Books published by University of California Press

"Nabel's The Arsacids of Rome represents a significant advance in both Roman and ancient Iranian history. A tour de force of source criticism, this work shrewdly reevaluates the classical literary sources, skillfully putting them into dialogue with the Iranian evidence to create a masterful work of political, diplomatic, and cultural history."--Matthew P. Canepa, author of The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Landscape, Architecture, and the Built Environment "This absorbing analysis of power and kinship emancipates misunderstanding as a vital conceptual tool for ancient historians. With theoretical ambition, Nabel leads the way towards a truly inclusive study of the ancient world. A transformative work."--Albert de Jong, Professor of Religion, Leiden University "Nabel presents a bold new vision of Parthian and Roman relations at the dawn of the first millennium, contending that creative misunderstanding lay at the heart of the international détente between the two superpowers of Europe and Western Asia. In a world in which human proxies continue to play an outsized role in international relations, The Arsacids of Rome offers lessons of value still for today."--John Bodel, W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Brown University "Nabel's thesis of 'pragmatic misunderstanding, ' confirmed by historical comparison and stupendous criticism of the sources, places research on the political settlements of Roman-Parthian relations on an entirely new footing."--Josef Wiesehöfer, author of Ancient Persia "Jake Nabel's book is innovative, timely, and impressive--a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Parthian studies. It will be invaluable in shedding much-needed light on the agency of the Arsacids in their interactions with Rome."--Nikolaus Overtoom, author of Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East

"Jason Cons's ethnography of Bangladesh's Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected 'climate solutions.' This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region's ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future." Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories "Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being 'captured' by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the 'siltscape' with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book."--Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland "In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a 'sentinel space' for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it."--Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

"Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories"--

This timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America's most vulnerable households Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.   Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead

Saïd Amir Arjomand's Kings and Dervishes is a pioneering study of the emergence and development of Sufism during the formation of the Persianate world. Whereas Sufi doctrine was expressed in the New Persian language, its social organization was detached from the civic movement among the urban craftsmen and artisans known as the fotovva(t) and was politically shaped by multiple forces-first by the revival of Persian kingship, and then by the emergence of the Turko-Mongolian empires. The intermingling of Sufism's developmental path with the transformation of the Persianate political regimes resulted in the progressive appropriation of royal symbols by the Sufi shaykhs. The original Sufi world renunciation gave way first to world accommodation and the medieval love mysticism of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Hafez of Shiraz, and then to world domination. This comprehensive work of historical sociology traces these spiritual and political evolutions over the course of some six centuries, showing how the Sufi saints' symbolic sovereignty was eventually made real in the imperial kingship of the Persianate world's early modern empires.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Though Japanese migration to Brazil only started at the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil is now the country with the largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan. Collaborative Settler Colonialism examines this history as a central chapter of both Brazil's and Japan's processes of nation and empire building, and, crucially, as a convergence of their settler colonial projects. Inspired by American colonialism and the final conquest of the U.S. Western frontier, Brazilian and Japanese empire builders collaborated to bring Japanese migrant workers to Brazil, which had the intended outcome of simultaneously dispossessing indigenous Brazilians of their land and furthering the expansion of Japanese land and resource possession abroad. Bringing discourses of Latin American and Japanese settler colonialism into rare dialogue with each other, this book offers new insight into understanding the Japanese empire, the history of immigration in Brazil and Latin America, and the past and present of settler colonialism.

A 300-million-year tour of the prominent role of the neck in animal evolution and human culture.   Humans give a lot of attention to the neck. We decorate it with jewelry and ties, kiss it passionately, and use it to express ourselves in word and song. Yet, at the neck, people have also shackled their prisoners, executed their opponents, and slain their victims. Beyond the drama of human culture, animals have evolved their necks into a staggering variety of shapes and uses vital to their lifestyles. The Neck delves into evolutionary time to solve a living paradox-why is our neck so central to our survival and culture, but so vulnerable to injury and disease?   Biologist Kent Dunlap shows how the neck's vulnerability is not simply an unfortunate quirk of evolution. Its weaknesses are intimately connected to the vessels, pipes, and glands that make it so vital to existence. Fun and far-reaching, The Neck explores the diversity of forms and functions of the neck in humans and other animals and shows how this small anatomical transition zone has been a locus of incredible evolutionary and cultural creativity.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Focusing on the lived experiences of Afro-Colombians processing and resisting violence against their ecological communities, Visions of Global Environmental Justice employs accounts of the supernatural narratively and analytically to frame a contemporary struggle for environmental justice. The book applies Achille Mbembé's theorization of necropolitics to the environmental racism of the US War on Drugs in Colombia, specifically the aerial eradication of coca in the comunidades negras of the Pacific Coast. Through critical examination and deconstruction of transnational mythmaking and local oral tradition, Visions of Global Environmental Justice illustrates that non/humans rendered expendable by US-driven drug (necro)politics are indispensable to both the conceptualization and the realization of environmental justice globally. Far from being a study singularly focused on the symptoms of environmental issues, this book creatively guides us toward a broader conceptualization of environmental racism and justice across geographic scales and non/human agencies.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis of significant proportions across much of sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of local and international interest-prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of Africans living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres by Africans themselves. These cultural representations engaged public discourse-the public policy pronouncements of officials of postcolonial states, an emerging global NGO-speak, and journalism. In Pandemic Genres, Neville Hoad investigates how cultural production-novels, poems, films-around the pandemic supplemented public discourse. From Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa, he shows that the long historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex underwrote all attempts to bring the pandemic into public representation. Attention to genres that stage themselves as imaginary, particularly on the terrain of feeling, may forecast possibilities for new figurations.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. DNA, Race, and Reproduction helps readers inside and outside of academia evaluate and engage with the current genomic landscape. It brings together expertise in law, medicine, religion, history, anthropology, philosophy, and genetics to examine how scientists, medical professionals, and laypeople use genomic concepts to construct racial identity and make or advise reproductive decisions, often at the same moment. It critically and accessibly interrogates how DNA figures in the reproduction of racialized bodies and the racialization of reproduction and examines the privileged position from which genomic knowledge claims to speak about human bodies, societies, and activities. The volume begins from the premise that reproduction, regardless of the means, forces a confrontation between biomedical, scientific, and popular understandings of genetics, and that those understandings are often racialized. It therefore centers reproduction as both a site of analysis and an analytic lens.