{"title":"The work of repair: Capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa By Thomas Cousins. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 314 pp.","authors":"Agata A. Konczal","doi":"10.1111/amet.13343","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"623-624"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ageing with smartphones in urban China: From the cultural to the digital revolution in Shanghai By Xinyuan Wang. London: UCL Press, 2023. 291 pp.","authors":"Xinru Sun","doi":"10.1111/amet.13330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13330","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"653-654"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142588187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building socialism: The afterlife of East German architecture in urban Vietnam By Christina Schwenkel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 432 pp.","authors":"Sandra Kurfürst","doi":"10.1111/amet.13336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13336","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"625-626"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142588093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Futures after progress: Hope and doubt in late industrial Baltimore By Chloe Ahmann. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. 366 pp.","authors":"Joshua O. Reno","doi":"10.1111/amet.13334","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"649-650"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar ended a decade-long period of liberal reforms. The reform period saw a shift from outright military dictatorship to military-backed civilian rule, thoroughgoing market deregulation, and attempts by workers, peasants, and students to contest top-down electoralism and intensified export-oriented extractivism. The 2010s also expanded research opportunities in Myanmar's central lowlands, where restrictions under military rule prevented fieldwork for decades. Based on research conducted largely during the 2010s, Elliott Prasse-Freeman's <i>Rights Refused</i> is one of the first ethnographies to reopen Myanmar's lowland ethnographic archive. Establishing a critical vantage point on the reform period, Prasse-Freeman rejects the familiar liberal narrative of Myanmar, rooted in Cold War knowledge politics, which sees democracy and authoritarianism locked in timeless conflict. Instead, the book follows activists, farmers, and workers who struggle with land, labor, and resources. Crucially, these subjects not only organize against the past and present of military power, but they also refuse rights-based liberal imaginaries—pointing toward futures less bound by the antinomies of the past.</p><p><i>Rights Refused</i> is an ethnography of activist life. It presents a portrait of a particular activist group, the Community Development Initiative (CDI), and some of its key figures, not least the itinerant Ko Taw. Chapter 1, however, begins by laying out the political world that CDI and Ko Taw inhabit, a world that takes the form of a specific governmental regime: blunt biopolitics. Blunt biopolitics is blunt in three senses: “uncaring for the protection of life, obtuse in its forms of knowing that life, and reliant on violence (‘blunt,’ as in ‘blunt force trauma’)” (p. xxii). This is reflected in the state's treatment of both the protesters who rose after the 2021 coup, many of whom it killed, and flood victims, whom it ignored. For Prasse-Freeman, the bluntness of this biopolitical regime is typical of postcolonial states that lack the capacity and ambition of, say, South Africa, with its basic income grants, or India, with its biometric-identification projects. Nevertheless, biopolitics names a regime of power in Myanmar, where a specific political logic still regulates or disregards life itself. Even in its disregard—a necropolitics, but a force among others—life remains an organizing feature of this governmental regime.</p><p>Part 2 shows how being an activist in Myanmar means navigating this regime. In chapter 2 activists like Ko Taw, who helped found CDI, construct their sense of self around refusing and resisting Myanmar's regime. Featured prominently are processes of radicalization, of becoming political prisoners, and impacts on family life. Ko Taw becomes estranged from his family, who struggle to understand his commitment to activist life. Meanwhile, CDI's office is a squat, two-story home on Yangon's perip
{"title":"Rights refused: Grassroots activism and state violence in Myanmar By Elliott Prasse-Freeman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 366 pp.","authors":"Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung","doi":"10.1111/amet.13335","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13335","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar ended a decade-long period of liberal reforms. The reform period saw a shift from outright military dictatorship to military-backed civilian rule, thoroughgoing market deregulation, and attempts by workers, peasants, and students to contest top-down electoralism and intensified export-oriented extractivism. The 2010s also expanded research opportunities in Myanmar's central lowlands, where restrictions under military rule prevented fieldwork for decades. Based on research conducted largely during the 2010s, Elliott Prasse-Freeman's <i>Rights Refused</i> is one of the first ethnographies to reopen Myanmar's lowland ethnographic archive. Establishing a critical vantage point on the reform period, Prasse-Freeman rejects the familiar liberal narrative of Myanmar, rooted in Cold War knowledge politics, which sees democracy and authoritarianism locked in timeless conflict. Instead, the book follows activists, farmers, and workers who struggle with land, labor, and resources. Crucially, these subjects not only organize against the past and present of military power, but they also refuse rights-based liberal imaginaries—pointing toward futures less bound by the antinomies of the past.</p><p><i>Rights Refused</i> is an ethnography of activist life. It presents a portrait of a particular activist group, the Community Development Initiative (CDI), and some of its key figures, not least the itinerant Ko Taw. Chapter 1, however, begins by laying out the political world that CDI and Ko Taw inhabit, a world that takes the form of a specific governmental regime: blunt biopolitics. Blunt biopolitics is blunt in three senses: “uncaring for the protection of life, obtuse in its forms of knowing that life, and reliant on violence (‘blunt,’ as in ‘blunt force trauma’)” (p. xxii). This is reflected in the state's treatment of both the protesters who rose after the 2021 coup, many of whom it killed, and flood victims, whom it ignored. For Prasse-Freeman, the bluntness of this biopolitical regime is typical of postcolonial states that lack the capacity and ambition of, say, South Africa, with its basic income grants, or India, with its biometric-identification projects. Nevertheless, biopolitics names a regime of power in Myanmar, where a specific political logic still regulates or disregards life itself. Even in its disregard—a necropolitics, but a force among others—life remains an organizing feature of this governmental regime.</p><p>Part 2 shows how being an activist in Myanmar means navigating this regime. In chapter 2 activists like Ko Taw, who helped found CDI, construct their sense of self around refusing and resisting Myanmar's regime. Featured prominently are processes of radicalization, of becoming political prisoners, and impacts on family life. Ko Taw becomes estranged from his family, who struggle to understand his commitment to activist life. Meanwhile, CDI's office is a squat, two-story home on Yangon's perip","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"605-606"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.13335","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A thousand steps to parliament: Constructing electable women in Mongolia By Manduhai Buyandelger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 288 pp.","authors":"Baasanjav Terbish","doi":"10.1111/amet.13331","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13331","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"655-656"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fighting to breathe: Race, toxicity, and the rise of youth activism in Baltimore By Nicole Fabricant. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. 266 pp.","authors":"Joseph O. Baker","doi":"10.1111/amet.13324","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13324","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"607-608"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Involuntary consent: The illusion of choice in Japan's adult video industry By Akiko Takeyama. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 252 pp.","authors":"Robert C. Marshall","doi":"10.1111/amet.13329","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13329","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"633-634"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The trauma mantras: A memoir of prose poems By Adrie Kusserow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 176 pp.","authors":"Karen Coen Flynn, Donald W. Goodrich","doi":"10.1111/amet.13332","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13332","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"617-618"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"For Putin and for Sharia: Dagestani Muslims and the Islamic State By Iwona Kaliszewska. Translated by Arthur Barys. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023. 168 pp.","authors":"Jean-François Ratelle","doi":"10.1111/amet.13341","DOIUrl":"10.1111/amet.13341","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48134,"journal":{"name":"American Ethnologist","volume":"51 4","pages":"647-648"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142144206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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