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The Yunnanese from southwestern China have for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in particular has served as a “back door” to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers. Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have fled to Burma. This book is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand, Taiwan, and China. Since the 1960s, Yunnanese migrants of Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily consumption goods. The book details the trade's organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use of modern transportation, and reconstructs trading routes while examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants' mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further afield by land, sea, and air.

This book is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. It tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, the book captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. It lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The book tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. This is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the doctors and surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than a quarter-million people and leaving another two million Haitians homeless. This book is a searing account of the first year after the earthquake. It explores how strong communities and an age-old gift culture have helped Haitians survive in the wake of an unimaginable disaster, one that only compounded the preexisting social and economic distress of their society. The book examines the history that caused such astronomical destruction, and draws in theories of resistance and social movements to scrutinize grassroots organizing for a more just and equitable country. The book offers rich perspectives rarely seen outside Haiti. It takes the reader through displaced persons camps, shantytowns, and rural villages, where they get a view that defies the stereotype of Haiti as a lost nation of victims. It also combines excerpts of more than one hundred interviews with Haitians, historical and political analysis, and investigative journalism. The book investigates and critiques U.S. foreign policy, emergency aid, standard development approaches, the role of nongovernmental organizations, and disaster capitalism. Woven through the text are comparisons to the crisis and cultural resistance in the city of New Orleans, when the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ultimately a tale of hope, the book will give readers a new understanding of daily life, structural challenges, and collective dreams in one of the world's most complex countries.

Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The wide-spread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity poses an intense moral problem; in the “land of dust,” disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. This book considers the results of several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, time spent with the “ninjas,” as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. As such, the book is a well-structured read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. It provides a uniquely up-close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice, and ways of envisioning and experiencing what counts as “value” in the Mongolian gold rush today.

How do specific secular and religious ideologies—such as nationalism, neoliberalism, atheism, Pentecostalism, Tablighi Islam, and shamanism—gain popularity and when do they lose traction? To answer these questions, this book critically examines the trajectories of a range of ideologies as they move into the post-Soviet frontier in Central Asia. Ethnographically rooted in the everyday life of a former mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan, this book shows how residents have dealt with the existential and epistemic crises that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Residents became enchanted by the truths of Muslim and Christian missionaries, embraced the teachings of neoliberal and nationalist ideologues, and were riveted by the visions of shamanic healers. But no matter how much enthusiasm and hope these ideas first engendered, the commitment to any of them rarely lasted very long. The book finds that there is an inverse relationship between the tenacity and the effervescence of collective ideas, between their strength to persist and their ability to trigger committed action. Introducing the concept of pulsation, the book argues that ideational power must be understood in relation to three aspects: the voicing of the idea, its tension with everyday reality, and its reverberation within groups of listeners. The conclusion that the power of conviction is rooted in the instability of sociocultural contexts is a message that has relevance far beyond urban Central Asia.

For many Muslims throughout the world, oral preaching provides the most accessible and enjoyable medium for learning about Islam and its meanings for everyday life. This is true in Indonesia’s West Java province, where almost 98% of the population of around forty-three million practices Islam. Despite its popularity, Indonesia’s Islamic elites are concerned about the value of preaching. They see that Islam provides directives and motivations towards progress in areas of social and political concern, but argue that this progress will not be achieved if Muslims are satisfied with the pleasing artifice of clever preachers. Millie spent fourteen months in the company of some of West Java’s most successful Islamic preachers, but also spent time with critics of listening. He described and explores a dichotomy between Islamic speech which succeeds because it is shaped to suit listeners’ social realities, and discourses about Muslim subjectivity that connect media consumption with aspirations for social and political progress, and which portray listening as anachronistic and inefficacious. This detailed analysis sheds light on a question that is increasingly important in efforts to understand contemporary Muslim societies: What is the place of pious listening in the complex societies of today?

India and the Patent Wars examines struggles over patents and access to medicine among pharmaceutical producers, activists and others under a new global intellectual property regime. India, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical exporters, has been at the center of these struggles, and this book explores multiple perspectives in these controversies including those of Indian pharmaceutical companies, which have long offered low-cost medicines to customers around the world, multinational pharmaceutical companies, which pursue patent claims in Indian courts and license drugs to Indian producers, and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, who are concerned about how their knowledge and practices relate to the new patent system.

Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics. This book argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness, and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes. Security concerns often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. The book situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines.

News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. This book highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The book is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster.