Bibliographies

1. Crehan, Kate. 2002. Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology. New York, NY: Pluto Press.

Abstract: This book explores Gramsci’s understanding of culture and the links between culture and power in relation to anthropology. Extensive use is made of Gramsci’s own writings, including his pre-prison journalism and prison letters as well as the prison notebooks. The book also provides an account of the intellectual and political contexts within which he was writing. The challenge Grasmci’s approach presents to some common anthropological assumptions about the nature of ‘culture’ is examined as is the potential usefulness of Gramsci’s writings for contemporary anthropologists.

2. de Bernardi, Cecilia. 2018. Reflections on the hegemonic exclusion of critical realism from academic settings: alone in a room full of people, Journal of Critical Realism, 17:4, 374-389, DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2018.1497316

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss my personal experience of the issues that can arise when adopting critical realism in academic contexts dominated by irrealist (positivist, phenomenological and post-structuralist) methodological approaches. I draw inspiration for my analysis from the concept of Gramscian hegemony and the concept of ‘authenticity’. These concepts are related because hegemonic processes prevent individuals from freely expressing themselves. In my case, academic hegemony has resulted in social pressure to sacrifice my authentic critical realist self in order to achieve academic success. I also discuss groupthink dynamics, suggesting that they are a mechanism by which hegemony – and denial of individual authenticity – can be achieved. This paper is meant to be a theoretical and reflexive discussion, which could be the starting point for empirical studies investigating the situation of a critical realist in a hegemonic academic context.

3. Gramsci, Antonio, and David Forgacs. 2014. The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2014.

Summary: This book contains essential writings from Antonio Gramsci, who coincide the term and concept of hegemony. It is a useful resource for those aiming to gain a general overview of his primary works, and a solid starting point for diving deeper into more specific writings on cultural hegemony itself.

4. Hearn, Jeff. “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men.” 2004. Feminist Theory 5, no. 1: 49-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104040813

Abstract: This article evaluates the usefulness of the concept of hegemony in theorizing men. The discussion is located within the framework of ‘Critical Studies on Men’ (CSM), in which the centrality of power issues is recognized, rather than that of ‘Men’s Studies’, where it is frequently not. Recent uses, as in ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in the analysis of masculinities, are subjected to a qualified critique. Instead a shift is proposed from masculinity to men, to focus on ‘the hegemony of men’. This formulation seeks to address the double complexity that men are both a social category formed by the gender system and collective and individual agents, often dominant collective and individual agents, of social practices. This is explored mainly in relation to substantive studies on men, and briefly the institutional development of CSM. The concluding discussion examines how these arguments connect with debates in feminist theory and social theory.

5. Im, Hyug Baeg. 1991. “Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Gramsci.” Asian Perspective 15, no. 1: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42705295

Summary from Intro: Focusing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this paper attempts to examine the following questions: 1) How does the bourgeoisie establish and maintain its hegemony in capitalist society and what is the nature and con- tent of the hegemony? 2) Under what conditions does the bourgeoisie still con- tinue to rule despite the crisis of hegemony? 3) Given the existence of bourgeois hegemony, what will be the most proper strategy of revolution for the proletariat? Can proletarian counter-hegemony be established only after the objective conditions are changed?

6. Kendie, Daniel. 2006. “How Useful is Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony and Domination to the Study of African States?” African Social Science Review: 3 (5). Available at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/assr/vol3/iss3/5

Abstract: Having investigated the relevance of the operative assumptions of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and domination to African realities, the paper proposes that scholars attempt to devise and articulate a more appropriate theory and methodology. It also proposes that the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods be examined as they relate to the theory of hegemony and domination in Africa, in an integrated form, especially in the interest of studying long-term social change.

7. Kurtz, Donald V. 1996. “Hegemony And Anthropology”. Critique Of Anthropology 16 (2): 103-135. doi:10.1177/0308275×9601600202.

Summary: The essay discusses how the contemporary spectrum of the hegemony concept relates to current anthropological interpretations.

8. Patton, Tracey Owens. 2004. “Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia.” Howard Journal of Communications, 15:3, 185-200, DOI: 10.1080/10646170490483629

Abstract: This essay examines the interdependence of racism and sexism in academe. To frame the discussion, the theory of articulation coupled with hegemony was used. The narrative examples cited in this essay illustrate a White supremacist hegemonic structure supported in academia. The essay explicates and illuminates issues of marginalization in academia because it increases awareness about interlocking systems of domination in academia at the microlevel, and, in doing so, exposes important meanings of marginalization at the macro level. Further, salient intersections between discourse and hegemony are critically analyzed because the role communicative interactions play in articulating the experiences of marginality become primary.

9. Wassmann, Jürg. 2020. Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony: Cultural Practices of Identity Construction. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. 

Abstract: The destruction of local identity through the relentless encroachment of a ‘McDonald-ized’ cultural imperialism is a global phenomenon. Yet the reactions of Pacific peoples to this Western hegemony are diverse and encourage the creation of independent cultural identities through sports and games, political mediations, tourism, media and filmmaking, and the struggles for land rights and titles, particularly in Australia.This book, based on extensive fieldwork, addresses a subject of great immediacy to peoples of the Pacific Island nations. It fills an important gap in existing ethnographic literature on the region and confidently navigates what had previously been considered uncharted, even unchartable, waters — that wide sea between the classic ethnography of Oceania and contemporary anthropology’s theoretical concerns with global relations and transnational cultures. Its breadth, rigour, and timely contribution to post-colonial politics in Oceania are certain to ensure that this book will provide an enduring contribution to the field.

10.  Williams, Alex. 2020. Political Hegemony And Social Complexity: Mechanisms Of Power After Gramsci. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Summary: Williams’ book explores the expansive concept of hegemony through identifying the political ways hegemony has played out historically. Through exploring various conceptual and theoretical approaches to hegemonic power, the book is a starting point for those looking to understand hegemony as a political concept before exploring the concept of cultural hegemony.

1. Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Abstract: From Boas to Black Power investigates how U.S. cultural anthropologists wrote about race, racism, and “America” in the 20th century as a window into the greater project of U.S. anti-racist liberalism. Anthropology as a discipline and the American project share a common origin: their very foundations are built upon white supremacy, and both are still reckoning with their racist legacies. In this groundbreaking intellectual history of anti-racism within twentieth-century cultural anthropology, Mark Anderson starts with the legacy of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and continues through the post-war and Black Power movement to the birth of the Black Studies discipline, exploring the problem “America” represents for liberal anti-racism. Anderson shows how cultural anthropology contributed to liberal American discourses on race that simultaneously bolstered and denied white domination. From Boas to Black Power provides a major rethinking of anthropological anti-racism as a project that, in step with the American racial liberalism it helped create, paradoxically maintained white American hegemony. Anthropologists influenced by radical political movements of the 1960s offered the first sustained challenge to that project, calling attention to the racial contradictions of American liberalism reflected in anthropology. Their critiques remain relevant for the discipline and the nation.

2. Bromley, Yu. V. 1987. “Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnic and Racial Prejudice.” International Social Science Journal 39 (111): 31.

Abstract. In anthropology and ethnology, a struggle has been going on for several decades between … aggressive and reactionary ideas on racial and ethnic problems. The twentieth century has seen an increase in progressive scientific thinking directed against chauvinism and racism, with a hitherto unheard-of scale of revolutionary movement and struggle for national liberation and rights on the part of the peoples of colonies and ethnic minorities of multinational states. The work of anthropologists and ethnologists against racism and chauvinism was not, however, completely devoid of contradictions, which sprang mostly from the concept of cultural relativism. Functionalism and cultural relativism in the treatment of ethnographical problems in modern Africa are also evident in attempts to attribute these problems to cultural differences between peoples, and to explain racial conflicts in terms of the incompatibility of cultural values. This trend in bourgeois social life is sometimes called culturalism or culturism.

3. Bizumic, Boris. 2015. “Ethnocentrism and Prejudice: History of the Concepts.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 168–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.03153-6.

Summary: Ethnocentrism and its relationship to prejudice is explored by Bizumic in this article, focusing on the angles of different social science disciplines on both topics. He identifies four main possible reasons for prejudice and ethnocentrism, being: “(1) evolutionary factors, (2) threat and conflict, (3) self-aggrandizement, and (4) socialization and norms”, and explains how each social science arrived to such theories.

4. Cox, Aimee Meredith. 2015. Shapeshifters Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Duke University Press.

Abstract: In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter’s residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women’s experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit’s history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

5. Dovidio, John F., Miles Hewstone, Peter Glick, and Victoria M. Esses. 2010. “Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Overview.” The SAGE Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination, n.d., 3–28. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200919.n1.

Summary: The authors write a short overview of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, with a focus on the different aspects of society these take place at, including within both personal life and the wider culture. The entire handbook approaches the three areas from a critical perspective; however, this chapter is focused on a primary overview of the topics.

6. Gonzales, Moises and Lamadrid, Enrique R. 2019. Nación Ǵenízara: Ethnogenesis, place, and identity in New Mexico. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press.

Summary provided by publisher: Nación Genízara examines the history, cultural evolution, and survival of the Genízaro people. The contributors to this volume cover topics including ethnogenesis, slavery, settlements, poetics, religion, gender, family history, and mestizo genetics. Fray Angélico Chávez defined Genízaro as the ethnic term given to indigenous people of mixed tribal origins living among the Hispano population in Spanish fashion. They entered colonial society as captives taken during wars with Utes, Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, and Pawnees. Genízaros comprised a third of the population by 1800. Many assimilated into Hispano and Pueblo society, but others in the land-grant communities maintained their identity through ritual, self-government, and kinship. Today the persistence of Genízaro identity blurs the lines of distinction between Native and Hispanic frameworks of race and cultural affiliation. This is the first study to focus exclusively on the detribalized Native experience of the Genízaro in New Mexico.

7. Hsu, Francis L. K. 1973. Prejudice and Its Intellectual Effect in American Anthropology: An Ethnographic Report1. American Anthropologist, 75: 1-19. doi:10.1525/aa.1973.75.1.02a00010

Abstract: This article deals with some deep forms of prejudice in American anthropology in terms of its dominant ideas and its products. The foundation of this prejudice seems to be Western individualism. It expresses itself by excluding contrary ideas from its public forums (publications, symposia, and so forth) and by elaborating and escalating ideas in conformity with it. In spite of its cross‐cultural protestations, American anthropology will become White American anthropology unless our fraternity consciously takes a more open‐minded approach to other competing assumptions—rooted in other cultures—about man and what makes him run. There is a world of difference between a truly cross‐cultural science of man and a White centered science of man with cross‐cultural decorations.

8. Martin, Catherine E. 1996. “Educating To Combat Racism: The Civic Role Of Anthropology”. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 27 (2): 253-269. doi:10.1525/aeq.1996.27.2.04x0230v.

Summary: Martin explores how anthropology can approach prejudice in the wider society through an applied lens. Specifically, she explains how anthropology has the potential to be a tool to combat conservative ideologies of genetic inferiority based on race and ethnicity in the United States.

9. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2013. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences Of Language, Race, And Class. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Summary: Urciuoli’s ethnography on Puerto Rican’s experiences in New York City explores how prejudice  impacts people based on the languages they use, in this case both Spanish and English. Specifically, she shares people’s stories on their lives while offering an analysis of the prejudiced power structures surrounding language and culture.

10.  Zhao, Xian, et al. 2014. “The Effect of Belief in Free Will on Prejudice.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 3, e91572. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints.

Abstract: The current research examined the role of the belief in free will on prejudice across Han Chinese and white samples. Belief in free will refers to the extent to which people believe human beings truly have free will. In Study 1, the beliefs of Han Chinese people in free will were measured, and their social distances from the Tibetan Chinese were used as an index of ethnic prejudice. The results showed that the more that Han Chinese endorsed the belief in free will, the less that they showed prejudice against the Tibetan Chinese. In Study 2, the belief of the Han Chinese in free will was manipulated, and their explicit feelings towards the Uyghur Chinese were used as an indicator of ethnic prejudice. The results showed that the participants in the condition of belief in free will reported less prejudice towards Uyghur Chinese compared to their counterparts in the condition of disbelief in free will. In Study 3, white peoples’ belief in free will was manipulated, and their pro-black attitudes were measured as an indirect indicator of racial prejudice. The results showed that, compared to the condition of disbelief in free will, the participants who were primed by a belief in free will reported stronger pro-black attitudes. These three studies suggest that endorsement of the belief in free will can lead to decreased ethnic/racial prejudice compared to denial of the belief in free will. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

1. Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York : [Jackson, Tenn.] :New Press.

Summary from newjimcrow.com: The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

2.  Ava Duvernay, and Jason Moran. 13TH  [Film/Documentary]. USA, 2016.

Summary: In the documentary 13^th, Filmmaker and Director Ava DuVernay explores the historical and legal root of the mass incarceration of Black Americans in the United States. This documentary highlights the systemic racism of the U.S. judicial and penal systems as well as offers a case for the prison abolition movement.

3.  Calvey, David . 2013. “Covert Ethnography in Criminology: A Submerged Yet Creative Tradition.” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 25, 1: 541-550

Abstract: This paper argues that covert ethnographic research has a legitimate and innovative voice in criminology, despite the increasing regimentation of ethical governance in social research. It also stresses that covert research has had a somewhat submerged and maligned history due to its perceived ethical transgression and is in need of rediscovery. It is argued that covert research, on closer inspection, has both a vibrant and diverse corpus of studies beyond the limited number of exemplars popularly associated with covert research. This paper explores the wide range of covert ethnographies in the study of deviance, criminality and illicit subcultures. It takes a critical stance on the appropriateness of an overly strict adherence to informed consent and suggests that ethical safeguards can stifle creative forms of criminological ethnography. The paper contends that, although covert ethnography clearly occupies a niche position in criminology, it is a necessary part of the criminological imagination.

4.  Castillejo-Cuellar, Alejandro. 2013. “On the Question of Historical Injuries: Transitional Justice, Anthropology and the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Anthropology Today 29, no. 1 (2013): 17-20.

Summary: In this article, the author explores the process of listening to the experience of violence and injustices. He argues that certain testimonies of violence, which  may be simultaneously local in different spaces and temporalities, may challenge larger notions about transitional justice.

5. Cooper, Jessica, Jessica R. Greenberg, Karen Faulk, Jessica Cooper, and Naisargi N. Dave. “Justice.” Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Summary: In this series for The Society for Cultural Anthropology, there are numerous writings on the concept of Justice from an anthropological point of view, including small ethnographies and more theoretical writings.

6. Foucault, Michel. 1995/1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House

Summary from publisher: Before the early 19th century, European ideas of crime and punishment tended to involve very public displays of the power of the monarch and the power of the state against the offending individual. Nowhere was this tendency more evident than in the spectacle of public executions. Those convicted of murder, piracy, counterfeiting, or other notable capital crimes would be taken to a public place for hanging or decapitation, and certain kinds of crimes warranted particularly gruesome punishments. In Discipline and Punish, social theorist Michel Foucault directly confronts and challenges a number of existing ideas surrounding the prison reforms of the late 1700s and early 1800s, and even into the twentieth century. By looking at the evolution of justice systems (focusing primarily on France), he suggests that the shift away from public executions and towards the idea of incarceration and reform within prison walls was a means of reframing the image of the power of society over the individual. Public executions often had the effect of making a criminal into a public martyr, and the ballads and broadsides printed for the common people did less to condemn the crime and more to glorify the criminal. By shifting the focus of justice into the prison and out of the public eye, authorities would have more direct control over the lives of those who had violated the norms of society.

7. Goodale, Mark, and Sally Engle Merry. 2017. Anthropology and Law: a Critical Introduction. New York: New York University Press.

Summary: This book explores the subfield of legal anthropology and the anthropology of law, the specific areas of research legal anthropologists do, and the challenges and main research questions that are centered in the subfield today.

8. Nader L., Sursock A. 1986. Anthropology and Justice. In: Cohen R.L. (eds) Justice. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, Boston, MA.

Abstract: Justice is so familiar a feature of daily life that we seldom pause to examine it. Anthropologists have only rarely been interested in cross-cultural conceptions of justice and almost never concerned with comparative conceptions of injustice The truth is, however, that anthropologists have provided the data for a comparative understanding of justice without often using the concept itself.

9. Niezen, Ronald. 2011. Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Summary: In this book, Niezen outlines the relationships between human rights and culture, specifically in the field of international law. He explores how anthropology as a discipline influences the politics of human rights.

10. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

Abstract: Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and even handed forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.

1. Domínguez, Silvia and Embrick, David G. 2020. Racial microaggressions: Bridging psychology and sociology and future research considerations. Sociology Campus. 14:e12803. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12803

Abstract: This article reviews racial microaggressions, specifically psychology and sociology’s historical trajectory in informing existing literatures and disciplines, in its connections to meso and macro levels of systemic racism. In doing so, we contend that a sociological understanding of racial microaggressions presents opportunities to better understand the cumulative and deleterious effects of racial violence on racialized groups. Furthermore, we argue that beyond bridging the disciplines of psychology and sociology to allow for more interdisciplinary analyses of racial microaggressions will help to move conversations in ways that more meaningfully capture the monstrosity of white supremacy and its cumulative deleterious effects of daily racial terrorism at all levels of society.

2. Hall, Joanne M, and Becky Fields. 2015. “”It’s Killing Us!” Narratives of Black Adults About Microaggression Experiences and Related Health Stress.” Global qualitative nursing research vol. 2. doi:10.1177/2333393615591569

Abstract. Perceived racism contributes to persistent health stress leading to health disparities. African American/Black persons (BPs) believe subtle, rather than overt, interpersonal racism is increasing. Sue and colleagues describe interpersonal racism as racial microaggressions: “routine” marginalizing indignities by White persons (WPs) toward BPs that contribute to health stress. In this narrative, exploratory study, Black adults (n = 10) were asked about specific racial microaggressions; they all experienced multiple types. Categorical and narrative analysis captured interpretations, strategies, and health stress attributions. Six iconic narratives contextualized health stress responses. Diverse mental and physical symptoms were attributed to racial microaggressions. Few strategies in response had positive outcomes. Future research includes development of coping strategies for BPs in these interactions, exploration of WPs awareness of their behaviors, and preventing racial microaggressions in health encounters that exacerbate health disparities.

3. Holling, Michelle A. 2019. “You Intimidate Me” as a Microaggressive Controlling Image to Discipline Womyn of Color Faculty. Southern Communication Journal 84:2, 99-112.

Abstract: This study used critical ethnography to document microaggressions experienced by women Staff and Faculty of Color at a predominantly White institution of higher education. This article focuses on invisibility, a specific type of microaggression, which emerged as a prominent finding. Participant narratives explicated three manifestations of environmental microaggressions (campus, disciplinary/professional, and community invisibility) and two forms of interpersonal microaggressions (professional and leadership invisibility). Recommendations for higher education professionals are provided.

4. Hill, Jane H. .1998. Language, Race, and White Public Space. American Anthropologist, 100: 680-689. doi:10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680.

Abstract: White public space is constructed through (1) intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African Americans for signs of linguistic disorder and (2) the invisibility of almost identical signs in the speech of Whites, where language mixing, required for the expression of a highly valued type of colloquial persona, takes several forms. One such form, Mock Spanish, exhibits a complex semiotics. By direct indexicality, Mock Spanish presents speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative racializing stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes “whiteness” as an unmarked normative order. Mock Spanish is compared to White “crossover” uses of African American English. Finally, the question of the potential for such usages to be reshaped to subvert the order of racial practices in discourse is briefly explored.

5. Williams, Monnica T. 2020 “Microaggressions: Clarification, Evidence, and Impact.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15, no. 1: 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619827499.

Abstract: [T]he current article provides a response that systematically analyzes the arguments and representations made in Lilienfeld’s critique with regard to the concept of microaggressions and the state of the related research. I show that, in contrast to the claim that the concept of microaggressions is vague and inconsistent, the term is well defined and can be decisively linked to individual prejudice in offenders and mental-health outcomes in targets. I explain how the concept of microaggressions is connected to pathological stereotypes, power structures, structural racism, and multiple forms of racial prejudice. Also described are recent research advances that address some of Lilienfeld’s original critiques. Further, this article highlights potentially problematic attitudes, assumptions, and approaches embedded in Lilienfeld’s

1. Brady, David, and Linda Burton. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Summary: This handbook is a useful resource for understanding how the social sciences approach poverty, by identifying wide reaching relationships between various measurements, for example such as structural issues, power, gender and race, and the different ways such things can be measured and analyzed through a social lens.

2. Farmer, Paul. 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 45, no. 3: 305–25. https://doi.org/10.1086/382250.

Summary: This text outlines Farmer’s primary work on outlining the concept of structural violence, by looking at various issues relating specifically to health, including AIDS, tuberculosis, and the illness attributed to poverty ,and how structures within society create and encourage these illnesses and deaths to continue.

3. Farmer, Paul. 2006/1993. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. University of California Press.

Summary: The book is an exemplary “ethnography of suffering” and structural violence that combines ethnographic, historic, epidemiologic, and political-economic analyses. Based on fieldwork conducted in Do Kay between 1982 and 1990, the ethnography reveals three areas of accusation regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic: 1) sorcery accusations Haitians levied against each other; 2) the accusations North Americans (scientists, press, and popular sector) brought against Haitians for the spread of HIV/AIDS in Haiti and the United States; and 3) the counter accusations of Haitian who saw HIV/AIDS as a North American conspiracy to eliminate Haitians (244). Farmer rightly asserts that of the three forms of accusations, only the one that blamed the victim carried real and material consequences (247).

4. Farmer, Paul E, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee. 2006. “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine.” PLoS Medicine 3, no. 10. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030449.

Summary: In this article, Farmer explores his concept of structural violence as relating specifically to clinical, allopathic medicine. He lays out how power influences medical systems, and also how medical systems themselves, as structures of power, influence people’s lives in physical ways.

5. Hirschfeld, K. Rethinking “Structural Violence.” 2017. Society 54, 156–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0116-y

Abstract: The concept of structural violence first developed in the 1960s as a way to explain disparities in health and development between wealthy countries and impoverished postcolonial states. This idea emerged out of Dependency Theory and defined poverty and disease in the developing world as the product of exploitation by colonial or neocolonial powers. Contemporary researchers continue to invoke structural violence to explain international health trends, but a review of recent literature reveals that the concept is increasingly outdated and poorly theorized. It is especially problematic when used to describe contemporary epidemics of infectious disease. In this paper I offer a brief overview of the concept of structural violence and critique the way it has been used to explain the political economy of two recent outbreaks: Ebola in West Africa and cholera in Haiti. Ultimately the paper concludes that these scholars claim to be explaining epidemics but instead use their research as a form of moralistic storytelling that leaves the structural dimensions of health unexplored.

6. Lane, Sandra D., Robert A. Rubinstein, Robert H. Keefe, Noah Webster, Donald A. Cibula, Alan Rosenthal, and Jesse Dowdell. “Structural Violence and Racial Disparity in HIV Transmission.” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 15, no. 3 (2004): 319–35. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2004.0043.

Summary: This article exposes how HIV transmission is affected by structural violence among certain populations, as based on racial disparities and inequalities. It lays out the specifics of vulnerability to infections due to social inequalities and subsequent structural inequalities.

7. Saleem, R., Pagan-Ortiz, M. E., Morrill, Z., Brodt, M., & Andrade, L. 2020. “I thought it would be different”: Experiences of structural violence in the lives of undocumented Latinas. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 26(2), 171-180. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000420

Abstract: In the United States, a majority of immigrants living with undocumented status hail from Latin America. Their migration is often propelled by adverse conditions and experiences of violence in their countries, which are inextricably linked to historical and ongoing policies of global political powers. However, their suffering does not end in the United States. Whereas many studies focus on the direct/individual violence experienced, few examine the impact of structural violence. Structural violence refers to the injustices embedded in social and institutional structures including laws and policies within societies that result in harm to an individual’s psychological and physical well-being. This qualitative study explored the experiences and consequences of structural violence faced by Latina women with undocumented status living in the United States. Participants (n = 8) were recruited in the community using snowball sampling. We conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews focusing on participants’ immigration process, health, work, education, and support systems. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) as a method, multiple themes that highlighted participants’ experiences of structural violence were identified. These included: (a) violence across several contexts, including places of employment, home, community, and while accessing services; (b) psychological and physical consequences of structural violence for participants; and (c) experiences of support and resilience that helped participants survive structural violence. Participants’ intersecting identities (e.g., gender, ethnicity/race, documentation status) increased their vulnerability to violence. We highlight the importance of calling attention to violent structures embedded in sociopolitical histories, the importance of systemic changes, including challenging laws and policies, and building solidarity across struggles

8. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004. “Dangerous and endangered youth: social structures and determinants of violence.” Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1036:13-46. doi:10.1196/annals.1330.002

Summary: In this article, Scheper-Hughes theorizes how structural violence “normalizes” issues of poverty, illness, and widespread inequality through an ethnographic account of her work in Northeastern Brazil.

9. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. The University of California Press.

Abstract: When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside “favela”. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

10.  Schuller, Mark. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Summary from publisher: The book analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”

1. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Abstract: How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel “walked into the ashes and mortal residue” of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project — the study of women’s folk songs as ethnohistory — was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author’s term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.

2. Denham, Aaron R. 2008. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45, no. 3.: 391-414.

Abstract: There is significant variation in how people experience, emplot and intergenerationally transmit trauma experiences. Despite this variation, the literature rarely illustrates alternative manifestations or resilient responses to the construct of historical trauma. Based upon person-centered ethnographic research, this article highlights how a four-generation American Indian family contextualizes historical trauma and, specifically, how they frame their traumatic past into an ethic that functions in the transmission of resilience strategies, family identity, and as a framework for narrative emplotment. In conclusion, the author clarifies the distinction between historical trauma — the precipitating conditions or experiences — and the historical trauma response — the pattern of diverse responses that may result from exposure to historical trauma.

3. Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441.

Summary: In this article, Hirschberger explores collective trauma from a psychological point of view. She outlines the process of collective trauma as moving from memory to a means of defining one’s self and social group, and the implications of the trauma on a group which spans generations.

4. Lester, Rebecca. “Back from the Edge of Existence: A Critical Anthropology of Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 50, no. 5 (2013): 753–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461513504520.

Summary: Lester explores historical trauma from the perspective of both anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, and how by approaching a collective cultural trauma through a psychiatric and psychological lens, new methods of healing can take place.

5. Maxwell, Krista. 2014. “Historicizing Historical Trauma Theory: Troubling the Trans-Generational Transmission Paradigm.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3: 407–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461514531317.

Abstract: The premise that “trauma” is transmitted across generations is central to the historical trauma discourse currently circulating in indigenous communities and professional networks in Canada. Historical trauma may be understood as the offspring of two older and apparently antithetical discourses: Native healing, and colonial professional critiques of indigenous family life. While the former has maintained a therapeutic focus on restoring intergenerational social relations, the latter has pathologized indigenous parenting and child-rearing practices. The emergence of historical trauma marks a global shift in the moral economy by which victimhood status, acquired through individual experiences of physical and especially sexual abuse, has come to wield greater currency than collective struggles against colonialism. Providers of contemporary indigenous healing programmes are drawing simultaneously on trauma discourse, which is seen to legitimate individual social suffering, and older therapeutic forms centered on sharing local social histories to restore intergenerational continuities and collective identity. But these invocations of historical trauma may continue the colonial discourse of mental health and social welfare professionals, who blamed indigenous parenting practices for children’s social problems and failure to assimilate. Some contemporary mental health and child development professionals have invoked parents’ and grandparents’ transmission of historical trauma in ways which construct indigenous families as pathological, promote an oversimplified, universalizing understanding of Canadian colonialism, and divert attention from the contemporary continuation of colonial structures and relations

6. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees In Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Summary from publisher: In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees’ current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate “mythico-history” of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of “enemies” get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.

7. Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.

Abstract: In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn’t just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police. My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

8. Mohatt, Nathaniel Vincent, Azure B. Thompson, Nghi D. Thai, and Jacob Kraemer Tebes. 2014. “Historical Trauma as Public Narrative: A Conceptual Review of How History Impacts Present-Day Health.” Social Science & Medicine 106: 128–36.

Summary: In this literature review, Mohatt collects the literature on, and investigates, the ways that cultural trauma can influence public and individual health. Specifically, the concept of the narrative of cultural trauma is explored in relation to the way that such narratives can also be used as healing techniques.

9. Prussing, Erica. 2014. “Historical trauma: Politics of a conceptual framework.” Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 51(3) 436–458 DOI: 10.1177/1363461514531316

Abstract: The concept of historical trauma (HT) is compelling: Colonialism has set forth cumulative cycles of adversity that promote morbidity and mortality at personal and collective levels, with especially strong mental health impacts. Yet as ongoing community based as well as scholarly discussions attest, lingering questions continue to surround HT as a framework for understanding the relationships between colonialism and indigenous mental health. Through an overview of 30 recent peer-reviewed publications that aim to clarify, define, measure, and interpret how HT impacts American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) mental health, this paper examines how the conceptual framework of HT has circulated in ways shaped by interactions among three prominent research approaches: evidence-based, culturally relevant, and decolonizing. All define current approaches to AIAN mental health research, but each sets forth different conceptualizations of the connections between colonialism and psychological distress. The unfolding trajectory of research about HT reflects persistent tensions in how these frameworks interact, but also possibilities for better integrating them. These considerations aim to advance conversations about the politics of producing knowledge about AIAN mental health and support ongoing calls for greater political pluralism in mental health research.

10.  Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M, and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. 2000. Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge University Press. 

Summary: In this book, the relationship between anthropology and psychology is explored through a number of case studies on cultural trauma, and specifically how violence on a large scale across a culture, influences later generations.

1. Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. “Language and Agency.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109-137.

Abstract: This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.

2. Brettell, C. B. 2002. “The Individual/Agent and Culture/Structure in the History of the Social Sciences.” Social Science History 26, no. 3: 429–45.

Summary: In this article, Brettell writes about how social science has historically engaged with the concept of agency within the larger scope of culture. Beginning and ending with a story from her ethnographic research, she concludes that agency is often tied to the wider structure in which it exists, as shown through individual narratives.

3. Dowding, Keith. 2008. “Agency and Structure: Interpreting Power Relationships.” Journal of Power 1, no. 1: 21–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540290801943380.

Summary: Published in The Journal of Power, Dowding’s article also criticizes the “agency-structure” divide and explores language as a means to understanding how we think about the relationships between people as agents and the structures they seek agency in, primarily through the language we use to describe them.

4. Edelman, Marc. 1999.  Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Abstract: This book tells the story of how small farmers responded to a free-market onslaught that devastated one of the Western Hemisphere’s most advanced social-democratic welfare states. In the early 1980s, the Latin American debt crisis struck Costa Rica, leading to major cutbacks in the social programs that had permitted the rural poor to attain an acceptable standard of living and a modicum of dignity. Peasants were in the forefront of movements against these cutbacks, marching, blocking highways, and occupying government buildings. In the struggle to preserve their livelihood, the rural poor also formed alliances with wealthy farmers, negotiated with politicians, and embraced and then repudiated charismatic outsiders who came to live among them and to speak in their name. These rural activists combined class-bound politics with concerns about threatened peasant identities, practical analysis with sentimentality, grassroots democracy with conspiratorial secrecy, and selfless sacrifice with opportunism. The small farmers portrayed in this book are worldly, outspoken, exuberant, future-oriented, and fiercely proud. They could hardly be less like the unsophisticated and stoic rustics so prominent in the development literature or those contemporary peasants whose imminent disappearance is endlessly predicted by both right- and left-wing social scientists. The author argues that the experience of rural activism in Costa Rica in the 1980s and 1990s calls into question much current theory about collective action, peasantries, development, and ethnographic research. The book invites the reader to rethink debates about old and new social movements and to grapple with the ethical and methodological dilemmas of engaged ethnography.

5. Farmer, Paul. 2005. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor: with a New Preface by the Author. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Summary: This book by Farmer explores the concept of structural violence with an emphasis on the way that power itself within society leads to cultural inequalities and subsequent violence. The book includes various ethnographic research from different authors as well as theoretical chapters on the concept of power itself.

6. Foucault, Michel. 2020. POWER: the Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. New York: PENGUIN Books.

Summary: This is a collection of Foucault’s seminal essays on power, containing his core philosophical analyses on power within varying areas of life, including politics, sexuality, and medicine. Foucault’s works, as included in this volume, give a broad yet grounded philosophical overview on the concept of power within human societies and history.

7. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford University Press.

Summary from Publisher: Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions–European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

8. Keane Webb. 2007. Christian moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Abstract: Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane’s analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.

9. Kockelman, Paul. 2007. “Agency: The Relation between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge.” Current Anthropology 48, no. 3: 375-401. doi:10.1086/512998.

Abstract: Using a Peircean theory of meaning, agency may be theorized in terms of flexibility and accountability, on the one hand, and knowledge and power, on the other. In this theory, residential agency, which is closest to notions such as “power” and “choice,” is the degree to which one can control the expression of a sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant of this sign-object relation. Representational agency, which is closest to notions such as “knowledge” and “consciousness,” is the degree to which one can thematize a process, characterize a feature of this theme, and reason with this theme-character relation. Agency, as a kind of social and semiotic facility, is thereby theorized as multidimensional, graduated, and distributed. This theory allows one to analyze, as concomitant phenomena, the longue durée processes that underlie relatively perduring institutions and the real-time practices that support relatively fleeting interactions. Finally, it highlights the theoretical and empirical terrain shared by linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, political economy, and critical theory.

10.  Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Summary from publisher: Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt’s political landscape. Saba Mahmood’s compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

1. Bartlett, Lesley. 2007. Literacy, speech and shame: the cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20:5, 547-563, DOI: 10.1080/09518390701207426

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between shame, literacy and social relations by analyzing shame narratives told to the author by youth and adult literacy students during a 24‐month ethnographic research project conducted in two Brazilian cities. Employing Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and literature from the anthropology of emotions, the article asks: What is accomplished through the micropolitics of shaming? What can it teach us about theories of literacy, language and power more broadly? The article shows how speech shaming in Brazil contributed to the cultural production of inequality by individualizing, psychologizing and embodying responsibility or blame for illiteracy. It argues that sociocultural theories of literacy, language and power need to account for the influence of emotions in communicative interactions.

2. Boaz, Franz. 1966. Race, Language and Culture. New York: Free Press.

Summary: This is a collection of Boaz’s most influential works within anthropology, collected in one place in the 1940s. This collection explores the relationships between race, language, and culture as three primary subjects to dispel the then-common notion of “scientific racism”, which at the time, led to prejudice within wider society, to be challenged by Boaz and his followers within the field of anthropology.

3. DeGraff, Michel. 2005. Linguists’ most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. Language in Society 34, 533–591. DOI: 10.10170S0047404505050207.

Abstract: “Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and0or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault’s sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists’ theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-0quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.

4. Duranti, Alessandro. 2003. “Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 44, no. 3: 323–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/368118.

Summary: In this article, Duranti outlines three primary paradigms faced by anthropologists in exploring language, as well as the way that studying language itself, as an anthropological subfield, can be useful to understanding culture through an anthropological lens. 

5. Hill, Jane H. 1998: “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 680–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680.

Summary: This article by Hill explores the way that whiteness polices language use in the United States from an anthropological standpoint. She outlines first the way that white people police the language of Latino people and African American people, while at the same time “mixing languages” in a way that is not equally as criticized.

6. Jourdan, Christine. 2008. Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Summary: This book explores the basics of linguistic anthropology as a subfield of anthropology in general. It provides the key concepts, questions, and areas of research that linguistic anthropologists work with, as well as its relationship to other fields, while exposing the reader to questions about the relationships between language and culture that anthropologists are routinely faced with.

7. McWhorter, John. 2017. Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.

Summary from publisher: It has now been almost fifty years since linguistic experts began studying Black English as a legitimate speech variety, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound “black.” In his first book devoted solely to the form, structure, and development of Black English, John McWhorter clearly explains its fundamentals and rich history while carefully examining the cultural, educational, and political issues that have undermined recognition of this transformative, empowering dialect. Talking Back, Talking Black takes us on a fascinating tour of a nuanced and complex language that has moved beyond America’s borders to become a dynamic force for today’s youth culture around the world.

8. Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Whitman, Amanda Miller, Wayne Harbert, ed. 2009. Language and Poverty. Multilingual Matters.

Summary from publisher: This volume explores the complex interactions of language with economic resources. How does poverty affect language survival? How is the economic status of individuals affected by the languages they do or do not speak? The authors address these questions from multiple perspectives, drawing on linguistics, language policy and planning, economics, anthropology, and sociology.

9. Schwartz, Saul. 2018. The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 28: 332-355. doi:10.1111/jola.12204

Abstract: A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of “culture” to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology’s contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like “language is the core of culture” and “when a language dies, a culture dies” are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities’ efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti‐essentialist and counter‐nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages.

10. Spears, Arthur. 1998. “African-American language use: Ideology and so-called obscenity.” African-American English. 226-250

Abstract: This paper is about what has been called obscene language. As I indicate below, I prefer to use the term uncensored speech in order not to prejudge the actions of the users of such speech. My wish not to prejudge is not the result of unreflexive liberal humanism; rather, it reflects one of the major conclusions presented below, to wit: in many cases, rigorous analysis of form, meaning, and communicative behavior is required before one can pass judgment on the speech of members of communities other than one’s own, where the term community membership is determined by age, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender, and other variables. Those who are invariably offended even by mentions, let alone uses, of “obscenity” should not read further. At the outset, I should make some clarifications and disclaimers since it seems many people wish, and indeed insist upon, forcing the discussions below into the judgmental framework of their own personal norms of propriety.

1. Gill, Lyndon K. 2018. Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. Duke University Press.

Summary from publisher: In Erotic Islands, Lyndon K. Gill maps a long queer presence at a crossroads of the Caribbean. This transdisciplinary book foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. At its heart is an extension of Audre Lorde’s use of the erotic as theory and methodology. Gill turns to lesbian/gay artistry and activism to insist on eros as an intertwined political-sensual-spiritual lens through which to see self and society more clearly. This analysis juxtaposes revered musician Calypso Rose, renowned mas man Peter Minshall, and resilient HIV/AIDS organization Friends For Life. Erotic Islands traverses black studies, queer studies, and anthropology toward an emergent black queer diaspora studies.

2. Kulick, Don and  Willson, Margaret, eds. 1995. Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Summary from bookseller: Taboo looks at the ethnographer and sexuality in anthropological fieldwork and considers the many roles that sexuality plays in the anthropological production of knowledge and texts. How does the sexual identity that anthropologists have in their “home” society affect the kind of sexuality they are allowed to express in other cultures? How is the anthropologists’ sexuality perceived by the people with whom he or she does research? How common is sexual violence and intimidation in the field and why is its existence virtually unmentioned in anthropology? These are but a few of the questions to be confronted, exploring from differing perspectives the depth of the influence this tabooed topic has on the entire practice and production of anthropology.

3. Leavitt, Gregory C. 2007. “The Incest Taboo? A Reconsideration of Westermarck.” Anthropological Theory, 7, no. 4 : 393-419.  

Abstract: The ongoing discussion between social scientists who espouse some variety of socio-environmental theory (for examples see Leavitt, Incest and Inbreeding Avoidance: A Critique of Darwinian Social Science, 2005: 215 and Leavitt, `Disappearance of the Incest Taboo’, American Anthropologist, 1989) and those who advance Darwinian selection principles (human sociobiology, Darwinian social science, behavioral genetics, or evolutionary psychology) have often focused their debate on the incest taboo and the avoidance of inbreeding. Acknowledged by many as an important cultural universal, the incest taboo has commonly been recognized by Darwinian social scientists as the most compelling instance supporting the premise that complex human behaviors can result from natural selection. Human sociobiology forwards the argument that natural selection mechanisms will favor outbreeding because inbreeding is deleterious. By contrast, socio-environmentalists have made the case that the incest taboo is a socioculturally derived solution to important practical problems found in human social life. In this article, I not only challenge the commonly held notion that inbreeding is injurious, but also argue that inbreeding is often harmless and even fitness-enhancing. If so, Westermarck’s hypothesis that children raised together naturally trigger selection mechanisms for sexual avoidance is highly questionable. Rather, incest and inbreeding avoidance are diverse practices related to environmental circumstances.

4. Freud, Sigmund. 1950/1913. Totem and Taboo. New York/London: Routledge.

Summary from bookseller: Adducing evidence from “primitive” tribes, neurotic women, child patients traversing the oedipal phase, and speculations by Charles Darwin, James G. Frazer, and other modern scholars, Freud attempts to trap the moment that civilized life began. It stands as his most imaginative venture into the psychoanalysis of culture.

5. Zhang, Weiguo. 2020. “Is Death Taboo for Older Chinese Immigrants? Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222820927883.

Abstract: Much of the scholarly literature sees death as a taboo topic for Chinese. To test this assumption, this study held seven focus groups in the Greater Toronto Area in 2017. It found that the majority of the older Chinese immigrant participants talked about death freely using either the word death or a euphemism. They talked about various issues including medical treatment and end-of-life care, medical assistance in dying, death preparation, and so on. A small number did not talk about death, but it seemed their reluctance was related to anxiety or discomfort or simply reflected a choice of words. The study concludes death as taboo could be a myth, at least for older Chinese immigrants.

1. Khan, Shamus. 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Summary by publisher. In Privilege, Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul’s students continue to learn what they always have–how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul’s students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life–from Beowulf to Jaws–and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.

2. LeVon, Laura A. 2017. “Teaching Race: On Stereotypes and Privilege.” Teaching Tools, Fieldsights, April 17. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/teaching-race-on-stereotypes-and-privilege

Summary: This article from the Society of Cultural Anthropology explores how teachers of anthropology can introduce, teach, and make an impact on students to understand their own privilege in the United States specifically. She outlines specific workshops and teaching tools she had found helpful in teaching the concept, and suggestions on how to work with students in the classroom.

3. Moses, Yolanda T. 2010. “Thinking Anthropologically About ‘Race’: Human Variation, Cultural Construction, and Dispelling Myths.” In Thinking Anthropologically: A Practical Guide for Students, 3rd edition, edited by Philip Salzman and Patricia Rice, 94−105. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Summary: In this introductory textbook, Moses explores core anthropological theories, history, and research methods. The elementary approach to anthropological thought is a useful tool for those who are new to anthropology to begin to think anthropologically and reflect on their own cultures and societies they may be a part of.

4. Waterston, Alisse. “The Habitus of Privilege and Position.” American Anthropological Association. http://www.americananthropologist.org/the-habitus-of-privilege-and-position/.

Summary: This article touches on the specifics of privilege as a term currently in the public eye and realm of academia from a specifically anthropological standpoint, and also reviews the most recent works on privilege from anthropologists.

5. Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. and  Moses, Yolanda T. 1997. Reestablishing “Race” in Anthropological Discourse. American Anthropologist, 99: 517-533. doi:10.1525/aa.1997.99.3.517

Abstract: Anthropology, despite its historic role in both creating and dismantling the American racial worldview, seems barely visible in contemporary scholarly and public discussions of “race.” The authors argue that race should once again be central to anthropological inquiry, that cultural and physical anthropologists must jointly develop and publicly disseminate a unified, uniquely anthropological perspective. They suggest ways to proceed and identify internal barriers that must be overcome before the anthropological voice can be heard.

1. Saleh, Zainab. Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narrative of Exile and Nostalgia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Summary from publisher. With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq—from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba’th coup and support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation. Zainab Saleh shares the experiences of Iraqis she met over fourteen years of fieldwork in Iraqi London—offering stories from an aging communist nostalgic for the streets she marched since childhood, a devout Shi’i dreaming of holy cities and family graves, and newly uprooted immigrants with fresh memories of loss, as well as her own. Focusing on debates among Iraqi exiles about what it means to be an Iraqi after years of displacement, Saleh weaves a narrative that draws attention to a once-dominant, vibrant Iraqi cultural landscape and social and political shifts among the diaspora after decades of authoritarianism, war, and occupation in Iraq. Through it all, this book illuminates how Iraqis continue to fashion a sense of belonging and imagine a future, built on the shards of these shattered memories.

2. Graeber, David. 2001. Towards the anthropology of value: The false coin of our dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Summary from publisher: Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

3. Cyril S. Belshaw. 1956. The Identification of Values in Anthropology. American Journal of Sociology, 64:6, 555-562.

Abstract: The paper examines the connotations of the term “value” as it has influenced recent anthropological thought. Current usage, leaning heavily on ethics and world view, is concerned with ideas and orientations rather than with action. Anthropological usage, unlike the sociological or philosophical, has ignored the approach of economics, which is concerned with values revealed in action. A system of values cannot be described empirically without assumptions about the presence or absence of values. An ideal scheme is presented, showing the steps necessary to identify values and the difficulties of this as an empirical procedure.

4. Heintz, Monica The Anthropology of Moralities. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Press.

Summary from publisher: Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit and focused attention until recently, when accelerated globalization often resulted in the collision of different value systems. Observing, describing and assessing values cross-culturally, the authors propose various methodological approaches to the study of moralities, illustrated with rich ethnographic accounts, thus offering a valuable guide for students of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies and for professionals concerned with the empirical and cross-cultural study of values.

5. Csordas, Thomas, editor. 1994.  Embodiment and Experience The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Summary from publisher: Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are “inscribed” on the body. These essays go beyond this passive construal of the body to a position in which embodiment is understood as the existential condition of cultural life. From this standpoint embodiment is reducible neither to representations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as an inalienable centre of individual consciousness. This more sensate and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, ritual healing, dietary customs, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self–an anthropology that is not merely about the body, but from the body.

1. Beck, Sam and Maida, Carl A. 2015. Public Anthropology in a Borderless World. New York/Oxford: BerghahnNew York/Oxford: Berghahn.

Summary from publisher: Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in a broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

2. de Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier. 1995.  Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Social Change. London/New York: Zed Books.

Summary from publisher: This book re-establishes the relevance of mainstream anthropological (and sociological) approaches to development processes and simultaneously recognizes that contemporary development ought to be anthropology’s principal area of study. The introduction provides a thought-provoking examination of the principal new approaches that have emerged in the discipline during the 1990s. Part I then makes clear the complexity of social change and development, and the ways in which socio-anthropology can measure up to the challenge of this complexity. Part II looks more closely at some of the leading variables involved in the development process, including relations of production; the logics of social action; the nature of knowledge; forms of mediation; and “political” strategies.

3. Eriksen, Annelin. 2007. Understanding Cultural Change: The Return of Core Anthropological Concepts, Reviews in Anthropology, 36:2, 131-154, DOI: 10.1080/00938150701344673

Abstract: Core anthropological concepts like culture and society have become vacated categories. The four books reviewed here all represent important efforts to return these concepts to anthropology. Among the key issues discussed here is the importance of such concepts for an understanding of cultural change. What is culture? How does culture change? How is agency related to the process of change?

4. Harris, Marvin. 1991. America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture. New York, NY: HarperCollin.

Summary from publisher: Written by one of the most famous modern anthropologists, the fifth edition of Cultural Anthropology holistic view of sociocultural continues to focus on the book’s two major objectives. First, it presents a system, and secondly, the book provides a unified theoretical framework for explaining these systems. It also remains faithful to the belief that anthropologists must routinely deal with facts and theories that are crucial to informed decisions regarding issues of enduring relevance. The cultural approach used throughout furnishes a framework for explaining how the parts of sociocultural systems are interrelated and how they change over time. The book also continues in its effort to identify the many causal strands that help explain the process of sociocultural change. It tries to make sense of the many seemingly irrational or arbitrary customs and institutions in small, technologically simple societies as well as complex nations. For anyone interested in the study of culture.

5. Nuttall, Mark. 2016. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Summary from publisher: The first book to comprehensively assess anthropology’s engagement with climate change, this pioneering volume both maps out exciting trajectories for research and issues a call to action. Chapters in part one are systematic research reviews, covering the relationship between culture and climate from prehistoric times to the present; changing anthropological discourse on climate and environment; the diversity of environmental and sociocultural changes currently occurring around the globe; and the unique methodological and epistemological tools anthropologists bring to bear on climate research. Part two includes a series of case studies that highlights leading-edge research—including some unexpected and provocative findings. Part three challenges scholars to be proactive on the front lines of climate change, providing instruction on how to work in with research communities, with innovative forms of communication, in higher education, in policy environments, as individuals, and in other critical arenas. Linking sophisticated knowledge to effective actions, Anthropology and Climate Change is essential for students and scholars in anthropology and environmental studies.