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This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.

Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.

Up to 2012, Mali was a poster child for African democracy, despite multiple signs of growing dissatisfaction with the democratic experiment. Then disaster struck, bringing many of the nation's unresolved contradictions to international attention. A military coup carved off the country's south. A revolt by a coalition of Tuareg and extremist Islamist forces shook the north. The events, so violent and unexpected, forced experts to reassess Mali's democratic institutions and the neoliberal economic reforms enacted in conjunction with the move toward democracy. This book's detailed study of cultural heritage and its transformations provides a key to understanding the impasse that confronts Malian democracy. As the book shows, postcolonial Mali privileged its cultural heritage to display itself on the regional and international scene. The neoliberal reforms both intensified and altered this trend. Profiling heritage sites ranging from statues of colonial leaders to women's museums to historic Timbuktu, the book portrays how various actors have deployed and contested notions of heritage. These actors include not just Malian administrators and politicians but UNESCO, and non-state NGOs. The book also delves into the intricacies of heritage politics from the perspective of Malian actors and groups, as producers and receivers—but always highly informed and critically engaged—of international, national and local cultural initiatives.

This book offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. It presents and analyzes lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Like many other indigenous peoples, the Napo Runa create meaning through language and other practices that do not correspond to the communicative or social assumptions of Western culture. Language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape. In the Napo Runa worldview, storytellers are shamans who use sound and form to create relationships with other people and beings from the natural and spirit worlds. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being—in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape—the book weaves exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language.

This book examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many of its women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, the book examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. The book approaches the narratives of emotional distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of the analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces. Evocative and compassionate, the book gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.

This book explores how young women navigate everyday moral dilemmas, develop understandings of self, and negotiate hierarchies of power, as they endeavor to “make life better” for themselves and their children. The ethnography is based on sixteen months of qualitative research (2009-2010, 2013, 2014) in an international NGO-run residence for young mothers and their children in the highland Andean region of Cusco, Peru. Drawing on feminist intersectionality theory, anthropological scholarship on reproduction and relatedness, and perspectives on the dialogical, or joint, production of social life and experience, this ethnography enriches understandings of ordinary life as the site of moral experience, and positions young women’s everyday practices, subjectivities, and hopes for the future at the story’s center. These mostly poor and working-class indigenous and mestiza girls care for their children and are positioned simultaneously as youth in need of care. As they seek to create a “good life” and future for themselves, these young women frame themselves as moral and modern individuals. Bringing attention to various dimensions of caring for, and caring by, young women illuminates broad social and political economic processes (deeply rooted gender inequalities, systemic racism, global humanitarianism) that shape their experiences and aspirations for the future. Tracing the micro-politics, everyday talk, and creative expression illuminates the dynamic processes through which individuals develop complex and changing senses of self, sociality, and morality.

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. This book delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas—Ecuador's province most associated with blackness—engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. The book shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spatial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns. Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. This book describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, the book presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.

Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina examines what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political ruptures, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Popular representations of Muslim communities in Southeastern Europe have long featured simplistic images of Muslims’ lost faith, and of Islam as serving the interests of nationalism and identity politics. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, this book challenges these stereotypes. Through an exploration of the everyday experiences of several generations of Muslim men and women and against the backdrop of the turbulent postsocialist and postwar transformations, David Henig shows how living a Muslim life in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina is ordered and inscribed by deep relations of obligation and care with the living, the dead, and the divine that spans generations. His evocative study traces the manifestations of these relations from the intimate spheres of houses and village neighborhoods to the waiting room of an Islamic dream healer, from village mosques and outdoor prayers for rain to the “little Hajj” pilgrimage and commemorative sites for the Ottoman martyrs and those of the recent Bosnian war. This study makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of how religion and historical consciousness, interlocked through the rubric of exchange, is actively engaged to make sense of past tumultuous experiences and future-oriented expectations in the present.

This ethnography is the first work to consider the role of clan in the Somali diaspora and the only book that considers women’s perspectives in addition to the traditionally recognized men’s perspectives on the topic of clan. The book is based on extensive fieldwork between 2000 and 2004 in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The comments of three research participants gathered in 2015 add a collaborative dimension and bring readers up to date on changes since the fieldwork period. It marks a departure from earlier kinship studies in Somalia, informed by structural-functionalism, by employing a practice theory approach to clan. Many Somalis are embarrassed by the notion that clan in any way affects their life abroad. They routinely blame cultural insiders and outsiders for its persistence as a source of both division and association. Cultural intimacy helps explain the cultural intricacies that shape Somalis’ contestation of clan. Daily life reveals the habitual, though understated efforts to construct clan and use clan networks to access and exchange capital and exposes networks as flexible and reveals innovative configurations and uses. Somalis consider clan alongside ideas of autonomy and gender equality and affinities toward clan relatives and nonrelatives. The book was written as a pedagogical tool, incorporating anthropological concepts and immersing readers in ethnographic research methods.

To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, AKA Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise. This book explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. This book forges an uncommon collaboration with its subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as the book explores the author's own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

An exemplary ethnography of post-apartheid life: this book takes the reader to a place that few people know even exists—a self-run shelter for homeless young people in Durban. What emerges is a searing portrait of drugs, violence, and AIDS but also of compassion, love, loyalty, and humanity. Point Place (a self-run homeless shelter for the young homeless) stands near the city center of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-story apartment building is home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalized by poverty and chronic unemployment. This book draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. The investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. The book's discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana—to care about or take notice of another—that young women and men use to construct “outside” and “inside” boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. The book exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But it also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need “rehabilitation.” As the book argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents—in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.

In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as “wild Amazonian Indians” in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region. This book examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. The book explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. The book shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.

Rhodesia's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed the hopes of women who had imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, this book draws on thirty years of experience to survey Zimbabwean feminism from the colonial era to today. The book's analysis shows how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. The book also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society—rural and urban, professional and domestic—accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, the book offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the widespread view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women.