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.

Of Love and Papers explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families. Drawing on interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain dating, marriage, and parenting. She illustrates how the imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency.

Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, she exposes the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families.

“By highlighting the ways US immigration policies shape the experiences of romantic love, intimacy, and family formation, Enriquez’s meticulous research calls attention to the enduring injurious effects on undocumented and DACAmented young adults, and on their citizen spouses and children. An innovative and sobering account of the far-reaching consequences of our punishing immigration policies. Timely and compelling.” PIERRETTE HONDAGNEU-SOTELO, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California

“In an engaging and methodologically rigorous narrative, Enriquez sheds novel light on the courtship and dating phase of family formation among undocumented and/or mixed status Mexican immigrant families. Undeniably, it will be of central interest to anyone who cares about immigrants and their families.” CECILIA MENJÍVAR, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

LAURA E. ENRIQUEZ is Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha—an influential and popular Sanskrit philosophical tale—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern scholars drew upon their respective traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.

“An erudite and valuable contribution. Nair’s deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers.” Supriya Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

“Nair exhibits a breathtaking command of languages, textual traditions, and intellectual cultures in this pioneering study of the crisscrossing of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic cultural jet streams in sixteenth-century India.” Jonardon Ganeri, author of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700

“Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. A masterwork.” John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

“A welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions.” Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

Shankar Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Peruvian migrant workers began arriving in South Korea in large numbers in the mid-1990s, eventually becoming one of the largest groups of non-Asians in the country. Migrant Conversions shows how despite facing unstable income and legal exclusion, migrants have come to see Korea as an ideal destination, sometimes even as part of their divine destiny. Faced with a forced end to their residence in Korea, Peruvians have developed strategies to transform themselves from economic migrants into heads of successful transnational families, influential church leaders, and cosmopolitan travelers. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis, Migrant Conversions explores the intersections of three types of conversions—monetary, religious, and cosmopolitan—to argue that migrants use conversions to negotiate the meaning of their lives in a constantly changing transnational context. As Peruvians carve out social spaces, they create complex and uneven connections between Peru and Korea that challenge a global hierarchy of nations and migrants. Exploring how migrants, churches, and nations change through processes of conversion reveals how globalization continues to impact people’s lives and ideas about their futures and pasts long after they have stopped moving or after a particular global moment has come to an end.

“A model of what transnational ethnographic research can accomplish.” ELEANA J. KIM, author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

“With crisp prose and candid presence throughout the text, Vogel gives us the first book-length study of the experiences of non-Asian migrants in South Korea.” CAREN FREEMAN, author of Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea

ERICA VOGEL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Saddleback College.

South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s films with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director.

“Christina Klein shines a brilliant klieg light on the still largely unknown South Korean classic films of the 1950s by placing them in a global context of Cold War culture and politics. This is an original and engaging study with broad scholarly and popular appeal.” CARTER J. ECKERT, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea

“Cold War Cosmopolitanism makes a unique contribution to multiple fields. Using Han Hyung-mo’s career and female characters as a springboard, Klein charts the historical and theoretical trajectories of the formation of Cold War cosmopolitanism in 1950s Korea under US hegemony.” HYE SEUNG CHUNG, author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema

“This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in the Cold War culture of Asia.” POSHEK FU, author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas

CHRISTINA KLEIN is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston College.

In a world where attacks on the basic human rights and equal worth of all people are escalating, Advancing Equality reminds us of the critical role of constitutions in protecting equal rights. Analyzing the constitutions of all 193 United Nations countries, this book traces fifty years of change in constitution drafting and examines how stronger protections against discrimination, alongside core social and economic rights, can transform lives. Looking across gender, race and ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, social class, and migration status, the authors reveal whose rights are increasingly guaranteed in constitutions, identify which nations and groups lag behind, and share inspiring stories of activism and powerful court cases from around the globe. Advancing Equality serves as a comprehensive call to action for anyone who cares about their country’s future.

“Advancing Equality shows how far we have come around the world in protecting human rights, but also how far we still have to go. Working together and taking action, we can make sure everyone’s rights, particularly the most discriminated against and marginalized, are protected in every constitution and enforced by law and societal change to realize true equality and a better world.” ANTONIA KIRKLAND, Global Lead, Legal Equality and Access to Justice, at Equality Now

JODY HEYMANN is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. ALETA SPRAGUE is Senior Legal Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an attorney whose career has focused on advancing public policies and laws that address inequality. AMY RAUB is Principal Research Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an economist with over a decade of experience working on discrimination and inequality.

High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.

“Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

“Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

“An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship

CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.

Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations.

“Milena Belloni’s engrossing ethnography—carried out across time, space, and place— is particularly commendable because of her scholarly commitment to ‘getting things right.’ The Eritrean women and men whose lives provided its empirical ground will see their pain, joy, and contradictions reflected back at them. This is scholar activism at its finest.” LAURA BISAILLON, Professor of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough

“The Big Gamble is a study of a migrant group that has received very little scholarly attention. Its focus on the Eritrea to Europe corridor is a novel approach, and Milena Belloni has produced a compelling and courageous account.” PETER KIVISTO, Augustana College and University of Helsinki

“A monumental and perceptive story of migration, taking the reader on a journey not just from Africa to Europe but through reflections on moralities, risk, and trust that are central to contemporary mobility and immobility. Belloni’s account of Eritrean migration experiences is powered by formidable fieldwork and written with warmth and wisdom.” JØRGEN CARLING, Peace Research Institute Oslo

MILENA BELLONI is a sociologist at the University of Trento. Her doctoral research on Eritrean migration received the 2016 IMISCOE Award. Belloni has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of those they leave behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants step in to supply public goods when local or state government cannot. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to these goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.

“An extraordinary analysis of what it means to be a migrant. Duquette-Rury gives us a text that goes well beyond the familiar, and situates the migrant in a complex set of vectors, both local and transnational, opening up the meaning of migration itself.” SASKIA SASSEN, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

“How do people who move to another country sometimes become more influential in the place they left? Exit and Voice combines surveys and lively details from original fieldwork to explore this paradox and identify the fragile pillars sustaining efforts to live in two worlds.” DAVID FITZGERALD, author of Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers

“Despite distance and difficulties, migrants around the world reach down into their pockets to help out the communities they left behind. Hoping that migration can spur development and possibly even democracy, scholars and policy makers find the effort laudable. But as Duquette-Rury demonstrates in this brilliant, beautifully written book, engaging from abroad is a challenging enterprise. A book to be savored by scholars and students alike.” ROGER WALDINGER, Distinguished Professor and Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration

LAUREN DUQUETTE-RURY is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.

Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.

“Ann E. Lucas very effectively combines historical analysis, ethnomusicology, and musicology to provide a broad, holistic explanation for complex, nuanced processes of change. Well written and highly original in its approach, this is a major contribution to the field.” KAMRAN SCOT AGHAIE, Associate Professor of Iranian History, University of Texas

“Music of a Thousand Years presents an innovative narrative of Persian music history and also provides important new perspectives on how to analyze the meaning of music and culture in historical perspective.” MOHSEN MOHAMMADI, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles

“Lucas turns the standard history of Persian music on its head, proving it is not a story of the survival of an ancient tradition, but rather the story of the invention of tradition. Revisionist in the best sense of the word.” JAMES L. GELVIN, author of The Modern Middle East: A History

ANN E. LUCAS is Assistant Professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program. She is recognized for her work on music historiography of the Middle East.