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Consuming Ivory
Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England
The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like...
ISBN: 9780295748818
more detailsReppin'
Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice
From hip-hop artists in the Marshall Islands to innovative multimedia producers in Vanuatu to racial justice writers in Utah, Pacific Islander youth are using radical expression to transform their communities. Exploring multiple perspectives about Pacific...
ISBN: 9780295748580
more detailsBad Dog
Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice
Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to...
ISBN: 9780295748023
more detailsPure Land in the Making
Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South
Since the 1970s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese immigrants have settled in Louisiana, Florida, and other Gulf Coast states, rebuilding lives that were upended by the wars in Indochina. For many, their faith has been...
ISBN: 9780295748474
more detailsMapping Water in Dominica
Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism
Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733
Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation...
ISBN: 9780295748726
more detailsReligious Tourism in Northern Thailand
Encounters with Buddhist Monks
Temples are everywhere in Chiang Mai, filled with tourists as well as saffron-robed monks of all ages. The monks participate in daily urban life here as elsewhere in Thailand, where Buddhism is promoted, protected, and...
ISBN: 9780295748924
more detailsBirds' Nests: Business and Ethnicity in Southeast Asia
An Anthropological Study of Business
Southeast Asia is renowned for birds’ nests and the bird’s nest trade. A bird’s nest is often referred to as “White Gold” or “the Caviar of the East.” In Birds’ Nests: Business and Ethnicity in...
ISBN: 9786162151675
more detailsHerring and People of the North Pacific
Sustaining a Keystone Species
Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved...
ISBN: 9780295748290
more detailsMountains of Blame
Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands
Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and...
ISBN: 9780295748160
more detailsExile from the Grasslands
Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects
At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and...
ISBN: 9780295748191
more detailsThe Ends of Kinship
Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York
For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped...
ISBN: 9780295747699
more detailsRural Origins, City Lives
Class and Place in Contemporary China
Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than...
ISBN: 9780295748085
more detailsGardens of Gold
Place-Making in Papua New Guinea
Since the start of colonial gold mining in the early 1920s, the Biangai villagers of Elauru and Winima in Papua New Guinea have moved away from planting yams and other subsistence foods to instead cultivating...
ISBN: 9780295747590
more detailsShifting Livelihoods
Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia
People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the...
ISBN: 9780295747538
more detailsDisturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories
Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands
In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial...
ISBN: 9780295746906
more detailsAncient Ink
The Archaeology of Tattooing
The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices...
ISBN: 9780295742830
more detailsRoses from Kenya
Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers
Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....
ISBN: 9780295746500
more detailsThe Way of the Barbarians
Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that...
ISBN: 9780295746036
more detailsThe Shaman's Wages
Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island
Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman’s Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula’s southwest coast. In...
ISBN: 9780295745954
more detailsThe Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí
Reflections on Sahaptin Ways
The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...
ISBN: 9780295746128
more details