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As the great American work-benefit experiment erodes, companies are increasingly asking people to take responsibility for managing their own health. There is no question that work and health are intertwined. But what effect does an intensely productive, globally connected, high-tech work environment have on a population largely entrusted with overseeing their own health needs? In California's Silicon Valley, a distinctive and medically diverse health culture has emerged. This book explores this health culture, detailing the biomedical, countercultural, and immigrant-based beliefs and practices that shape ideas about working, care-giving, and what it means to be healthy. The book shows that the integration of workplace productivity with personal health has created national patterns of discrimination against those not in the productive mainstream, including the unemployed, retired, and chronically ill. But new ideas about work and health can clarify core American values, highlight emerging global trends, and provide a vital assessment of the evolution of our shared pursuit of well-being. While policymakers debate the possibilities for health insurance reform and government provisions, they overlook this lived experience. The shift of responsibility from organization to individual, a key feature of late capitalism, has significant implications. Individuals are supposed to be unfettered innovators at work, while managing the mundane details of their pensions and health plans. Workers are simultaneously responsible for work projects and for themselves as projects. Here, where work and health collide, in the front offices and on the warehouse floors, is one of the key ways in which people, in the guise of workers, feel capitalism.

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 draws on research into a multinational corporation (MNC) in Qingdao, China, and delves deep into the power dynamics at play between Korean management, Chinese migrant workers, local-level Chinese government officials, and Chinese local gangs. Located within the chain of global garment production, the multinational corporation was under the incessant demand to cut production costs that continually destabilizes the factory regime of the corporation. The relentless demand of price cuts, the decreasing business profits, and the outmoded production facilities forced management to change the factory regime, which resluted in a relatively rapid transformation from despotic to paternalist regimes. The book demonstrates how a particular MNC struggled with the pressure to be increasingly profitable while negotiating a clash between Korean and Chinese cultures, traditions, and classes on the floor of a garment factory. Beyond a one-dimensional observation based on corporate greed or an exploitation model, it captures the daily struggles of management, mid-level personnel, and workers who struggle, each in their own way, to survive the pressures of laboring in a global market system. The book also pays particular attention to common features of post-socialist countries such as the greater importance of social connection and backroom influence in business. By analyzing the contentious collaboration between foreign management, factory workers, government officials, and gangs, it contributes not only to the research on the politics of resistance but also to our understanding of how global and local forces interact.

The intersection between history and anthropology is more varied now than it has ever been—a look at the shelves of bookstores and libraries proves this. Historians have increasingly looked to the methodologies of anthropologists to explain inequalities of power, problems of voicelessness, and conceptions of social change from an inside perspective. And ethnologists have increasingly relied on longitudinal visions of their subjects, inquiries framed by the lens of history rather than purely structuralist, culturalist, or functionalist visions of behavior. The contributors to this book deal with the problems and possibilities of the blurring of these boundaries in different and exciting ways. They provide further fodder for a cross-disciplinary experiment that is already well under way, describing peoples and their cultures in a world where boundaries are evermore fluid, but where we all are alarmingly attached to the cataloguing and marking of national, ethnic, racial, and religious differences.

This book provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. The book presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial role in the emergence of postcolonial states. The book contends that the contemporary Bolivian experience is best understood by examining historical patterns of intention as they emerge from everyday practices. It provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level, and gives key insights into this important South American country.

What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.

This book is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. The book offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of anthropological research and an engagement with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, and moves beyond previous studies of Southeast Asian cities by linking larger conceptual issues of ethics, belief, and experience to the concrete trajectories of everyday urban life in the region.

The Tibetan diaspora began fifty years ago when the current Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and established a government-in-exile in India. For those fifty years, the vast majority of Tibetans have kept their stateless refugee status in India and Nepal as a reminder to themselves and the world that Tibet is under Chinese occupation and that they are committed to returning someday. In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed 1,000 Tibetans and their families to immigrate to the United States; a decade later the total U.S. population includes some 10,000 Tibetans. Not only is the social fact of the migration—its historical and political contexts—of interest, but also how migration and resettlement in the U.S. reflect emergent identity formations among members of a stateless society. This book examines Tibetan identity at a critical juncture in the diaspora's expansion, and argues that increased migration to the West is both facilitated and marked by changing understandings of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Tibetan—deterritorialized, activist, and cosmopolitan.

This book examines the intersections of life and work for expatriates in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the many changes to their experience of overseas labor in the last sixty years. Western elite transnational laborers are the nominal centerpoint of Mediating, yet the text uses this base as opportunity to explore other populations and practices. Bureaucracy and audit practices constrain the work and lives of expatriates, being also their medium of exchange with many local coworkers and friends. Changes in best practices have transformed the ideologies of overseas labor as well as the lives of workers themselves. New racialized and gendered labor, forms of expertise and ideas of security have altered the work of experts and their relationships to Nepalis. This book examines such diverse phenomena as global business, international politics, gendered labor practices and Nepal's own history through the lens of the world of transnational elite labor in Kathmandu.

Once a thriving community, by the late 1980s, 240,000 Jews had emigrated from Morocco. Today fewer than 4,000 Jews remain. Despite a centuries-long presence, the Jewish narrative in Moroccan history has largely been suppressed through national historical amnesia, Jewish absence, and a growing dismay over the Palestinian conflict. Memories of Absence investigates how four successive generations remember the lost Jewish community. Moroccan attitudes toward the Jewish population have changed over the decades and a new debate has emerged: Where does the Jew fit in the context of an Arab and Islamic monarchy? Can Jews simultaneously be Moroccans and Zionists? Drawing on oral testimony and stories, on rumor and humor, Aomar Boum examines the strong shift in opinion and attitude over the generations and the increasingly anti-Semitic beliefs in younger generations, whose only exposure to Jews has been through international media and national memory.

This book offers an in-depth look at the ways in which technology, travel, and globalization have altered traditional patterns of immigration for South Asians who live and work in the United States, and explains how their popular cultural practices and aesthetic desires are fulfilled. They are presented as the twenty-first century's “new cosmopolitans”: flexible enough to adjust to globalization's economic, political, and cultural imperatives. They are thus uniquely adaptable to the mainstream cultures of the United States, but also vulnerable in a period when nationalism and security have become tools to maintain traditional power relations in a changing world.

This ethnography details the traditional social and cultural conditions of the Moso, a matrilineal group living on the border of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces in southwest China. Among the Moso, a majority of the adult population practice a visiting system called tisese instead of marriage as the normal sexual and reproductive institution. Until recently, tisese was noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive. Partners lived and worked in separate households. The only prerequisite for a tisese relationship was a mutual agreement between the man and the woman to allow sexual access to each other. In a comprehensive account, this book explores this unique practice specifically, and offers thorough documentation, fine-grained analysis, and an engaging discussion of the people, history, and structure of Moso society. This book draws on extensive fieldwork, conducted from 1987 to 2006.

Residents of Parma, Italy pride themselves on their sophistication and connection to European modernity. But despite a reputation for civility, intimate partner violence continues to take place, largely hidden from public view. Offering a detailed ethnography of two women's shelters—one leftist, the other Catholic—this book provides the political, cultural, and legal contexts of competing explanations for intimate partner violence. Some contend that violence against women reflects the cultural and historical gender inequalities embedded in Italian society, including “old-fashioned” or “traditional” understandings of masculinity. Others argue that it stems from confusion and ambivalence over “new” or “modern” forms of gender relations. While the first explanation places the blame on tradition and the second cites the transition to modernity, both emphasize societal understandings of gender and point to collective, rather than individual, responsibility. Through an intimate portrayal of everyday life, the book reveals how violence against women can be studied as one part of a continuum of locally relevant understandings of gender relations and gender change.

After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church's intermediary role. This book argues that their struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, it illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, it shows how they produced new geographies—of regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenship—that underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice. Moving beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations, this work reveals the charged political maneuvers that bound subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia. In rich historical and ethnographic detail, this book illuminates postcolonial rights politics as the product of particular histories of caste, religion, and development, allowing us to see how democracy is always “provincial.”

This book follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. The author takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say. Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing Palestinian poetry, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold stories of a highly stereotyped people.

This is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are “free” to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about “freedom” and “determinacy” to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.

People of African descent living in the Colombian Andes had long been struggling, as peasants and workers, for political participation and equal citizenship. When the 1991 Colombian Constitution enabled them to claim territory as ethnic groups, their demands became part of a growing worldwide phenomenon of citizenship claims that are based on territory and expressed through cultural distinction. This book looks at two such claims pursued by Afro-Colombians in the 1990s and investigates how territory serves to connect and disconnect citizen and state in the context of today's changing state authority, legitimacy, and institutions. Drawing from a detailed ethnographic study of everyday Afro-Colombian life, the book underscores the centrality of territory to modern states and the consequences of legal categorizations of race and ethnicity. Though focused on Afro-Colombian struggles for political space in their country, the book also illustrates how these struggles are part of events and entities operating on a much broader global front.

Since 1999 South Korean films have drawn roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box office, matching or even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity. How did this Korean “film explosion” come about? This book examines the Korean film industry’s success story from the viewpoint of a group of unlikely social actors-Korean independent filmmakers. It investigates the unexpected alliances among independent filmmakers, the state, and the mainstream film industry practitioners under the postauthoritarian administrations of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and argues that these alliances were critical to the making of the Korean film sector as we know it. During this postauthoritarian/reform era, independent filmmakers with activist backgrounds who were part of the “democratic generation” or “3–8-6 generation” were able to mobilize the cultural repertoires and networks of their 1980s activism in turning themselves into important players in state cultural institutions. They also negotiated with the purveyors of capital and helped lead national protests against trade liberalization. Instead of simply labeling these alliances with the state, capitalists, and film industry practitioners as “selling out” or “co-optation,” the book explores how independent filmmakers transformed South Korea’s film institutions, policies, and narratives about film. This book is an ethnographic investigation of the political, social, and cultural contexts that created the Korean “film explosion.”

We are in a transitional moment in our national conversation on race. Despite optimistic predictions that Barack Obama's election would signal the end of race as an issue in America, the race-related news stories just keep coming. Race remains a political and polarizing issue, and the sprawling, unwieldy, and often maddening means we have developed to discuss and evaluate what counts as “racial” can be frustrating. This book examines a watershed year of news stories, taking these events as a way to understand American culture and challenge our existing notions of what is racial—or not. The book follows race stories that have made news headlines—including Don Imus's remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team, protests in Jena, Louisiana, and Barack Obama's presidential campaign—to trace the shifting contours of mainstream U.S. public discussions of race as they incorporate new voices, words, and images. Focused on the underlying dynamics of American culture that shape this conversation, this book aims to make us more fluent in assessing the stories we consume about race. Advancing our conversation on race hinges on recognizing and challenging the cultural conventions governing the ways we speak about and recognize race. In drawing attention to this curious cultural artifact, our national conversation on race, the book offers a way to understand race in the totality of American culture, as a constantly evolving debate. As this book demonstrates, the conversation is far from over.