SUP Anthropology

SUP Anthropology http://www.sup.org/rss/anthropology.xml The latest titles from Stanford University Press en-us Copyright 2008 Stanford University Press webmaster@www.sup.org (Webmaster) Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank Galit A. Sarfaty "Why has the World Bank been so slow to take on human rights? This fascinating ethnography follows the movement of people and ideas within the Bank to show how human rights were 'economized' in order to be heard. It offers great insight into the way organizations work and into the cultural dimensions of law."—Sally Engle Merry, New York University "The book offers a unique inside study of the culture of the World Bank and how it affects the Bank's attitudes toward human rights. It is an important book for those wanting to understand international organizations, human rights, and development."—Edith Brown Weiss, Professor of International Law at Georgetown University Law Center; Former President of the World Bank Inspection Panel <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17865">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> The World Bank is the largest lender to developing countries, making loans worth over $20 billion per year to finance development projects around the globe. To guide its investments, the Bank has adopted a number of social and environmental policies, yet it has never instituted any overarching policy on human rights. Despite the potential human rights impact of Bank projects—the forced displacement of indigenous peoples resulting from a Bank-financed dam project, for example—the issue of human rights remains marginal in the Bank's operational practices. Values in Translation analyzes the organizational culture of the World Bank and addresses the question of why it has not adopted a human rights framework. Academics and social advocates have typically focused on legal restrictions in the Bank's Articles of Agreement. This work's anthropological analysis sheds light on internal obstacles including the employee incentive system and a clash of expertise between lawyers and economists over how to define human rights and justify their relevance to the Bank's mission. Galit A. Sarfaty is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=17865 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=17865 Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice Catherine Bliss "The ongoing debates about the role of race in biology, genetics, and clinical medicine have often produced more heat than light. Catherine Bliss takes us on a journey that is bound to illuminate an important and relatively unexplored feature of this phenomenon—the ways in which leading scientists in these fields compare in their thinking about (and use of) the concepts of race and ethnicity."—Troy Duster, New York University "With the mapping of the human genome, a heated and contentious debate has flared regarding the very concept of race and the extent and meaning of human variation. What is stunning and original about Bliss's account of this debate is her focus on the assumptions, values, and social consciousness of the scientists themselves. We see how researchers navigate different taxonomies of race and establish what often become contested policies, protocols, and practices. Through this account, Bliss provocatively captures the emergence of a new 'sociogenomic' paradigm of race."—Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20299">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> In 2000, with the success of the Human Genome Project, scientists declared the death of race in biology and medicine. But within five years, many of these same scientists had reversed course and embarked upon a new hunt for the biological meaning of race. Drawing on personal interviews and life stories, Race Decoded takes us into the world of elite genome scientists—including Francis Collins, director of the NIH; Craig Venter, the first person to create a synthetic genome; and Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, among others—to show how and why they are formulating new ways of thinking about race. In this original exploration, Catherine Bliss reveals a paradigm shift, both at the level of science and society, from colorblindness to racial consciousness. Scientists have been fighting older understandings of race in biology while simultaneously promoting a new grand-scale program of minority inclusion. In selecting research topics or considering research design, scientists routinely draw upon personal experience of race to push the public to think about race as a biosocial entity, and even those of the most privileged racial and social backgrounds incorporate identity politics in the scientific process. Though individual scientists may view their positions differently—whether as a black civil rights activist or a white bench scientist—all stakeholders in the scientific debates are drawing on memories of racial discrimination to fashion a science-based activism to fight for social justice. Catherine Bliss is Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Fellow in Biomedicine, Medical Humanities, and Science and Technology Studies at Brown University. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20299 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20299 Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi Erica Bornstein "Bornstein has pioneered the holistic study of aid, and in this delicately crafted book she conveys deep insights into international and intra-Indian charity and volunteering. An important sequel to The Spirit of Development."—Jonathan Benthall, University College London "In a time when humanitarianism seems to have become a prerogative of the Western world, Erica Bornstein's inquiry into philanthropy in India opportunely provides novel insights on charity. Reappraising an object which has become a classic in anthropology since the pioneering study of Marcel Mauss, her rich ethnography reveals the complexity of the contemporary moral economies of the gift."—Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, author of Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18212">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> While most people would not consider sponsoring an orphan's education to be in the same category as international humanitarian aid, both acts are linked by the desire to give. Many studies focus on the outcomes of humanitarian work, but the impulses that inspire people to engage in the first place receive less attention. Disquieting Gifts takes a close look at people working on humanitarian projects in New Delhi to explore why they engage in philanthropic work, what humanitarianism looks like to them, and the ethical and political tangles they encounter. Motivated by debates surrounding Marcel Mauss's The Gift, Bornstein investigates specific cases of people engaged in humanitarian work to reveal different perceptions of assistance to strangers versus assistance to kin, how the impulse to give to others in distress is tempered by its regulation, suspicions about recipient suitability, and why the figure of the orphan is so valuable in humanitarian discourse. The book also focuses on vital humanitarian efforts that often go undocumented and ignored and explores the role of empathy in humanitarian work. Erica Bornstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is author of The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford, 2005). http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18212 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=18212 Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Grace Peña Delgado "This path-breaking history is a probing analysis of the interconnected worlds that the Chinese in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands created, inhabited, and sometimes contested. Making the Chinese Mexican is a stunning example of borderlands history."—Erika Lee, University of Minnesota "Delgado gives new life to the argument that the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were diverse and unpredictable. Her attentiveness to the commonalities and differences in the U.S. and Mexico, as well as the historical possibilities and tragedies, will make this required reading for all social historians of the region."—Katherine Benton-Cohen, Georgetown University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=9775">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> Making the Chinese Mexican is the first book to examine the Chinese diaspora in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It presents a fresh perspective on immigration, nationalism, and racism through the experiences of Chinese migrants in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Navigating the interlocking global and local systems of migration that underlay Chinese borderlands communities, the author situates the often-paradoxical existence of these communities within the turbulence of exclusionary nationalisms. The world of Chinese fronterizos (borderlanders) was shaped by the convergence of trans-Pacific networks and local arrangements: against a backdrop of national unrest in Mexico and in the era of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States, Chinese fronterizos carved out vibrant, enduring communities that provided a buffer against virulent Sinophobia. This book challenges us to reexamine the complexities of nation-making, identity formation, and the meaning of citizenship. It represents an essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Grace Peña Delgado is Assistant Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9775 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9775 Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America Bakirathi Mani "Working with a truly innovative archive, Mani compellingly argues that merely 'adding on' South Asians to the litany of ethnic and national-origin identifications that circulate under 'Asian America' is thoroughly inadequate to pursuing the study of racialization in ways that take seriously the intimacy and depth of the relationship between the local and the global. —Kandice Chuh, CUNY/The Graduate Center "An elegantly written and trenchantly argued book."—Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "An important contribution to the burgeoning field of South Asian American studies, Bakirathi Mani's Aspiring to Home easily traverses a range of cultural practices, moving seamlessly between genres (literature, film, performance) and methodologies (textual analysis, ethnography). Mani compelling transforms our understanding of seemingly transparent assimilationist narratives produced by South Asian Americans in the US. These contradictions, for Mani, point to the ways in which middle class South Asian Americans both collude with and renegotiate dominant notions of belonging in multiple national spaces. Thus Mani argues that we must reconceptualize Asian American studies beyond a familiar mapping of US colonialism in East and South East Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but simultaneously through US and British imperial interests in South Asia."—Gayatri Gopinath, New York University <center><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=9410">To buy this book or view bibliographic details, click here.</a></center> What does it mean to belong? How are twenty-first-century diasporic subjects fashioning identities and communities that bind them together? Aspiring to Home examines these questions with a focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Advancing a theory of locality to explain the means through which immigrants of varying regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds experience what it means to belong, Bakirathi Mani shows how ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital. Aspiring to Home focuses on popular cultural works created by first- and second-generation South Asians from 1999–2009, including those by author Jhumpa Lahiri and filmmaker Mira Nair, as well as public events such as the Miss India U.S.A. pageant and the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams. Analyzing these diverse productions through an interdisciplinary framework, Mani weaves literary readings with ethnography to unravel the constraints of form and genre that shape how we read diasporic popular culture. Bakirathi Mani is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Swarthmore College. http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9410 http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=9410