We offer this virtual space in addition to our AAA booth to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Anthropology titles with discount code S23XAAA through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2023" »
How revolutionary values survive repression in postwar Dhufar
The Dhufar region of Oman was famous in ancient times for its frankincense. Visitors today can learn about this past in “The Museum of the Frankincense Land” near the ruins of the former port city where medieval traveler Ibn Battuta sojourned. Visitors can later enjoy a frankincense flavor ice cream at a peaceful café that looks out from the edge of Dhufar’s mountain interior, across its coastal plain, to the city of Salalah and the Arabian Sea beyond. But it was not always frankincense that brought Dhufar renown, nor did the mountains, plain, and coast always offer such peaceful landscapes.
From 1965 to 1976, Dhufar captured global attention for its anti-colonial revolutionaries and their liberation movement. Fighting against the British-backed al-Busaid dynasty of Sultans, the front pursued political and social emancipation, initially for Dhufar but later for Oman and the Arabian Gulf under formal and informal British colonialism. The increasingly internationalized, British-led counterinsurgency militarily defeated the movement in 1976. This campaign deployed indiscriminate violence such as airstrikes and food and water blockades that destroyed Dhufari lives and livelihoods. Subsequently, the Sultanate expunged the revolution, and other episodes of dissent, from official history.
In postwar Oman, former revolutionaries have lived, worked, raised families, and buried peers while living under the authoritarian rule of the very government that they once opposed. As such, theirs is a predicament reminiscent of that of later generations of disappointed activists and sympathizers of the revolutions in Southwest Asia and North Africa that met with backlash, repression, counterinsurgency, and counterrevolution. Taking a close look at the postwar lives of former revolutionaries in Dhufar offers the opportunity to ask: what happens to the ideas and values of revolution after military defeat and repression?
We offer this virtual space in addition to our AAA booth to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% and free North American shipping off these and other recent SUP Anthropology titles with discount code S22XAAA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Conference Photos
Pictured left to right: Elyse Ona Singer with her book Lawful Sins, Marit Tolo Østebø with her book Village Gone Viral, Miguel Pérez with his book The Right to Dignity, Mark Goodale with his book Reinventing Human Rights, Tess Lea and her book Wild Policy, Richard Kernaghan and his book Crossing the Current, Rebecca Berke Galemba and a flyer for her forthcoming book Laboring for Justice, Leah Zani and her book Strike Patterns, and Amahl A. Bishara with a poster of her book Crossing a Line.
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2022" »
Palestine, the global LGTBQ community, and the future of activism.
The global LGBTQ community has now reached a point that celebrations of Pride mark the month of June across the world. Yet this also begs a number of pressing questions, including whether a global queer community exists in the first place, what is exactly meant by “pride,” and what types of events are privileged this month? Furthermore, who has the ability to define these terms and to make these decisions? Examining the contemporary intersection of queer rights and the question of Palestine provides insights on the promise—and limits—of global LGBTQ politics.
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique », my book on the transnational queer Palestinian solidarity movement, was published by SUP in 2020. In it, I examined events relevant to the movement reaching the year 2018. Thus, while much has remained constant over the past four years, much has also changed significantly.
My ethnography revealed the potential of global queer solidarity across lines of difference. There are shared struggles against patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and colonialism that tie LGBTQ activists together despite disparate geographies and positionalities. At the same time, the realities in Palestine are similar to contexts elsewhere, in that queer agency is intimately connected to socioeconomic status, political and religious ideologies, family and education background, urban and rural divides, and other factors. These conditions shape whether one is able to lead a life free from structural and physical violence in the face of homophobia. While privileged queer people in Ramallah and New York each benefit from the forces of cosmopolitanism, the former must contend with life under military occupation while the latter live under a sovereign state.
To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AAA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
Greetings from our New Anthropology Editor
In early September, Stanford University Press welcomed a new editor of Anthropology, Dylan Kyung-lim White. Dylan comes to Stanford from UNC Press, where he acquired books in anthropology, geography, sociology, and race and ethnic studies. In his new position at Stanford, he is particularly interested in projects that are connected to environmental anthropology, political anthropology, and science, technology, and medical anthropology, and that are engaged in debates around racial capitalism, colonialism and Indigenous resistance, migration and borders, social and labor movements, prisons and policing, gender, sexuality, and environmental justice. He is keen to support work that can reach across disciplines, and that aims to impact not just the scholarly community but also a wider public. Below is a short note from him on the occasion of the conference:
Dear Reader,
As I write this note I am rounding out my early days as anthropology editor at Stanford University Press. Already in this short time I have been so impressed by the intelligence, dedication, and good humor of my new colleagues in the face of the ongoing pandemic, and have now seen up close what I had glimpsed from afar: a dynamic, forward-thinking anthropology program. In surveying Stanford’s most recent group of publications, I am struck by the ground being covered – from cleared-eyed appraisals of our global environmental crisis, to critical accounts of political struggle and resistance to oppression around the world, to cats on the internet – and feel grateful for the opportunity to build on the important work already underway. I’m looking forward to what’s ahead, and to meet future partners in this endeavor.
Thanks, and take good care,
Dylan
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2021" »
To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AAA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
New in Stanford Digital Projects
The More-Than-Human Anthropocene »
Every event in human history has been a more-than-human event. When hunter-gatherers burn the land, they cooperate with herbs that seed quickly and grasses that sprout after fires, attracting game. Inside us, intestinal bacteria make it possible for us to digest our food. Other things, living and nonliving, make it possible to be human. Yet powerful habits of thought over the last centuries have made this statement less than obvious. With the arrival of the idea of the Anthropocene, we move away from such thinking to reconsider how human and nonhuman histories are inextricably intertwined.
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2020" »
Governance of mobility during the pandemic in China
Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 12, 2020, governments around the world have been adopting lockdown measures to contain the virus. While the virus knows no geographic and racial boundaries, government policies and social commentaries often act upon and reinforce those existing boundaries. Amid our global struggles with the often asymptomatic yet highly contagious disease has arisen much prejudice and national and racial discrimination. While overseas Chinese have carried signs reading “I am not a virus” to protest against the anti-Asian racism and Sinophobia implied by the use of the term “the Chinese virus” in America and Europe, exclusive policies and social discrimination against Hubei people within China have been equally disheartening.
On January 23, the world was shocked by the complete closure of Hubei province’s capital Wuhan where the outbreak came to light before the Lunar New Year holidays. The city of Wuhan sitting on two rivers announced full closure from 2 AM Jan 23 and closed all public transportation means form 10 AM that same day. Its residents were barred from leaving home and outsiders could not enter. Thirteen neighbouring cities adopted similar measures from Jan 24, which made the province largely in lockdown. Residents who left Wuhan before the complete lockdown of the city were shunned by hotels and local communities where they were sheltering. Cars with Hubei plates were frequently pulled over and checked by police on city streets around China and even denied entrance to certain areas. Wuhanese who have been living outside of Hubei for years have also been subjected to strict quarantine and close monitoring simply because of their Hubei hukou (household registration) status.
Continue reading "Convenient boundaries and inconvenient lives in the Pandemic" »
How young people navigate migration and deportation in Central America
“The Guatemalan government treats us like we don’t belong—even on the lands of our ancestors—and blocks us at every turn. Bad schools, no work, no medical care. They treat us like indios sucios [dirty Indians] while they rob gold from under our lands. Believe me, I never wanted to migrate. I’d heard the stories from my cousin--about the dangers of the journey, living in a cramped apartment, working twenty hours a day and never saving--but I had no choice. My mother and sister got sick; the [Marlin] mine contaminated our water and spoiled the crops. They call it “desarrollo” [development], but it is not developing our communities; it is devastating them. They are killing us slowly.”
- Juan Gabriel, seventeen years old
Juan Gabriel is one of a growing number of young people migrating unaccompanied from Central America to the United States. Often dismissed as mere victims of poverty or stigmatized as gang members, these young people are social actors who contribute to the survival of their households through their care, labor, and mobility. In spite of his desire to remain in Guatemala, Juan Gabriel migrated due to the environmental repercussions of a gold mine near his hometown of Sipacapa that imperiled his mother’s and sister’s health when it contaminated the soil and local water sources. The U.S. and Guatemalan governments contend that foreign investment—often in the form of extractive industries, free trade zones, and agricultural initiatives—create alternatives to migration through employment opportunities, improved infrastructure, and investment that, in theory, trickles down to communities. For Juan Gabriel, however, the adverse consequences resulting from “development” in tandem with a failing public health system spurred his transnational migration. For other young migrants, limited employment and education opportunities, high rates of unemployment, scarce arable land, financial debt, and family emergencies (such as accidents or death) prompted their migration.
Although cast as objects of policy, not participants, Indigenous youth are not passive recipients of securitization policies, development interventions, or discourses of migranthood.
Who precisely is the “common good” that the public health sector purports to serve?
In light of current events we present Katherine A. Mason’s 2016 blog post for Infectious Change » with a new epilogue that takes into account the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been barely a year since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa released its grip on the frightened imaginations of the Global North, and already global health officials are in the midst of another viral panic. After spreading across the Pacific to Brazil and Puerto Rico, the mosquito-born Zika virus this summer is expected to continue its march to the mainland United States, where it will make landfall on the Gulf Coast. The message from global and American health authorities is the same as it was in 2003 with the appearance of SARS, in 2006 with H5N1 avian flu, and in 2014 with Ebola: Be very afraid.
“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” writes Peter J. Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “If I were a pregnant woman … in an impoverished neighborhood in a city like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., or Mobile, Ala., I would be nervous right now.” Of course, Hotez is none of the above. So are those women nervous? Will controlling Zika end up helping them? And would Hotez listen if the affected women thought it wouldn’t? As we enter another round of emergency epidemic control, these questions are critical to ask.
Public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this threat carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?
What I have found from my own research is that even when a global disease response appears to be effective, unintended consequences can emerge that threaten to undermine, rather than support, the long-term health and well-being of vulnerable communities most affected by the disease in question. In the urban Chinese settings I studied during and after the SARS outbreak, China’s enormous population of rural-to-urban migrant workers was seen as a public health menace capable of spreading the same dangerous diseases that threatened it. In the wake of the 2003 outbreak, Chinese public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this menace carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?
How sanctions have impacted Cubans' plates.
Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders recently made comments on Cuba that have stirred some criticism and controversy. Although Sanders condemned authoritarianism, he said that “it's unfair to simply say everything is bad” with respect to Cuba, as Sanders pointed to Fidel Castro’s massive literacy program put in place just after the 1959 socialist revolution. Between this literacy campaign and free education at all levels, Cuba continues to have a 99% literacy rate. However, what Sanders did not mention is that while Cuba has historically accomplished these things in spite of the U.S. Embargo, the impact of U.S. sanctions can be felt through other metrics and is only getting worse.
Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system.
Long before these comments Cubans on the island had been keeping a close eye on the 2020 US Presidential election; this year’s election is particularly important because of the recent crushing sanctions against Cuba that the Trump administration has put in place. Trump’s sanctions have happened in tandem with many political changes on the island. In 2019 Cubans approved a new Constitution that formally recognizes the operation of the market and legalizes forms of private property and business. These shifts continue to be within the single-party system and formalize an ongoing process of economic liberalization toward a mixed economy, which has been termed “market socialism.” Cuba’s new President Miguel Diaz-Canel assumed office on Oct 10, 2019, having served as the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers since 18 April 2018. Just before Diaz-Canel began, Trump activated a rarely used part of the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which allows U.S. citizens to file claims against Cuba’s trading and investment partners for properties nationalized following the revolution 60 years ago. This is an effort to tighten the U.S. Embargo by forcing other countries to stop trading and investing in Cuba.
Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system. I have written about this extensively in my new book, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal», which is based on research I conducted in Santiago de Cuba between 2008 and 2019. Cuba imports 60 to 80% of food consumed on the island. Not only are direct food imports an issue, but reductions in imported agriculture inputs, including fuel to operate farm machinery also have severe impacts on domestic food production. For instance, in March 2019, Cuba produced 900,000 fewer eggs than the 5.7 million needed daily to satisfy national demand. As a measure to ensure basic food access, in May 2019 the government tightened the food rations, food items that had recently been more abundantly available in non-subsidized markets were now only available through the food ration. This included chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products that are only available in limited quantities. At hard currency stores there is also a limit on powdered milk to four packets per person, sausages to four packs per person and peas to five packets per person. Adjacent to actual food shortages, in early January 2020 the Cuban government announced that tanks of petroleum gas, the main cooking source for most Cubans, would be scarce. This scarcity is directly tied to a contract that was cancelled due to Trump’s sanctions.
Why words alone do not convey all the meaning in Trump's phone call with Zelensky.
We’ve been through this routine many times before: Trump says something egregious. Critics cry foul. Trump and his supporters respond by invoking plausible deniability. They project the president’s own fault onto his opponents and reframe the conversation in a way that sows enough doubt and distrust across a divided electorate to avoid being held accountable.
This time could be different—if congressional Democrats follow Speaker Pelosi’s lead and effectively counter Trump’s disingenuous language games. But doing so will require understanding some key ideas from sociocultural linguistics on the way meaning unfolds through language use. Holding Trump accountable for his most recent impeachable offense requires communicating to the public why the memo of his call with President Zelensky of Ukraine is so damning. And it has less to do with what he reportedly said—or didn’t say—in so many words (a quid pro quo of US military aid for dirt on a political opponent) than what he did communicate within the context of the call and US foreign relations.
Politicians frequently play the plausible deniability language game by exploiting the gap between semantic and pragmatic meaning. In that other infamous memo of the Trump presidency—the one in which then-FBI director James Comey documented what he took to be the president’s attempt to obstruct justice in the investigation of Michael Flynn—Trump’s defense hinged on the semantics of the word hope (“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”).
Continue reading "How to Stop Trump from Evading What’s Undeniably Impeachable" »
“Illegal” immigrants are universally demonized, but it is exclusionary immigration laws that produce “illegality.”
Illiberal immigration policies and the xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies them are on the rise in the Western world. In Trump’s America, children are being prised away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, making even the President’s Republican colleagues express discomfort. In the U.K., the unlawful detention and deportation of British-Caribbean citizens – the so-called “Windrush scandal” – has revealed the deeply pernicious consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy for migrants. In mainland Europe, meanwhile, the anti-immigrant nationalist leader Victor Orban achieved a resounding victory in the Hungarian national election in April, while in Italy the formation of a new coalition government has catapulted the anti-immigrant Lega (League) party into the heart of political power. The appointment of Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, as Interior Minister means that a far-right politician is now in charge of Italy’s border control, its policing, and its immigration policy. This has rightly caused alarm: during the recent election campaign, Salvini pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of “illegal” migrants should his party win, and this rhetoric has continued following the Lega’s positive election results. Just weeks after coming into office, the newly appointed minister left 629 migrants stranded when he refused to allow a rescue ship to dock in Italy.
Politicians such as Salvini and Trump revel in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment with a dramatic focus on the supposed threats to nation-states’ borders, but as my book Rules, Paper, Status shows, they consistently overlook a crucial part of the immigration picture: “illegal” immigration is actually produced inside borders through the implementation of harsh and exclusionary policies that create the very categories which parties like the Lega then rail against. As migration scholars have consistently pointed out, “illegal” immigrants are not merely comprised of those who arrive on the rickety boats that cross the Mediterranean. In fact, the number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.
How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.
In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.
The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”
Crooked teeth are a modern phenomenon and a telltale sign of an underlying epidemic.
Modern industrialized societies are plagued by crowded, ill-aligned teeth, a condition that the dental profession refers to as “malocclusion”—which translates literally to “bad bite.” Survey data from 1998 suggests that as much as a fifth of the U.S. population has significant malocclusion, over half of which require at least some degree of orthodontic intervention. Braces, tooth extractions, and retainers are the bread and butter for all the dentists and orthodontists tasked with setting straight our dental deviations. Having braces as a child has become so common in the Western world that it can seem a rite of passage—today, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of U.S. children will wear braces before adulthood. But what did humans do to fix their teeth before modern dentistry, before Novocain, gauze, and rubber spacers?
As it turns out, our ancestors did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent that we do today. Our species’ fossil record reveals a telling story: the epidemic of crooked teeth developed in humans over time. Evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman, notes the pattern in his book, The Story of the Human Body:
The museum I work in has thousands of ancient skulls from all over the world. Most of the skulls from the last few hundred years are a dentist’s nightmare: they are filled with cavities and infections, the teeth are crowded into the jaw, and about one-quarter of them have impacted teeth. The skulls of preindustrial farmers are also riddled with cavities and painful-looking abscesses, but less than 5 percent of them have impacted wisdom teeth. In contrast, most of the hunter-gatherers had nearly perfect dental health. Apparently, orthodontists and dentists were rarely necessary in the Stone Age.
Ample evidence abounds in support of Lieberman’s observations. A comparison of 146 medieval skulls from abandoned Norwegian graveyards with modern skulls indicated a trend toward bad bite in our more recent forebears. The skulls of people scored as being in “great” or “obvious” need of orthodontic treatment made up 36 percent of the medieval sample and 65 percent of the modern sample. And evidence of malocclusion in still earlier human fossils is vanishingly rare. The jaws of hunter-gatherers nearly uniformly reveal roomy, perfect arches of well aligned teeth, with no impacted wisdom teeth—a movie star’s dream smile, 15,000 years before the movies!
Smuggling is a form of livelihood on the Mexico-Guatemala border, where economic opportunities are scarce.
Tito was born on the Mexican side of an unmonitored road crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border to a poor family with little farmland. He grew up crossing the border to visit family and exchange goods. Now, Tito has two houses: an old cement block one and a new, two-story house with pillars, tiled porches and floors, and an indoor bathroom with a hot-water shower. Tito sees himself first as a farmer and second as a businessman.
At the Mexico-Guatemala border, Tito makes a living by transporting goods like corn and coffee across the border. In this region, smuggling basic goods has flourished as a form of legitimate livelihood as alternative economic options have evaporated. The border’s recent integration into a hemispheric security and trade agenda has disrupted and displaced the traditional means of livelihood for many border residents. That agenda, which emerged in the 1990s and 2000s in coordination with the United States, focuses on curtailing unauthorized flows of goods, capital, and people. As the security and trade nexus between North and Central America, policies governing the border were increasingly positioned in line with geopolitical security interests emanating from the United States. In effect, Mexico has been a partner in the extension of the U.S. southern border to the Mexico-Guatemala border.
Those living near the boundary have felt the consequences, as residents there have historically traded, married, and migrated across the Mexico-Guatemala border. Even in the face of tightening controls, residents remain savvy in using border knowledge and networks to navigate politics, social dynamics, and currency and trade differentials to make a living where there are few opportunities.
“Free trade is just for the academics and the corporations. The people will become poorer.”
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