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    Iraq at a Distance

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    The Iraq War has cost innumerable lives, caused vast material destruction, and inflicted suffering on millions of people. Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropology Can Teach Us About the War focuses on the plight of the Iraqi people, caught since 2003 in the carnage between U.S. and British troops on one side and, on the other, Iraqi insurgents, militias, and foreign al Qaeda operatives. The volume is a bold attempt by six distinguished anthropologists to study a war zone too dangerous for fieldwork. They break new ground by using their ethnographic imagination as a research tool to analyze the Iraq War through insightful comparisons with previous and current armed conflicts in Cambodia, Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and Argentina. This innovative approach extends the book's relevance beyond a critical understanding of the devastating war in Iraq. More and more parts of the world of long-standing ethnographic interest are becoming off-limits to researchers because of the war on terror. This book serves as a model for the study of other inaccessible regions, and it shows that the impossibility of conducting ethnographic fieldwork does not condemn anthropologists to silence. Essays analyze the good-versus-evil framework of the war on terror, the deterioration of women's rights in Iraq under fundamentalist coercion, the ethnic-religious partitioning of Baghdad through the building of security walls, the excessive use of force against Iraqi civilians by U.S. counterinsurgency units, and the loss of popular support for U.S. and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan after the brutal regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had been toppled.

    Western Welfare in Decline

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    The feminization of poverty is increasingly recognized as a global phenomenon, affecting women not only in third world countries but also in the West. Taking globalization as its starting point, Western Welfare in Decline explores the plight of poor single mothers in five English-speaking nations that have implemented welfare restructuring: the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This restructuring is analyzed in relation to the emergence of neoliberalism, which valorizes the free market, individualism, and a circumscribed role for the state. Contributors to Western Welfare in Decline creatively combine theoretical and empirical analysis, emphasizing the economic and social goals of welfare reforms and the discourses of labor, gendered subjectivity, and the separation of public and private spheres. They document how the neoliberal project of welfare reform interacts with local cultures to create both similar and divergent new cultural formations and identify opportunities for asserting the social rights of poor single mothers who are being denied these rights at the level of the nation-state.

    Voices of the English Reformation

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    Spanning the different phases of the English Reformation from William Tyndale's 1525 translation of the Bible to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, John King's magisterial anthology brings together a range of texts inaccessible in standard collections of early modern works. The readings demonstrate how Reformation ideas and concerns pervade well-known writings by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Marlowe and help foreground such issues as the relationship between church and state, the status of women, and resistance to unjust authority. Plays, dialogues, and satires in which clever laypersons outwit ignorant clerics counterbalance texts documenting the controversy over the permissibility of theatrical performance. Moving biographical and autobiographical narratives from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs and other sources document the experience of Protestants such as Anne Askew and Hugh Latimer, both burned at the stake, of recusants, Jesuit missionaries, and many others. In this splendid collection, the voices ring forth from a unique moment when the course of British history was altered by the fate and religious convictions of the five queens: Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I.

    Women as Unseen Characters

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    Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Women's exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process. Women as Unseen Characters is the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world. In this volume, leading Melanesian scholars build on recent ethnographies that show how female kin had roles in male rituals that had previously gone unseen. Female seclusion and the enforcement of taboos were crucial elements of the ritual process: forms of presence in their own right. Contributors here provide detailed accounts of the different kinds of female presence in various Papua New Guinea male rituals. When these are restored to the picture, the rituals can no longer be interpreted merely as an institution for reproducing male domination but must also be understood as a moment when the whole system of relations binding a male person to his kin is reorganized. By dealing with the participation of women, a totally neglected dimension of male rituals is added to our understanding.

    Witchcraft and Magic

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    Magic, always part of the occult underground in North America, has experienced a resurgence since the 1960s. Although most contemporary magical religions have come from abroad, they have found fertile ground in which to develop in North America. Who are today's believers in Witchcraft and how do they worship? Alternative spiritual paths have increased the ranks of followers dramatically, particularly among well-educated middle-class individuals. Witchcraft and Magic conveys the richness of magical religious experiences found in today's culture, covering the continent of North America and the Caribbean. These original essays survey current and historical issues pertinent to religions that incorporate magical or occult beliefs and practices, and they examine contemporary responses to these religions. The relationship between Witchcraft and Neopaganism is explored, as is their intersection with established groups practicing goddess worship. Recent years have seen the growth in New Age magic and Afro-Caribbean religions, and these developments are also addressed in this volume. All the religions covered offer adherents an alternative worldview and rituals that are aimed at helping individuals redefine themselves and make their interactions with the environment more empowered. Many modern occult religions share an absence of dogma or central authority to determine orthodoxy, and have become a contemporary experience embracing modern concerns like feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and gay rights. Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santería, Palo, and Curanderismo, which do have a more developed dogma and authority structure, offer their followers a religion steeped in African and Hispanic traditions. Responses to the growth of magical religions have varied, from acceptance to an unfounded concern about the growth of a satanic underground. And, as magical religions have flourished, increased interest has resulted in a growing commercialization, with its threat of trivialization.

    Human Rights Under African Constitutions

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    Some of the most massive and persistent violations of human rights occur in African nations. In Human Rights Under African Constitutions: Realizing the Promise for Ourselves , scholars from a wide range of fields present a sober, systematic assessment of the prospects for legal protection of human rights in Africa. In a series of detailed and highly contextual studies of Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda, experts seek to balance the socioeconomic and political diversity of these nations while using the same theoretical framework of legal analysis for each case study. Standards for human rights protection can be realized only through direct and strong support from a nation's legal and political institutions. The contributors to this volume uniformly conclude that a well-informed and motivated citizenry is the most powerful force for creating the political will necessary to effect change at the national level. In addition to a critical evaluation of the current state of human rights protection in each of these African nations, the contributors outline existing national resources available for protecting human rights and provide recommendations for more effective and practical use of these resources.

    Fighting for the Farm

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    In North America industrial agriculture has now virtually displaced diversified family farming. The prevailing system depends heavily on labor supplied by migrants and immigrants, and its reliance on monoculture raises environmental concerns. In this book Jane Adams and contributors—anthropologists and political scientists among them—analyze the political dynamics that have transformed agriculture in the United States and Canada since the 1920s. The contributors demonstrate that people become politically active in arenas that range from the state to public discourse to relations between growers and their contractors or laborers, and that politics is a process that is intimately local as well as global. The farm financial crisis of the 1980s precipitated rapid consolidation of farms and a sharp decline in rural populations. It brought new actors into the political process, including organic farmers and environmentalists. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed considers the politics of farm policy and the consequences of the increasing alignment of agricultural interests with the global economy. The first section of the book places North American agriculture in the context of the world system; the second, a series of case studies, examines the foundations of current U.S. policy; subsequent sections deal with the political implications for daily life and the politics of the environment. Recognizing the influence of an array of political constituencies and arenas, Fighting for the Farm charts a decisive shift since the early part of the twentieth century from a discursive regime rooted in economics to one that now incorporates a variety of environmental and quality-of-life concerns.

    Female Circumcision

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    Bolokoli , khifad , tahara , tahoor , qudiin , irua , bondo , kuruna , negekorsigin , and kene-kene are a few of the terms used in local African languages to denote a set of cultural practices collectively known as female circumcision. Practiced in many countries across Africa and Asia, this ritual is hotly debated. Supporters regard it as a central coming-of-age ritual that ensures chastity and promotes fertility. Human rights groups denounce the procedure as barbaric. It is estimated that between 100 million and 130 million girls and women today have undergone forms of this genital surgery. Female Circumcision gathers together African activists to examine the issue within its various cultural and historical contexts, the debates on circumcision regarding African refugee and immigrant populations in the United States, and the human rights efforts to eradicate the practice. This work brings African women's voices into the discussion, foregrounds indigenous processes of social and cultural change, and demonstrates the manifold linkages between respect for women's bodily integrity, the empowerment of women, and democratic modes of economic development. This volume does not focus narrowly on female circumcision as a set of ritualized surgeries sanctioned by society. Instead, the contributors explore a chain of connecting issues and processes through which the practice is being transformed in local and transnational contexts. The authors document shifts in local views to highlight processes of change and chronicle the efforts of diverse communities as agents in the process of cultural and social transformation.

    Cross-Border Marriages

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    Illuminating how international marriages are negotiated, arranged, and experienced, Cross-Border Marriages is the first book to chart marital migrations involving women and men of diverse national, ethnic, and class backgrounds. The migrations studied here cross geographical borders of provinces, rural-urban borders within nation-states, and international boundaries, including those of China, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, the United States, and Canada. Looking at assumptions about the connection between international marriages and poverty, opportunism, and women's mobility, the book draws attention to ideas about global patterns of inequality that are thought to pressure poor women to emigrate to richer countries, while simultaneously suggesting the limitations of such views. Breaking from studies that regard the international bride as a victim of circumstance and the mechanisms of international marriage as traffic in commodified women, these essays challenge any simple idea of global hypergamy and present a nuanced understanding where a variety of factors, not the least of which is desire, come into play. Indeed, most contemporary marriage-scapes involve women who relocate in order to marry; rarely is it the men. But Nicole Constable and the volume contributors demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, these brides are not necessarily poor, nor do they categorically marry men who are above them on the socioeconomic ladder. Although often women may appear to be moving «up» from a less developed country to a more developed one, they do not necessarily move higher on the chain of economic resources. Complicating these and other assumptions about international marriages, the essays in this volume draw from interviews and rich ethnographic materials to examine women's and men's agency, their motivations for marriage, and the importance of familial pressures and obligations, cultural imaginings, fantasies, and desires, in addition to personal and economic factors. Border-crossing marriages are significant for what they reveal about the intersection of local and global processes in the everyday lives of women and men whose marital opportunities variably yield both rich possibilities and bitter disappointments.

    UHPLC in Life Sciences

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    Since its commercial introduction in 2004, UHPLC (Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography) has begun to replace conventional HPLC in academia and industry and interest in this technique continues to grow. Both the increases in speed and resolution make this an attractive method; particularly to the life sciences and more than 1500 papers have been written on this strongly-evolving topic to date. This book provides a solid background on how to work with UHPLC and its application to the life sciences. The first part of the book covers the basics of this approach and the specifics of a UHPLC system, providing the reader with a solid background to working properly with such a system. The second part examines the application of UHPLC to the life sciences, with a focus on drug analysis strategies. UHPLC-MS, a key technique in pharmaceutical and toxicological analyses, is also examined in detail. The editors (Davy Guillarme and Jean-Luc Veuthey) were some of the earliest adopters of UHPLC and have published and lectured extensively on this topic. Between them they have brought together an excellent team of contributors from Europe and the United States, presenting a wealth of expertise and knowledge. This book is an essential handbook for anyone wishing to adopt an UHPLC system in either an academic or industrial setting and will benefit postgraduate students and experienced workers alike.