Books in the California Series in Public Anthropology series

In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our timethe human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of ';Prevention through Deterrence,' the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. In harrowing detail, De Leon chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert.The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

Here, for the first time, is a collection of short speeches by the charismatic doctor and social activist Paul Farmer. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer's vision in a single, accessible volume.A must-read for graduates, students, and everyone seeking to help bend the arc of history toward justice, To Repair the World:* Challenges readers to counter failures of imagination that keep billions of people without access to health care, safe drinking water, decent schools, and other basic human rights; * Champions the power of partnership against global poverty, climate change, and other pressing problems today; * Overturns common assumptions about health disparities around the globe by considering the large-scale social forces that determine who gets sick and who has access to health care;* Discusses how hope, solidarity, faith, and hardbitten analysis have animated Farmer's service to the poor in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Russia, and elsewhere;* Leaves the reader with an uplifting vision: that with creativity, passion, teamwork, and determination, the next generations can make the world a safer and more humane place.

Donna M. Goldstein presents a hard-hitting critique of urban poverty and violence and challenges much of what we think we know about the "e;culture of poverty"e; in this compelling read. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, who cope with unbearable suffering, violence and social abandonment. The book offers a clear-eyed view of socially conditioned misery while focusing on the creative responses-absurdist and black humor-that people generate amid daily conditions of humiliation, anger, and despair. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation among residents of the shantytown.

Provides an examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. The author shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care.

"In Textures of Terror, Victoria Sanford brilliantly unravels complex and widespread gender-based violence in Guatemala and how the very institutions created to combat it perpetuate violence and impunity. Above all, she tells the love story of a father's ceaseless quest for justice for the murder of his beloved daughter."--Kerry Kennedy, President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights "How can anyone convey Guatemala's descent into ultra-violence following a US-backed coup decades ago? Sanford does it beautifully by telling a single poignant story and placing it against the country's dazzling political and cultural background. Harrowing but deeply insightful, Textures of Terror shows how ordinary people react and resist as a society decomposes."--Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and world affairs columnist for the Boston Globe "This book is simultaneously one book and many. One chronicles the murder of a young female law student. The others explore the layers of systemic horror that remind us that to be a woman in twenty-first-century Guatemala is to live in danger, in the shadow of violence, impunity, and historical oppression."--Carolina Escobar Sarti, National Director, La Alianza Guatemala "In Textures of Terror, Sanford illuminates the way violence and impunity continue to destroy lives, especially women's lives, in postwar Guatemala. She focuses on the 2005 feminicide of Claudina Isabel and her father's efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice, weaving a story rooted in Guatemalan history, but with universal resonance."--Jo-Marie Burt, Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University

"Mara Buchbinder's rich description of the law, bureaucracy, and the hurdles to scripting physician aid-in-dying provides an eye-opening, sometimes disturbing answer to the question of how we can foster health care justice when it comes to assisted dying. Costs, access, community, the burden of time, and the pragmatics of choice loom large here. A provocative, necessary book."--Sharon R. Kaufman, author of Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line "This marvelous, unsettling book documents how a new law on assisted dying gets translated into practice. With sensitivity and nuance, Buchbinder describes the new forms of exclusion as well as sociality that this 'aspirational death' has created, and the dilemmas for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and others involved."--Janelle S. Taylor, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto "The trained eye of an ethnographer sees things ordinary observers don't, and the trained eye of an ethnographer committed to careful neutrality is particularly valuable. Partisans on both sides of the debate over medical aid-in-dying should read this perceptive and informative book: it will enhance the vision of all."--Margaret Pabst Battin, author of The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life

Neoliberalism has been the defining paradigm in global health since the latter part of the twentieth century. This book offers a tale about the forces driving decision making in health and development policy today, illustrating how the privatization of health care can have catastrophic outcomes for some of the world's most vulnerable populations.

Provides a fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. This title illuminates a social world based on love, compassionate relationship based on material exchange and nurturing, that transcends romance and binds people together across space.

The United States has seen a dramatic rise in the number of informal day labor sites in the last two decades. This book offers a perspective on how the informal economy of undocumented labor truly functions in American society.

In this vivid ethnography, Harri Englund investigates how ideas of freedom impede struggles against poverty and injustice in emerging democracies. Reaching beyond a narrow focus on the national elite, Prisoners of Freedom shows how foreign aid and human rights activism hamper the pursuit of democratic citizenship in Africa. The book explores how activists' aspirations of self-improvement, pursued under harsh economic conditions, find in the human rights discourse a new means to distinguish oneself from the poor masses. Among expatriates, the emphasis on abstract human rights avoids confrontations with the political and business elites. Drawing on long-term research among the Malawian poor, Englund brings to life the personal circumstances of Malawian human rights activists, their expatriate benefactors, and the urban and rural poor as he develops a fresh perspective on freedom-one that recognizes the significance of debt, obligation, and civil virtues.

Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz-an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala-tells the story of the village of Santa Maria Tzeja, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village-its birth, destruction, and rebirth-embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa Maria Tzeja, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa Maria Tzeja, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.

In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the "e;supermaximums"e;-and the mental health units that complement them-Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an expose, Total Confinement is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions-from the violent to the tender-among prisoners and staff. Total Confinement offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.

Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions-of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry-affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream.In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "e;the other Asians"e; whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "e;Buddha is hiding."e; Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life-and death-in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi's chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America's voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry's reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Based on the author's six years of collaboration with a local workers' center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people's racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area's long history of racial inequality, the industry's growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants' contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers' prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Returned follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportationan emergent global order of social injusticereaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. The book includes accounts of displacement, struggle, suffering, and profound loss but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. Returned tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.

A paradoxical situation emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century: the dramatic upscaling of the suburban American dream even as the possibilities for achieving and maintaining it diminished. Having fled to the suburbs in search of affordable homes, open space, and better schools, city-raised parents found their modest homes eclipsed by McMansions, local schools and roads overburdened and underfunded, and their ability to keep up with the pressures of extravagant consumerism increasingly tenuous. How do class anxieties play out amid such disconcerting cultural, political, and economic changes? In this incisive ethnography set in a New Jersey suburb outside New York City, Rachel Heiman takes us into people's homes; their community meetings, where they debate security gates and school redistricting; and even their cars, to offer an intimate view of the tensions and uncertainties of being middle class at that time. With a gift for bringing to life the everyday workings of class in the lives of children, youth, and their parents, Heiman offers an illuminating look at the contemporary complexities of class rooted in racialized lives, hyperconsumption, and neoliberal citizenship. She argues convincingly that to understand our current economic situation we need to attend to the subtle but forceful formation of sensibilities, spaces, and habits that durably motivate people and shape their actions and outlooks. "e;Rugged entitlement"e; is Heiman's name for the middle class's sense of entitlement to a way of life that is increasingly untenable and that is accompanied by an anxious feeling that they must vigilantly pursue their own interests to maintain and further their class position. Driving after Class is a model of fine-grained ethnography that shows how families try to make sense of who they are and where they are going in a highly competitive and uncertain time.

In this rich, evocative study, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh examines the changing notions of sexuality, family, and reproduction among Palestinians living in Israel. Distinguishing itself amid the media maelstrom that has homogenized Palestinians as "e;terrorists,"e; this important new work offers a complex, nuanced, and humanized depiction of a group rendered invisible despite its substantial size, now accounting for nearly twenty percent of Israel's population. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Birthing the Nation contextualizes the politics of reproduction within contemporary issues affecting Palestinians, and places these issues against the backdrop of a dominant Israeli society.