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The introduction lays out the argument of the book, the challenges of native ethnography, and the issue of data collection. It provides a general history of Moroccan Jews and the reasons behind the methodological focus on a remote Muslim population. This chapter also discusses in detail the social, economic, and educational background of the different generations.

We discuss two longitudinal projects designed to understand the development and adaptation of children with developmental problems and their families. Project REACH and Project CHILD followed cohorts of 3 and 4-year olds with ambiguous developmental delays and their families for 30 and 20 years, respectively. At the time REACH began, many parents of children with delays were told that their child would eventually “grow out of it” suggesting that the child would eventually achieve his or her developmental milestones. What was lacking was a solid research base that examined this assumption: Will these children indeed “catch up?” Project REACH was designed to describe child characteristics and to address issues of measurement. Project CHILD, initiated 10 years later, replicated the REACH sampling procedure, and continued to track child characteristics over time. Inspired by ecocultural theory, the CHILD team broadened REACH’s design and methods to include children’s impact on family daily routines. Findings demonstrated that early delays were not transitory—a finding with important implications for the service delivery system. The mixed methods approach was critical to our understanding that a problem child does not necessarily mean a problem family, rather, that child and family outcomes are loosely linked.

This chapter brings attention to the daily struggles faced by young people in contemporary Uganda, where indeed all children are affected in some way by HIV/AIDS but also by persistent structural, household-level, and/or individual poverty. While HIV/AIDS has certainly shaped the lives of the young people who became youth research assistant for this study, their life stories also demonstrate that it is primarily poverty that continues to mark their experiences, influence their choices, and impinge on their life chances. Aside from growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, these children are also part of the ‘youth bulge’ in population that has experienced the neoliberal retreat of the state, first under global economic restructuring and later under economic austerity. These factors all intersect to create the challenges and obstacles that shape young people’s lives today, providing illustrative examples of the life trajectories of orphans and vulnerable children as well as insights into the resilience and survival strategies employed by young people throughout Africa. In the process, it also reveals how an engaged researcher can become entwined with the lives of her research subjects.

Why do farmworkers experience heat death more frequently than other outdoor workers, and why are migrant men at particular risk? While heat death may appear a “natural” phenomenon, this book instead implicates U.S. public policies in its production. Drawing upon nearly a decade of ethnography with the same 15 migrant farmworkers, this book examines the way that U.S. labor and immigration policies place them at particular risk in the fields, even as health and social assistance policies offer them little succor when their bodies begin to decline. Yet this book is not about heat death alone; instead, it uses the phenomenon to shed light on migrant farmworkers’ higher burden of chronic illness and cardiovascular mortality at home as well. The introduction addresses the ethical and logistical challenges posed by conducting longitudinal research with vulnerable populations such as migrant farmworkers and makes the case for an advocacy anthropology.