Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Series
By Duana Fullwiley, Sarah Besky, Anthony W. Fontes and
()
About this series
Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.
Titles in the series (13)
- Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City
1
The fear of violent crime dominates Guatemala City. In the midst of unprecedented levels of postwar violence, Guatemalans struggle to fathom the myriad forces that have made life in this city so deeply insecure. Born out of histories of state terror, migration, and US deportation, maras (transnational gangs) have become the face of this new era of violence. They are brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade, and yet they have also become essential to the emergence of a certain kind of social order. Drawing on years of fieldwork inside prisons, police precincts, and gang-dominated neighborhoods, Anthony W. Fontes demonstrates how gang violence has become indissoluble from contemporary social imaginaries and how these gangs provide cover for a host of other criminal actors. Ethnographically rich and unflinchingly critical, Mortal Doubt illuminates the maras’ role in making and mooring collective terror in Guatemala City while tracing the ties that bind this violence to those residing in far safer environs.
- Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean
3
How is it possible for six men to take a Liberian-flagged oil tanker hostage and negotiate a huge pay out for the return of its crew and 2.2 million barrels of crude oil? In his gripping new book, Jatin Dua answers this question by exploring the unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia in the twenty-first century. Taking the reader inside pirate communities in Somalia, onboard multinational container ships, and within insurance offices in London, Dua connects modern day pirates to longer histories of trade and disputes over protection. In our increasingly technological world, maritime piracy represents not only an interruption, but an attempt to insert oneself within the world of oceanic trade. Captured at Sea moves beyond the binaries of legal and illegal to illustrate how the seas continue to be key sites of global regulation, connectivity, and commerce today.
- Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States
2
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
- Fires of Gold: Law, Spirit, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana
4
Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa’s most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police, adjudicate, and navigate conflict in this theater of violence, destruction, and rebirth. These authorities, or shadow sovereigns, include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power—one that, in many ways, is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold, itself governed by spirits, serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city, the soul, and the sacred.
- Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
5
What is the role of quality in contemporary capitalism? How is a product as ordinary as a bag of tea judged for its quality? In her innovative study, Sarah Besky addresses these questions by going inside an Indian auction house where experts taste and appraise mass-market black tea, one of the world’s most recognized commodities. Pairing rich historical data with ethnographic research among agronomists, professional tea tasters and traders, and tea plantation workers, Besky shows how the meaning of quality has been subjected to nearly constant experimentation and debate throughout the history of the tea industry. Working across fields of political economy, science and technology studies, and sensory ethnography, Tasting Qualities argues for an approach to quality that sees it not as a final destination for economic, imperial, or post-imperial projects but as an opening for those projects.
- Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability
6
Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion.
- The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction
7
What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. The personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita Vijay Dharia discusses the aggressive environmental and ecological metamorphosis of the region in the twenty-first century. Urban planning and architecture are messy processes that intertwine migratory pathways, corruption politics, labor struggle, ecological transformations, and technological development. Rampant construction activity produces an atmosphere of ephemerality in urban regions, creating an aesthetic condition that supports industrial political economy. Dharia's brilliant analysis of the sensibilities and experiences of work lends visibility to the struggle of workers in an era of growing urban inequality.
- A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands
10
A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.
- Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire
8
Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.
- Stuck Moving: Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology
9
This one-of-a-kind literary and conceptual experiment does anthropology differently—in all the wrong ways. No field trips. No other cultures. This is a personal journey within anthropology itself, and a kind of love story. A critical, candid, hilarious take on the culture of academia and, ultimately, contemporary society. Stuck Moving follows a professor affected by bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and a stalled career who searches for meaning and purpose within a sanctimonious discipline and a society in shambles. It takes aim at the ableist conceit that anthropologists are outside observers studying a messy world. The lens of analysis is reversed to expose the backstage of academic work and life, and the unbecoming self behind scholarship. Blending cultural studies, psychoanalysis, comedy, screenwriting, music lyrics, and poetry, Stuck Moving abandons anthropology’s rigid genre conventions, suffocating solemnity, and enduring colonial model of extractive knowledge production. By satirizing the discipline’s function as a culture resource for global health and the neoliberal university, this book unsettles anthropology’s hopeful claims about its own role in social change.
- Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland
11
Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives.
- Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil
12
Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way people understand their lives in relation to Brazil's history of violent racial differentiation and inequality. From expressions of otherworldly hope to political exhaustion, Go with God depicts Evangelical life as it is lived and explores where people turn to find grace, possibility, and a future.
- Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science
14
Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.
Duana Fullwiley
Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.
Related to Atelier
Related ebooks
Flying Saucers Vs. the Earth #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrimordia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLogan's Run: Aftermath #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPromises: The First Chapter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHolding Forth the Word of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrowing Up on the Farm Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFAME: Lady Gaga: Giant-Sized Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrapped in the Tower Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Itsy and Bitsy Birdie Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsyellow promises Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDell Junior Treasury: Wizard of Oz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaparazzi #0 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNanny & Hank #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTom Corbett: Space Cadet: Danger in Deep Space #4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hunted and the Haunted Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpecial and Different: The Autistic Traveler: Judgment, Redemption, & Victory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExtreme Rhyming Poetry: Over 400 Inspirational Poems of Wit, Wisdom, and Humor (Five Books in One) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitical Power: Ted Kennedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhitetail Deer Facts and Strategies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTribute: Jerry Garcia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFemale Force: RuPaul Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen Reindeer Learned to Fly Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe First Extraterrestrial Signal: The Global Reaction to the Signal from the Outer Space Aliens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOrbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Creator of Facebook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVincent Price Presents #20 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStyx & Stone #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings10th use: Giant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings100 Hardest Hitting Quotes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRoo and the World of Crum Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJourney to the Moon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Crime & Violence For You
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (2nd Edition) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Violent Abuse of Women: In 17th and 18th Century Britain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Introduction to Conducting Private Investigations: Private Investigator Entry Level (02E) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence | Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Stone Unturned: The True Story of the World's Premier Forensic Investigators Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Worse Than Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5House of Secrets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And The Mountains Echoed Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poison Tree: A True Story of Family Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Regarding the Pain of Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chasing the Scream: The Inspiration for the Feature Film "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Enigma of Ted Bundy: The Questions and Controversies Surrounding America's Most Infamous Serial Killer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Death Row, Texas: Inside the Execution Chamber Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No More Police: A Case for Abolition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Killer Joe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bloodbath Nation Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related categories
Reviews for Atelier
0 ratings0 reviews