From fashion sketches of Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to phantasmagoric imagery of war in the 1930s and 1940s, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the 1950s, the cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China’s modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated and deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations from the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation.

“An innovative reconceptualization of manhua. John Crespi’s meticulous study shows the many benefits of interpreting Chinese comics and other illustrations not simply as image genres but rather as part of a larger print culture institution. A must-read for anyone interested in modern Chinese visual culture.” CHRISTOPHER REA, author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China

“A rich media-centered reading of Chinese comics from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, Manhua Modernity shifts the emphasis away from ideological interpretation and demonstrates that the pictorial turn requires examinations of manhua in its heterogenous, expansive, spontaneous, and interactive ways of engaging its audience’s varied experiences of fast-changing everyday life.” YINGJIN ZHANG, author of Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

JOHN A. CRESPI is Associate Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Colgate University. He is the author of Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the AuditoryImagination in Modern China

The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of “the scarcity slot,” a kind of othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past, with major implications for the future.

“This book offers a pathbreaking archaeological ethnography of food in a region of West Africa that has experienced some of the most cataclysmic sociopolitical upheavals the world has ever seen. Amanda Logan dismantles the dominant narrative that Columbian Exchange crop introductions rescued a continent long shaped by hunger. This brilliant study elevates archaeology’s contributions to African food history and food insecurity studies.” JUDITH CARNEY, author of In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World

“The Scarcity Slot is an accessible, empirically grounded history demonstrating for students of Africa’s futures the urgent need to understand her pasts.” KATHRYN M. DE LUNA, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, Georgetown University

“A radical shift from the old ways of doing the archaeology of diet, this book breaks ground for a new food archaeology. A truly innovative and exciting work and a convincing antidote to the popular image of Africa as a continent of famine.” RICHARD WILK, Distinguished Professor and Provost’s Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Indiana University

AMANDA L. LOGAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University.

While migration has become a vital issue worldwide, mainstream literature on migrants’ legal adaptation and integration has focused on cases in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russia—the third largest recipient of migrants worldwide—and investigates how Central Asian migrant workers produce new forms of informal governance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule of law and a corrupt political system to navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiate, using informal channels, access to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying legal incorporation of immigrants in similar political contexts.

“Not only provides a brilliant analysis of the under-researched Russian case but also significantly adds to the existing knowledge of undocumentedness, informality, and migrant agency.” JOAQUÍN ARANGO, COMPLUTENSE UNIVERSITY OF MADRID 

“Rustamjon Urinboyev’s empathetic interviewing style allows him to illuminate complex social relationships, parallel legal orders, and behavioral norms. A remarkable book, rich in stories of extraordinary people, embedded in theoretical analysis.” JUDITH PALLOT, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, RESEARCH DIRECTOR OF GULAGECHOES

“Ethnographically rich and theoretically ambitious, this book reveals the extralegal negotiations through which migrant workers, employers, middlemen, and streetlevel bureaucrats negotiate the Russian migration system. An original and important contribution.” MADELEINE REEVES, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

RUSTAMJON URINBOYEV is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University and Senior Researcher in Russian and Eurasian Studies at University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri Institute.

Although wartime sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than is commonly assumed, its dynamics are remarkably underexplored, and male survivors’ experiences remain particularly overlooked. This reality is poignant in northern Uganda, where sexual violence against men during the early stages of the conflict was geographically widespread, yet now accounts of those incidents are not just silenced and neglected locally but also widely absent from analyses of the war. Based on rare empirical data, this book seeks to remedy this marginalization and to illuminate the seldom-heard voices of male sexual violence survivors in northern Uganda, bringing to light their experiences of gendered harms, agency, and justice.

“Schulz offers a nuanced frame for understanding the dynamic and varied lived experiences of male survivors. Essential reading for anyone who wants to better comprehend conflict-related sexual violence as well as political violence more generally.” MARIA ERIKSSON BAAZ, author of Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond

“This extraordinary book opens new conceptual pathways in and beyond the field of transitional justice. A rich exploration of justice as a survivor-led praxis and a generous methodological offering for conducting ethical research.” ERIN BAINES, author of Buried in the Heart: Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda

“In his ethnographically nuanced study, Schulz charts a more grounded approach to international justice. The Ugandan men who have survived wartime rape have a lot to teach us—about constructing non-oppressive masculinities, creating mutual support, and building gender-aware sustainable peace.” CYNTHIA ENLOE, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy

PHILIPP SCHULZ is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Bremen’s Institute for Intercultural and International Studies.

Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.

“This powerful and compelling analysis of maternal mortality in rural Tanzania is a groundbreaking addition to scholarship on Africa and its public health challenges. Adrienne E. Strong presents a rich ethnography of hospital function and dysfunction, to which the voices of patients and staff add poignant detail. The ways in which state and global health policy shape maternal health and well-being frame individual narratives in a memorable testimony.” Carolyn Sargent, Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

“Documenting Death is an arresting tale of life and death on a busy maternity ward in rural Tanzania. Drawing on a remarkable period of ethnographic fieldwork, Strong evocatively details the predicament of nurse midwives caught in the ‘biobureaucracy’ of global health projects and their audit trails. A significant contribution to medical anthropology and critical global health scholarship.” Margaret MacDonald, Associate Professor of Anthropology, York University

Adrienne E. Strong is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida.

The Camphill movement, one of the world’s largest and most enduring networks of intentional communities, deserves both recognition and study. Founded in Scotland at the beginning of the Second World War, Camphill communities still thrive today, encompassing thousands of people living in more than one hundred twenty schools, villages, and urban neighborhoods on four continents. Camphillers of all abilities share daily work, family life, and festive celebrations with one another and their neighbors. Unlike movements that reject mainstream society, Camphill expressly seeks to be “a seed of social renewal” by evolving along with society to promote the full inclusion and empowerment of persons with disabilities, who comprise nearly half of their residents. In this multifaceted exploration of Camphill, Dan McKanan traces the complexities of the movement’s history, envisions its possible future, and invites ongoing dialogue between the fields of disability studies and communal studies.

“Dan McKanan knows Camphill better than anyone else in the academic world and has crafted an absorbing account of the movement as it faces challenges eighty years after its founding.” TIMOTHY MILLER, author of The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities

“This book serves as a living, working document for the Camphill movement. McKanan shows that disability studies and communal studies have more to offer each other than we recognize.” ELIZABETH SANDERS, Managing Director, Camphill Academy

“With good research and wonderful empathy, McKanan pinpoints not only Camphill’s societal significance but also how this eighty-year-old movement can still bring potent remediation for the values and social norms of today’s world.” RICHARD STEEL, CEO, Karl König Institute

DAN MCKANAN is the Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. His research focuses on religion and social transformation, with special emphasis on intentional communities, sustainable agriculture, and leftist activism. His most recent book is Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism.

In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.

“A captivating account of Egyptian film director Togo Mizrahi. Starr shows that Mizrahi’s distinct, often comical vision of Egypt captured a dramatic moment of social, political, and cultural transformation in which people of diverse backgrounds coexisted and struggled to achieve better lives.” JOEL GORDON, author of Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt

“A remarkable study of a remarkable career. Starr offers a comprehensive analysis of a life in filmmaking that adds nuance to our definition of Egyptian nationalism and enhances our appreciation of Alexandrian cinema. This is a book of recovery, reclamation, and celebration.” NANCY E. BERG, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis

DEBORAH A. STARR is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire and coeditor of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff.

In this vitally important book, medical anthropologist Holly Wardlow takes readers through a ten-year history of the AIDS epidemic in Tari, Papua New Guinea, focusing on the political and economic factors that make women vulnerable to HIV and on their experiences with antiretroviral therapy. Alive with the women’s stories about being trafficked to gold mines, resisting polygynous marriages, and struggling to be perceived as morally upright, Fencing in AIDS demonstrates that being female shapes every aspect of the AIDS epidemic. Offering crucial insights into the anthropologies of mining, ethics, and gender, this is essential reading for scholars and professionals addressing the global AIDS crisis today.

“This inspiring book sets the stage for the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in Tari. With the collapse of the state, some women turn to transactional sex for school fees and basic goods. A chorus of women tell stories of rape and abandonment and of their resilience in adopting forms of self-care that include protection for others.” SHIRLEY LINDENBAUM, author of Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands

“Fencing in AIDS is a superb book that creates a consummate connection between an intimate ethnography of gender, sexuality, and HIV amongst Huli people in Papua New Guinea and the structural contours of the economy and politics in that country, engaging the global literature on sex, love, HIV, the state, extractive industries, and moral philosophy.” MARGARET JOLLY, Professor in the School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University

“Holly Wardlow’s thoughtful analysis of changing gender relations reminds us once again why New Guinea societies have figured so importantly in anthropology. Engagingly written, the book offers vignettes of women and situations that are tough and touching.” SUSAN REYNOLDS WHYTE, editor of Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda

HOLLY WARDLOW is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society.

Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990sits structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Palestinian Chicago charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects they have had on identity across religious, political, class, gender, and generational lines. The perspectives that emerge through this rich ethnography challenge prevailing understandings of secularity and religion,offering critical insight into current debates about immigration and national belonging.

“Provides the first in-depth examination of an important Palestinian-American community in a major US city. This book is a welcome contribution to our understanding of both the Palestinian diaspora and an important US immigrant community.” RASHID KHALIDI, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

“In this groundbreaking and beautifully written book, Loren Lybarger centers the voices of a wide array of Palestinians and brings forth the complex, dynamic, and fluid ways members of this community navigate identity and belonging in today’s world.” MAHA NASSAR, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World

“Palestinian Chicago masterfully transforms existing understandings of Palestinian identity, resistance, and diaspora. This is an extraordinarily valuable text for anyone interested in history, ethnic studies, urban studies, religious studies, and Middle East studies.” NADINE NABER, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism

“A compelling work that complicates the secular in Palestine and the Arab world, in diaspora, and in the United States.” SHERENE SEIKALY, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

LOREN D. LYBARGER is Associate Professor of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University. He is the author of Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories.

What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead regard them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.

“With insightful references to cases around the world, this book advances a brilliant holistic theory that offers credibility and significance to the ways revolutions unfold in culturally specific practices without diminishing their political impact and universal aspirations.” Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment

“This fascinating volume opens up new horizons in the study of revolutionary practice. It is difficult to imagine a more important or original work.” David Nugent, author of The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in the Peruvian Andes

“This book is a truly original (in all senses of the term) contribution to understanding the global and human condition of far-reaching political, social, and cosmological change.” Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, author of Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

Igor Cherstich is Teaching Fellow in Social Anthropology at University College London. He is coeditor of the special issue “The Multiple Narratives of the Libyan Revolution,” Middle East Critique. Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College London. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination and coauthor of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Nico Tassi is Research Associate at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, and author of The Native World System: An Ethnography of Bolivian Aymara Traders in the Global Economy.