Book Shelf

Sovereignty Unhinged

Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco (eds)

An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Onscreen/Offscreen

Constantine V. Nakassis

Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination.

Fare stile - Culture giovanili e mass media nell’India del Sud

Constantine V. Nakassis

In Fare stile Constantine Nakassis prende in esame il mondo dei giovani e dei mass media nell’India del Sud, dove la vita quotidiana e i media trovano ancoraggio in un fenomeno che i giovani tamil chiamano stile.

After Servitude - Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia

Mareike Winchell

How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy.

The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century

Shannon Dawdy

The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning—from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized “necro-waste,” the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death.

Multisituated - Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline.

American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century

Shannon Dawdy

Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.

Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern - Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia

E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis (eds)

Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization.

The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making

Joseph Masco

The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making (2021, Duke University Press) gathers writings that examine the strange American intimacy with and commitment to existential danger. Tracking the simultaneous production of nuclear emergency and climate disruption since 1945, Masco focuses on the psychosocial accommodations as well as the technological revolutions that have produced these linked planetary scale disasters.