Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century

Through illuminating case studies of street art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City, The Aesthetics of Rule and Resistance explores the visual strategies of persuasion and meaning-making employed by both rulers and resisters to foster self-legitimization, identification, and mobilization.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

By examining the multiple cultural and ethnic threads that traverse this landscape, The Amazonian Puzzle sets out to show how the category of caboclo (a powerful spiritual entity to some, and to others a despised peasant of mixed ancestry) reveals deep currents of ethnic recompositions, religious interpenetration, and social hierarchy.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Since her creation in 1959, Barbie has become an icon of femininity to girls all over the world. In this monograph, author Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez explores the ways through which women and girls in Puerto Rico construct their own identities in relation to femininity, body image, race, and nationalism through Barbie play.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Theory and Methodology

Subject: History (General)

Drawing on ethnographic data from fairs in the Southern Andes involving highland herders and lowland cultivators, Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andesadvances an anthropology of the practice of barter, contributing to a fuller understanding of how social groups create themselves through material circulation.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

Lost among current debates over slavery reparations is the fact that such payments were once widespread—except the “victims” were not slaves, but slaveholders deprived of their labor. This landmark study analyzes the debates over compensation within France and Great Britain, establishing a compelling analysis of the Atlantic slave trade’s aftermath.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History (General) Colonial History

During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals

Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. Brazilian Steel-Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sociology

Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and human rights activists, this groundbreaking volume provides the first systematic analysis of the 2012–2014 Brazilian National Truth Commission. It explores the emergence, functioning, and outcome of the Commission, and offers a more general and critical reassessment of truth commissions from a variety of perspectives.

Subject: Peace and Conflict Studies

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Cesare Lombroso’s Legacy in Latin America: How His Controversial Popularity as a Criminologist Remains argues that the study of ethnography in Latin America should give more attention to the Lombroso school and the academic exchange between relatively marginal national anthropologies, such as the Italian and the various Latin American schools.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology History (General) Sociology

The Children of Gregoria portrays a struggling Mexico, told through the story of the Rosales family. This book highlights their voices and allows them to tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner without prejudice, persecution or judgment.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Media Studies

Subjects: Colonial History Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies

Drawing from ethnographic material based on long-term research in Guyana, Competing Power shows how the local is occupied and re-occupied by various powerful and powerless people and entities (“big ones” and “small ones”), and how it becomes the site of intense power negotiations in relation to external ideas of empowerment.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

This wide-ranging, briskly narrated volume from acclaimed Mexican historian Carlos Illades guides the reader through key episodes in Mexican social history, from rebellions under Porfirio Díaz to the recent emergence of neo-anarchist movements. Taken together, they comprise a mosaic history of power and resistance, with ordinary people confronting the forces of domination and transforming Mexican society.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Peace and Conflict Studies

The cultural and political connections between Spain, Italy and Argentina developed complex transnational transfers over the course of two World Wars. Bringing together scholars from all three nations, Continental Transfers configures a multidirectional approach to the nations’ reciprocal exchange using new theoretical ground to understand the development links to the construction of national and supranational identities, such as Latinism and Hispanism.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: World War I History: World War II

Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

“This is a fascinating body of work…I was most impressed by his balance of "hard" political-science analysis and the softer socio-cultural interpretations and by the balance of theory and applied work (scholarship speaking to real world contemporary problems).”  ·  Edward Fischer, Vanderbilt University

Willem Assies explored the messy, often untidy daily lives of people, with their inconsistencies, irrationalities, and passions, but also with their hopes, sense of beauty, solidarity, and quest for dignity. This collection brings together some of Willem Assies’ best, most fascinating, and still highly relevant writings.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Toxic production, disrupted lives and contaminated bodies. Care for unacknowledged suffering, incurable cancers, and immeasurable losses. This book bears witness to the invisible disasters provoked by the asbestos market worldwide and gives a voice to the communities of survivors who struggle daily in the name of social and environmental justice.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General) Sociology

Liberalism in the 19th Century, rooted in philosophy and expressed through economic and political systems, shaped the Western world in complex and often contradictory ways. The influence of liberalism on music in Portugal, Spain, and Latin America is explored, regions where liberalism evolved amid conflicts that left deep cultural marks.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Cultural Studies (General)

Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence forest use by Wapishana people in Guyana and developing an original analytical framework, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Embodying Exchange addresses the infrastructural, legal and moral complexities in contemporary world trade through an ethnographic analysis of the interface of multinational brand manufacturers and popular traders in the Bolivian Andes.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

Since the end of the Pinochet regime, Chilean public policy has sought to rebuild democratic governance in the country. This book examines the links between the state and civil society in Chile and the ways social policies have sought to ensure the inclusion of the poor in society and democracy.

Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Between 1898 and 1939, Spain saw the emergence of political and social identities shaped by the concepts of Hispanidad, catholicism, race, tradition and the Spanish language. This collection explores how such identities were reshaped during Spain’s major political shifts and how they intersected with Latin American discourses.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

The papers in this volume present detailed studies of highland and lowland pastoralists and horticulturalists in Andean South America, including taphonomy and sacred landscapes. This volume will be of use to anyone who studies human adaptations to highland or arid environments, and to those interested in pastoral societies, as well as Andean South America.

Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

As an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time “beyond ruin” in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Urban Studies

Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

Subject: Colonial History

Shedding light on the role of visual creativity in religion, Canals explores the current practice of the cult of María Lionza, one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Motherhood in Mexico is profoundly shaped by the legacy of colonialism. This ethnography situates motherhood in a critical global health analysis of maternal health inequalities and interventions in the southeast state of Chiapas.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

The expanding mining industry in the Indigenous Atacameño-Likanantay territories in the hyper-arid Salar de Atacama in Chile are linked to the ecological harm to groundwater. The book addresses recent socioeconomic and political conditions it calls ‘advanced extractivism’ and asks how both ecological harm and mining economies are sustained.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

House of the Waterlily is a historical novel set in the world of the Late Classic Period Maya of the Southern Lowlands. Through the story of Lady Winik, a young Maya noble girl, the reader is immersed in the everyday world of the Maya

Subjects: Archaeology Literary Studies Memory Studies Anthropology (General)

The intricacies of living in contemporary Latin American cities include cases of both empowerment and restriction. This volume captures the paradoxical histories and experiences of urban life in Latin America, offering new empirical and theoretical insights to scholars.

Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology

Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General) Media Studies

The Imbalance of Power demonstrates that the indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relationships with nature.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Every year, young adults from Western nations travel to Brazil to train in the dance/martial art of capoeira. This ethnography uses the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage—studying with a local master at a historical point of origin—to explore how non-Brazilians learn their art and claim legitimacy within capoeira communities.

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

This important contribution presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation of sacred natural sites in the Americas. The book explores how struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reformed as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

“A cutting edge discussion between anthropology and the disciplines of history and geography, all through the lens of the politics of intellectual work. A paradigm of sensitive ethnographic work fused with broadly social/political theory, this book will pull in a lot of people looking to find their way out of a certain rabbit hole of recent academia.”  ·  Neil Smith, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Gavin Smith suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. He tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies

Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural intervention, focusing on selected islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. This volume goes on to compare these ecologies with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands, placing the Caribbean into a larger context of island historical ecology.

Subjects: Archaeology Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, this ethnography explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology Sociology

In the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro was not only home to the largest population of enslaved laborers in the Americas, but it was also the site of an incipient working-class consciousness across seemingly distinct social categories. This volume analyzes the diverse labor arrangements and associative life of Rio’s working class, from which emerged the strategies that workers free and unfree pursued against oppression.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Language and Political Subjectivity offers an innovative approach to stancemaking as a rhetorical semiotic process that produces truth, beliefs, and certainties about social realities and relations. It considers how Indigenous and diasporic communities, with their political subjectivities, expand over significant sociohistorical changes, debates, and struggles in the transformation of Chilean democracy and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Colonial History Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

Looking at refugee protection in Latin America, this landmark edited collection assesses what the region has achieved in recent years. The book analyses Latin America’s main documents in refugee protection, evaluates the particular aspects of different regimes, and reviews their emergence, development and effect, to develop understanding of refugee protection in the region.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

This ethnography focuses on Yanomami shamanism, especially in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the “part is equal to the whole.” This book fills a gap in the study of Yanomami people and enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is no longer in its infancy. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past gives a transnational and thematically diverse survey of historical developments since the nineteenth century.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sustainable Development Goals

The Portuguese-speaking Global South, especially Brazil, often envisions itself as exceptional in its racial conceptions and politics. Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents reassesses Gilberto Freyre’s influential claims that Portuguese colonialism produced what came to be called “racial democracy,” and explores racialization beyond the common trope of “race-mixing.”

Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

Detailed are the travels, self-education, and archaeological explorations of Eugène Boban, an expert in the field of pre-Columbian studies and explores the circumstances that allowed him to sell fakes to museums that would remain undetected for over a century.

Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology

This ethnoarchaeological study of the settlements of the Rarámuri focuses primarily on their mobility strategy. This group presents a case where the common equation of agriculturalists = sedentary, and hunter-gatherers = mobile is broken. The Rarámuri are agriculturalists with a pattern of mobility between two or more settlements during the course of any year.

Subject: Archaeology

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as the Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge. Nearly the New World tells the remarkable story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of World War II

Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History History: World War II Refugee and Migration Studies

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies, and presenting ethnographies of non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music, this book offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders such as American missionaries through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Anthropology of Religion

On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies

Through ethnography of the Amazonia region, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for debates about the classic anthropological theme of property. This volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia despite portrayals of the region as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies

Peter Lilienthal is the first comprehensive study of Lilienthal’s life and career, highlighting the distinctively cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of his oeuvre, and exploring his role as an early exemplar of a more vibrant and inclusive European film culture.

Subject: Film and Television Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

Political Networks and Social Movements examines the relationship between the State and social movements under the administration of current Bolivian president Evo Morales. Author Soledad Valdivia Rivera analyzes how this linkage has come to transform the essence of the Bolivian political process as we know it.

Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)

Politics of the Dunes explores the ways in which the Open City’s architectural and urban practice is devoted to keeping open the utopian possibility for multiplicity, pluralism, and democratization in the face of authoritarianism, a powerful mode of postcolonial environmental urbanism that can inform architectural practices today.

Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology History (General)

Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies

A historical account of Argentine anticommunism from 1900 to the present. From Peronism to the last military dictatorship, this is an in-depth analysis of Argentina’s most pivotal political processes over the past 120 years. It reveals the persistent and often underestimated role of anticommunism in shaping national political culture.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Development Studies Sociology

Subject: Urban Studies

Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects the hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

A ground-breaking volume that gathers the testimonies of NGO workers, street vendors, activists, scholars, health professionals, and creative writers to chronicle the devastating impact of COVID-19 on Romani communities globally.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

Silenced Communities offers an ethnographic account of the failed demilitarization of the rural militia in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango following the Guatemalan Civil War. Author Marcia Esparza explores how legacies of grassroots militarization affect indigenous communities exploited by the internal colonialism prevalent in Latin American societies.

Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Colonial History History (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Sustainable Development Goals

The richness of Brazilian stardom extends well beyond the ubiquitous Carmen Miranda, and among the studies assembled in this volume are fascinating explorations of figures alongside interrogations of the inner workings of the star system in Brazil, from the pioneering efforts of silent-era actresses to the recent advent of the non-professional movie star.

Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies

Organized around Argentine “memory wars” since the 1970s, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory’s dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization in Argentina, it also gives an illuminating account of the emergence and development of Memory Studies as a field.

Subjects: Memory Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

Subjectivity at Latin America's Urban Margins investigates how margins are actively produced, upheld, and challenged through the process of subject-making and margin-drawing by a multiplicity of actors affecting Latin American cities today.

Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Subject: Colonial History

Amid the Cold War and global student protests, transnational forces significantly shaped the modernization of educational systems in Spain and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Each study sheds new light on the transnational circulation of modernization discourses, practices, and ideology within the sphere of education.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies

Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)

Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Comparing a wide array of these experiences, the author uses tourism to offer a new understanding of how relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism

Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how various media forms have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. Within new media spaces, the Ayuujk people carve out their own visions of development, modernity, gender, and indigeneity in the twenty-first century.

Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Urban Studies Applied Anthropology Sociology

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes such as manioc cultivation and cuisine, predatory relations with non-humans, and the interplay of myth and practice, and to consider dynamics of kin, clan, and gender relations, the meaning of productive work, and practices of foreign diplomacy.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

The response in Chile to Santiago’s metro’s fare hike in October of 2019 has grown into a strong and multi-faceted resistance movement. Through incisive and topical analysis, the authors offer a beautiful catalog of photographs of the murals, graffiti, and other forms of political art, reflecting on these aesthetic traditions and their relationship to the broader context of global protest movements and the long shadow cast by memories of the Pinochet regime.

Subjects: Media Studies History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History