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The first book to offer a history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through decades of authoritarian rule. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish.
“Celluloid Democracy is brilliant; the scholarship is admirable. Hieyoon Kim has written an extraordinarily captivating account of the film workers, educators, intellectuals, and radical film activists in Cold War South Korea who dreamed of a better world and struggled to achieve democracy through cinema until the end of military rule in 1987. This remarkably readable and well-researched study deserves a wide audience.” — SANGJOON LEE, author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network
“A fascinating and polished piece of scholarship. I don’t know of any other book quite like this one. Moving away from the traditional focus on auteurs and film texts, Kim masterfully draws our attention to the critical yet often forgotten figures working on the margins of the postwar film scene, filling in some substantial gaps in our understanding of this period.” — CHRISTINA KLEIN, author of Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema
HIEYOON KIM is a scholar of dissident culture and media with a focus on Korea. She teaches in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop’s introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre’s diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre’s growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.
“Here it is—bam! The definitive story of rap, race, radio, and marketplace during hip hop’s Golden Age. Amy Coddington combines an archivist’s rigor and a raconteur’s wit in documenting what those of us of a certain age remember but, perhaps, never fully grasped: how, amidst expanding racial inequalities and against all odds, rap music became the most popular genre in America.” — Anthony Kwame Harrison, author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification
“Making use of trade publications that have received little scholarly attention, Coddington has crafted a provocative and lucid alternative history that tracks how the radio industry’s engagement with hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s both reflected and shaped changing ideas about race and music.” — Loren Kajikawa, author of Sounding Race in Rap Songs
Amy Coddington is Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music.
In less than half a century, people in Vietnam have gone from fearing war and famine to fretting over the best cell phone plan. This shift in the landscape of people’s anxieties is the result of policies that made Vietnam the second-fastest-growing economy in the world and a triumph of late capitalist development. Yet as much as people marvel at the speed of progress, all this change— even for the better—can be difficult to handle.
A Life of Worry unpacks an ethnographic puzzle. What accounts for the simultaneous increase in anxiety and economic prosperity among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class? At a time when people around the world are turning to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries to soothe their troubled minds, it is worth asking whether these industries might be part of the problem.
“A fascinating study of an important global phenomenon.” — LI ZHANG, author of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
“A Life of Worry takes us from Ho Chi Minh City’s lively cafes to its burgeoning psychotherapy centers to offer an original phenomenological approach to anxiety as it is felt and enacted, often as a form of care for others, in Vietnam today.” — JOCELYN LIM CHUA, author of In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India
“Allen Tran compels readers to consider how economic growth can diminish collective well-being, how uncertainty structures our lives, and how we might mobilize our collective anxiety toward new political agendas and practices of care.” — THUY LINH NGUYEN TU, author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam
ALLEN L. TRAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University.
What becomes of men the U.S. locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the U.S. deported more than five million people—over 90 percent of them men. In Banished Men, Abigail Andrews and her students tell 186 of their stories. How, they ask, does expulsion shape men’s lives and sense of themselves? The book uncovers a harrowing carceral system that weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization to undermine migrants as men. Guards and gangs beat them down, till they feel like cockroaches, pigs, or dogs. Many lose ties with family. They do not go “home.” Instead, they end up in limbo: stripped of their very humanity. Against the odds, they fight for new ways to belong. At once devastating and humane, Banished Men offers a clear-eyed critique of the violence of deportation.
“Banished Men is beautifully written, bringing deported men to life in all their misery and hopes. It is a timely contribution to immigration and Latinx sociology literatures, as well as an intervention in how to do collective social-justice-oriented research.” — NANCY PLANKEY-VIDELA, Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of Latino/a and Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M University
“Banished Men asks what becomes of men—their emotions, relationships, family ties, economic opportunities, and very sense of self—as they are forced to live through U.S. detention, imprisonment, and deportation. This powerful book delves into how banishment upends men’s lives and shapes their humanity.” — JENNIFER RANDLES, author of Essential Dads
ABIGAIL ANDREWS is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. The Mexican Migration Field Research Program (mmfrp.org) enables UCSD students to do original, trauma-informed fieldwork in collaboration with immigrant rights organizations at the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 90 percent of the team are first-generation Latinx students.
Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.
“Evocative, wide-ranging, and fascinating. A highly original contribution that charts the way for many future paths of exploration.” — RONIT RICCI, author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia
“Undoubtedly the definitive, standard-bearing work on the deeply cosmopolitan and interconnected soundworlds of the Indian Ocean.” DAVESH SONEJI, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India
“A finely crafted voyage that secures the place of ethnomusicological scholarship in the reconstruction of one of the world’s oldest long-distance trading arenas.” — ANGELA IMPEY, author of Song Walking: Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland
“Adeptly shows how music composes and transgresses categories, genealogies, and geographies in Afro-Asiatic seascapes.” — SMRITI SRINIVAS, coeditor of Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds
JIM SYKES is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka. JULIA BYL is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta and author of Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present.
This book explores analytic induction, an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology. A popular research technique in the early decades of empirical sociology, analytic induction differs fundamentally as a method of social research from conventional variation-based approaches. In Analytic Induction for Social Research, Charles C. Ragin demonstrates that much is gained from systematizing analytic induction. The approach he introduces here offers a new template for conducting cross-case analysis and provides a new set of tools for answering common research questions that existing methods cannot address.
“Breaks new ground in introducing analytic induction as an approach distinct from qualitative comparative analysis. Charles Ragin’s writing is among the clearest, most accessible, and engaging that I know.” — PEER C. FISS, Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California
“At a time when methodological debates are becoming increasingly mathematical, this intervention is both refreshingly nontechnical and unusually helpful for qualitative researchers in sociology and political science. Because of its clarity, brevity, and usability, qualitative researchers in the social sciences are going to want a copy of this book.” — JAMES MAHONEY, Gordon Fulcher Professor in Decision-Making and Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University
CHARLES C. RAGIN is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a recipient of the International Science Council’s Stein Rokkan Prize, the Policy Studies Organization’s Donald Campbell Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award.
In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.
“Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship.” — ALICE LOVEJOY, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military
“Masha Salazkina’s scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like ‘world cinema,’ ‘global cinema,’ or ‘cinemas of solidarity.’ I know of nothing comparable.” — PETER LIMBRICK, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi
MASHA SALAZKINA is Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and coeditor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures.
This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborated to defend the rights of immigrant women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons who are threatened by gender-based, sexual, and gang violence in their home countries. Researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and contributed to public debates on immigration reform, but the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that, guided by the resources provided in this handbook, can aid asylum seekers and refugees and promote the fair adjudication of asylum claims in US courts. As the recent refugee crisis of immigrant mothers and children and unaccompanied minors has made clear, there is an urgent need for academics to work with other professionals to build a legal framework and national network that can respond effectively to this human rights crisis.
“Practicing Asylum is nothing short of groundbreaking. Asylum cases increasingly rest on the quality of country-condition experts’ work.” — HAYDEN RODARTE, immigrant rights attorney
“It is rare to read a book that has been written with so much heart and so many insights for academics, attorneys, and advocates alike.” — S. DEBORAH KANG, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia
“Practicing Asylum is a call to action that comes amid an unfolding humanitarian disaster met by a system cruelly stacked against asylum seekers.” — J. T. WAY, Associate Professor of Latin American History, Georgia State University
KIMBERLY GAUDERMAN is Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of New Mexico.
This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.
“An original and groundbreaking study, Neis’s analyses open a window to a much more complex and surprising intellectual world than the rabbis usually get credit for. This book is provocative, thoughtful, and timely.” — MIRA BALBERG, Professor of History and Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization, University of California, San Diego
“A trailblazing work that introduces a new, sophisticated discourse in the study of rabbinic literature. Neis is at home in the classical rabbinic texts, with their philological complexity and immense width, encompassing half a millennium and diverse historical circumstances.” — GALIT HASAN-ROKEM, Professor Emerita of Hebrew Literature and Folklore Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond.
“Timur Hammond’s reimagining of Eyüp is lively and erudite, bringing readers a fresh understanding of the spaces and tempos in Istanbul as a place of Islam. The result is thrilling: a story of Islam and placemaking that is at once intricately grounded and expansively illuminating.” — ANNA J. SECOR, Professor of Geography, Durham University
“An impressive ethnographic and textual work. Hammond provides new insight into the inner workings of a sacred site and pilgrimage center, making this a valuable contribution to the literature on urban anthropology and lived Islam.” — M. BRETT WILSON, Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Central European University
TIMUR HAMMOND is Assistant Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.
Becoming Global Asia centers Singapore as a crucial site for comprehending the uneven effects of colonialism and capitalism. In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Singapore initiated socioeconomic policies and branding campaigns to transform its reputation from a culturally sterile and punitive nation to "Global Asia"—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing. Rather than evaluating the efficacy of state policy, Cheryl Narumi Naruse analyzes how Singapore gained cultural capital and soft power from its anglophonic legibility. By examining genres such as literary anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives, and princess fantasies, Naruse reveals how, as Global Asia, Singapore has emerged as simultaneously a site of imperial desire, a celebrated postcolonial model nation, and an alibi for the continued subjugation of the so-called Third World. Her readings of Global Asia as a formation of postcolonial capitalism offer new conceptual paradigms for understanding postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and empire.
Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy, but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of pre-recorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century's development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious.
Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: how could a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation’s most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, this book examines how the unruly Mississippi River and its muddy delta shaped the people, culture, and governance of the region. It proposes a framework of “muddy thinking” to gum the wheels of extractive capitalism and pollution that have brought us to the precipice of planetary collapse. Muddy Thinking calls upon our dirty, shared histories to address urgent questions of mutual survival and care in a rapidly changing world.
Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically and politically opposed to each other. However, Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode. Travis Workman reveals that the melancholic moods of film melodrama express the somatic and social conflicts between political ideologies and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references. These moods dramatize the tension between the language of Cold War politics and the negative affects that connect cinema to what it cannot fully represent. The result is a new way of historicizing the cinema of the two Koreas in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, war, and nation building.
Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia’s Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California—but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews with a global contingent of film and television workers, Kevin Sanson weaves an analysis of the sheer scale and complexity of mobile production into a compelling account of the impact that mobility has had on job functions, working conditions, and personal lives. Mobile Hollywood captures how an expanded geography of production not only intensifies the often invisible pressures that production workers now face but also stretches the parameters of screen-media labor far beyond craftwork and creativity.
In this deeply archival work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which women's labor in the American television industry of the 1970s furthered feminist ends. Carefully crafted around an impressive assemblage of interviews and primary sources (from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas), Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform-oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynamics of a workplace and the cultural products created there.
Seeking to shed light on how we might end mass incarceration, The Price of Freedom compares the histories and goals of the American and German justice systems. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with incarcerated young men in the United States and Germany, Michaela Soyer argues that the apparent relative lenience of the German criminal justice system is actually founded on the violent enforcement of cultural homogeneity at the hands of the German welfare state. Demonstrating how both societies have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders over time, this book emphasizes that criminal justice reformers in the United States need to move beyond European models in order to build a truly just, diverse society.
Palestinian writing imagines the nation, not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into a distinct set of formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so that we might move beyond the idea of an incomplete or fragmented reality and speak frankly about the nation that exists and the freedom it seeks. Engaging the writings of Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nora E. H. Parr traces a vocabulary through which Palestine can be discussed as a changing and flexible national network linking people across and within space, time, and community. Through an exploration of the Palestinian literary scene subsequent to its canonical writers, Parr makes the life and work of Nasrallah available to an English-language audience for the first time, offering an intervention in geography while bringing literary theory into conversation with politics and history.
When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group, or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
Originally delivered as the Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran is an exploration of kinship in the archaeological and historical record of Iran’s most ancient civilizations. D. T. Potts brings together history, archaeology, and social anthropology to provide an overview of what we can know about the kith and kinship ties in Iran, from prehistory to Elamite, Achaemenid, and Sasanian times. In so doing, he sheds light on the rich body of evidence that exists for kin relations in Iran, a topic that has too often been ignored in the study of the ancient world.
In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions of people. While refuge is conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends narrow judicial definitions. In Lived Refuge, Vinh Nguyen reconceptualizes refuge as an ongoing affective experience and lived relation, rather than a fixed category whose legitimacy is derived from the state.
Focusing on Southeast Asian diasporas that formed in the wake of the Vietnam War, Nguyen examines three affective experiences—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to reveal the actively lived dimensions of refuge. Through multifaceted analyses of literary and cultural productions, Nguyen argues that the meaning of refuge emerges from how displaced people negotiate the kinds of "safety" and "protection" that are offered to (and withheld from) them. In doing so, he lays the framework for an original and compelling understanding of contemporary refugee subjectivity.
Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art-film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters’s Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box-office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema offers a compelling case study of the evolution of contemporary film culture through the disintegration of the mass audience fostered by the classic Hollywood studios into the multitude of niche audiences that Hollywood seeks today.
Since the end of the Cold War, globalization—both the process and the idea—has been reshaping the world. An array of new global studies scholarship has emerged to make sense of the various transnational manifestations of globalization: economic, social, cultural, ideological, technological, environmental, postcolonial, and technological. However, following a series of crises in the first two decades of the 21st century, the neoliberal globalization system of the 1990s has come under severe strain.
Are we witnessing a turn toward “deglobalization” intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, or a moment of “reglobalization” spearheaded by digital technology? The contributors to this book employ transdisciplinary research strategies to assess pertinent past developments, the current state, and future trajectories of globalization in light of the current dynamics of insecurity, volatility, and geopolitical tensions.
Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave problematic forms of alcohol use behind. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaalespirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While their engagements with possession, aversion, and deliverance are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and toward the possibility of release. In so doing, Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these massive changes, Indian Muslim artisans began to publicly assert the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions "from below." Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor tells the story of colonial-era social changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.
This is the first book devoted entirely to summarizing the body of community-engaged research on environmental justice, how we can conduct more of it, and how we can do it better. It shows how community-engaged research makes unique contributions to environmental justice for Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing actionable data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities so that they are more equitable and mutually beneficial. The book offers a critical synthesis of relevant research in many fields, outlines the main steps in conducting community-engaged research, evaluates the major research methods used, suggests new directions, and addresses overcoming institutional barriers to scholarship in academia. The coauthors employ an original framework that shows how community-engaged research and environmental justice align, which links research on the many topics treated in the chapters—from public health, urban planning, and conservation to law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty.
Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the gramophone-era cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, “golden age” cantorial music offers a model for aspiring Hasidic singers of a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority were aligned. As Lockwood argues, Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the cantors of the golden age as a precedent for musical and social practices that defy institutional authority and push at normative boundaries of sacred and secular by foregrounding artist’s voices in the culturally intimate space of prayer.
In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the magical evidence reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. The magical evidence also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between the Christian and non-Christian; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.
