverty, etc. This is done through the framework of the unmasking of female aggression, bullying, and competition that are evoked by the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order.

In 2002, Sierra Leone emerged from a decade long civil war. Seeking international attention and development aid, its government faced a dilemma. Though devastated by conflict, Sierra Leone had a low prevalence of HIV. However, like most African countries, it stood to benefit from a large influx of foreign funds specifically targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention and care. What Adia Benton chronicles in this ethnographically rich and often moving book is how one war-ravaged nation reoriented itself as a country suffering from HIV at the expense of other, more pressing health concerns. During her fieldwork in the capital, Freetown, thirty NGOs administered internationally funded programs that included HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Benton probes why HIV exceptionalism—the idea that HIV is an exceptional disease requiring an exceptional response—continues to guide approaches to the epidemic worldwide and especially in Africa, even in low-prevalence settings. In the fourth decade since the emergence of HIV/AIDS, many today question whether the effort and money spent on this health crisis has helped or exacerbated the problem. HIV Exceptionalism reveals the unanticipated consequences of HIV/AIDS development programs.

On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d’Éole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the mayor’s vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers. Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic research with northeast Paris residents, as well as an analysis of green architecture and urban design, Andrew Newman argues that environmental politics must be separated from the construct of urban sustainability, which has been appropriated by forces of redevelopment and gentrification in Paris and beyond. France’s turbulent political environment provides Newman with insights into the ways in which multiethnic coalitions can emerge⎯even amid overt racism and Islamophobia⎯in the struggle for more just cities and more inclusive societies. A tale of multidimensional political efforts, Landscape of Discontent cuts through the rhetoric of green cities to reveal the promise that environmentalism holds for urban communities everywhere.

In 1995, a half-vacant, wrecked public housing project on Chicago's Near West Side went under the wrecking ball. Federal and local officials touted the demolition and redevelopment of the Governor Henry Horner housing complex as a model for public housing reform within and beyond Chicago. Its redevelopment ushered in the most ambitious urban planning experiment of its kind: The demolition of Chicago's infamously troubled public housing projects and their redevelopment into much smaller developments known as "new communities." Proponents expected everyday life in these much smaller, mixed-income, and partially privatized developments would mitigate the insecurity, isolation, and underemployment that plagued residents of "severely distressed" public housing. Focusing on Horner's redevelopment, Last Project Standing asks how Chicago's experiment transformed everyday built environments into laboratories for teaching urbanites about the rights and obligations of belonging to a city that seemed incapable of taking care of its most destitute citizens. Based on three years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that aspirations to raise a more inclusive, more caring city took shape and faltered as public housing residents, their advocates, their new neighbors and other Chicagoans came into contact with the people and things of changing public housing. Fennell considers how collisions with everything from unruly heating systems and decaying buildings to silent neighbors became an education in the potentials of care and protection in the aftermath of welfare failure.

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.

Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, this book raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, it explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants. The book examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, the book shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of this analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. The book also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.

This book-length study explores the discursive construction of pregnant migrants in Ireland as paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration; the measures that were taken in response; and the cultural, social, and economic consequences of these developments for migrants and citizens. It argues that these Irish transformations drew on and contributed to similar transformations globally, including in the United States, where controversies over pregnant migrants legitimized legal changes that rendered increasing numbers of migrants “illegal,” reconfigured multiple social hierarchies—and generated resistance. The study brings the scholarship on the social construction of illegal immigration into critical dialogue with queer theory. Immigration scholarship shows that designations of legality and illegality do not reflect individual character, but instead, stem from histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and nation-building. The role of sexual regimes in shaping immigrants’ legal status designations remains overlooked, however. By using queer theory to analyze how pregnant women became constructed as illegal immigrants, this project fills that gap in immigration scholarship. The project also expands queer theory by exploring how crises over illegal immigration transform nationalist sexual norms and associated social hierarchies at interlinked local, national, and global scales.

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.

The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18^th century through the turn of the 21^st century. The foundation of contemporary American sleep is laid in the 19^th century, when industrial workday demands the coordination and consolidation of sleeping and waking patterns. What was lost in this transition was unconsolidated sleep – instead of two nightly periods of rest, or daily naps supplemented with nightly sleep, one eight hour period of sleep was substituted as a new norm. This norm laid the basis for the emerging field of sleep medicine, which took as its primary concern the eradication of napping and insomnia, and substituting eight regular and consolidated hours of sleep. This invention of consolidated sleep led to the eventual pathologization of many forms of sleep, and provided the basis for contemporary sleep medicine. The present interest in sleep, exemplified by advertising campaigns for “Z drugs” – a new chemical that promotes and consolidates sleep – is not so much new as an intensification of a two hundred year old interest in making “normal” American sleep. In the present, I focus on the lives of physicians, scientists, patients and their families as they deal with the social frictions that sleep disorders are accepted as causing. I argue in the conclusion that by recognizing the human limits of sleep, we can apprehend sleep’s variations as non-pathological, and that with more flexible social institutions and expectations, the medicalization of sleep might be subverted.

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.