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This book inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal. A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the health practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.

This book argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, the author shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, he likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, the author suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society.

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.

Due to rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing, and the projections are grim. Despite billions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. This book exposes the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer's disease through early detection of pre-symptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals. Based on a meticulous account of the history of Alzheimer's disease and extensive in-depth interviews, the book highlights the limitations and the dissent associated with biomarker detection. It argues that basic research must continue, but should be complemented by a public health approach to prevention that is economically feasible, more humane, and much more effective globally than one exclusively focused on an increasingly harried search for a cure.

Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians—this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century. This book seeks to recover some of anthropology's global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier—the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884–1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone. Colonial administrators there were drawn to approaches partially inspired by anthropology. Anthropologists and museum officials exploited this interest by preparing large-scale expeditions to German New Guinea. The book explores the interactions between German colonial officials, resident ethnographic collectors, and indigenous peoples, arguing that all were instrumental in the formation of anthropological theory. It shows how changes in collecting aims and methods helped shift ethnographic study away from its focus on material artifacts to a broader consideration of indigenous culture. It also shows how ethnological collecting could become politicized and connect to national concerns.

This book explores language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in extensive field research on the Hopi Tribe of northeastern Arizona—on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore—this work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence. Like many indigenous legal institutions across North America, the Hopi Tribal Court was created in the image of Anglo-American-style law. However, the book shows that in recent years, Hopi jurists and litigants have called for their courts to develop a jurisprudence that better reflects Hopi culture and traditions. Providing insights into the Hopi and English courtroom interactions through which this conflict plays out, the book argues that tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition both drive Hopi jurisprudence and make it unique. Ultimately, this analyses of the language of Hopi law offer a fresh approach to the cultural politics that influence indigenous legal and governmental practices worldwide.

This ethnography examines the colonization of the Pacific island of Rapa Nui/Easter Island by the Latin American country of Chile. It also discusses the Rapanui people’s growing emphasis on cultural difference. The first part, entitled “Challenging the nation-state”, gives an historical account of Chile’s political relationship with the island, from the moment of annexation in 1888 up to the present day. In the second part, “Polynesian cultural politics and global imaginaries”, I describe various contemporary forms of cultural politics. To express their difference, the Rapanui are increasingly engaging in cultural performances such as sculpting, dancing, body painting and other cultural expressions, as well as a yearly festival. They are also revitalizing their Polynesian language and traditional concepts of land and territory, and strengthening contacts with other Polynesians and the international community. This emphasis on cultural politics creates tensions between the Rapanui--who increasingly claim their right to self-determination as a people--and the Chilean nation-state, which insists on its supposed rights to sovereignty over the island. Moreover, I discuss how the global fascination with Rapa Nui has resulted in a blooming tourist industry, which commodifies Rapanui difference and creates a possibility to loosen economic and, potentially, political ties with Chile. The realms of the cultural and the political have thus become entangled in subtle but important ways.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. The stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of “homework”—ethnography that directly engages with issues and identities in which the ethnographer finds political solidarity and belonging in fields at home—the book contributes to growing trends that complicate the distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders.” The obligations that fieldwork engenders among researchers and local communities are exemplified by contributors who are often socially engaged with the peoples and places they work. In its focus on Asia and the Pacific Islands, the book offers ethnographic updates on topics that range from ritual money burning in China to the militarization of Hawai‘i to the social role of text messages in identifying marriage partners in Vanuatu to the cultural power of robots in Japan. These cultural encounters will resonate with readers and provide valuable talking points for exploring the human diversity that makes the study of ourselves and each other simultaneously rewarding and challenging.

Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and nation-building—on customary land tenures, and customary communities, in two Pacific countries. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners explores the entanglements of custom and modernity that emerge from these processes. These entanglements are deeply ambivalent, giving rise to competing cartographies of power. They lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy but also, importantly, create new possibilities for reasserting that autonomy, and for rearticulating the forms and sites of authority to which customary connection to land gives rise. Pacific peoples are becoming landowners, the book argues, both in the sense that modernising processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power and culture are reconfigured and reimagined.

Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to 100,000 German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. This book explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today's Europe. The book looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment. This book provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to calls for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy without debt. Based on research in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on ethnographic work that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how experts deploy Islamic finance to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how they seek to create a new "geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center the global system in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula—a birthing injury that leads to chronic incontinence—to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backwards culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. Beyond Surgery unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation. Through her in-depth ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belonging, shame and delight, and where a host of religious, moral, aesthetic, economic, and political agendas converge. As she chronicles the lived experiences of fistula patients in clinical treatment, Hannig explores the danger of labeling “culture” the culprit, showing how this common argument ignores the larger problem of insufficient medical care in rural Africa. Beyond Surgery portrays the complex social outcomes of surgery in an effort to deepen our understanding of present-day medical missions in Africa, expose cultural biases, and clear the path toward more effective ways of delivering care to those who need it most.

Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The book suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not based simply in text, writing or correspondence theories of truth. As such, Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual, sound and film studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural, and textual forms—for example text and image, image and sound, body and voice. What—we ask—is the relationship between the interiority of a person’s experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience ‘open’ to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? We argue that there is a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. The collected papers and audio-visual materials presented on a DVD, explore the potential for a more sensorially-grounded, critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research.

Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. This book looks at why and how these individuals have entrusted their lives to Chinese neurosurgeons operating at the forefront of experimental medicine, in a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace. The book shows how cutting-edge medicine is not just about the latest advances in biomedical science but also encompasses transformations in online patient activism, surgical intervention, and borderline experiments in health care bureaucracy. The book opens up important theoretical and methodological horizons in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. It illuminates how poignant journeys in search of fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, the entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Using innovative methods to track the border-crossing quests of Chinese clinicians and their patients from around the world, the book maps the transnational life of fetal cell therapies.

This book examines the once widespread practice of footbinding from the perspective of China’s gendered labor system. In contrast to the common belief that footbinding was motivated by the quest for beauty and was practiced primarily to attract a husband, this book emphasizes that footbinding was extremely widespread, not limited to the elite, and must be understood in the context of girls’ and women’s labor. In preindustrial China, rural women and girls produced vast amounts of cloth and other handcraft goods at home for local use and for market networks with a global reach. Up to the early twentieth century, footbinding coincided with and corresponded to a household labor regime in which small girls were required to help their mothers by performing tedious sedentary work with their hands. Drawing on interviews and surveys with thousands of rural women who grew up in the era when footbinding was being abandoned, this book reconnects footbinding to the intensive hand labor expected of young girls and women. Examining the decline of footbinding in early twentieth-century China, the book argues that in the aggregate, industrialization and the disruption of traditional handcraft occupations that used the labor of young girls, particularly in textiles, hastened the demise of footbinding.

This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. It examines these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis. Following a critique of how tradition has been viewed in terms of dichotomies like authenticity vs. inauthenticity, the book takes a novel perspective in which tradition figures as context-bound articulation. This makes it possible to view cultural traditions as resulting from interactions between people and the ambient contexts. Such interactions are analyzed from the past down to the Oceanian present—with indigenous agency being highlighted. The work focuses first on early encounters, initially between Pacific Islanders themselves and later with the European navigators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to clarify how meaningful actions and contexts interrelated in the past. The present-day memories of Pacific Islanders are examined to ask how such memories represent encounters that occurred long ago and how they influenced the social, political, economic, and religious changes that ensued. Next, the book addresses ongoing social and structural interactions that social actors enlist to shape their traditions within the context of globalization and then the repercussions that these intersections and intercultural exchanges of discourses and practices are having on active identity formation as practiced by Pacific Islanders.

Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between inequality and consciousness at multiple scales—local, national and global. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Alcântara, Maranhão, the book analyzes the conflicts surrounding Brazil’s spaceport—a high-technology project of global transcendence located in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. The spaceport was built in the 1980s in a region principally populated by the descendants of those once enslaved on local cotton plantations, inaugurating a land conflict that continues today. Announced by Brazil’s military government as part of a project to make Brazil a world technomilitary power, the spaceport has been beset by internal and external problems, and is today populated by two Brazilian space programs (one military and the other neoliberal) that differ in their projects to confront global political and economic inequalities. Another project at the site is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race. Mobilizing as escaped-slave descendants (quilombolas), villagers and their allies have organized to resist the expansion of the spaceport and to win the villagers rights of wellbeing and citizenship that have long been denied to them. The spaceport thus stands at the center of competing projects of social and material transformation, different utopias, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales, and in very different ways.

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. This is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. The book shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new “market socialist” economy where value is produced through innovation. Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, the book combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, the book sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

In every culture intimacy between adults and children is subject to regulation, but it is most often only a taboo. In the last half-century in the West such taboos have become explicit objects for legal regulation. In much of the West, however, the focus has shifted from punishment and healing to “rehabilitation” through therapy. In Germany treatment is in fact a legal right and a personal obligation. “Cruel Attachments” is an anthropological account based on ethnographic research in Berlin, Germany, of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders through therapy, often accompanied by short-term imprisonment. Therapy is charged with creating a person who not only avoids a repeating the crime but a self capable of reflection, introspection, and transformation. Through an explication of this modern secular ritual of rehabilitation, John Borneman theorizes the complex relation between a legal system that demands a change of self, a transformation of the inner state of a person, and a public that is extremely skeptical of the success of rehab rituals. Using select case studies, he follows offenders as they experience a sequence of events––from accusation to admission of culpability, through arrest, trial, imprisonment, treatment, release from prison, and either social reincorporation or indefinite surveillance. Tensions and problems in the relationship between law, therapy, and a skeptical public notwithstanding, the author argues that the turn to therapy within the German mode of rehabilitation of child sex molesters presents a more effective alternative to a punitive model such as is practiced in the United States.

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.