Founded in 1989, this groundbreaking series’ purpose is to encourage ethnographic writing that is flexible enough to give a voice to the people whose lives it records, to recreate those lives rather than merely describe them, and to encompass in this recreation the complexity, ambiguity, and emotion that are central to human experience. This flexibility can be achieved through the use of narration, first person and multiple points of view, dialogue, descriptive imagery, and other literary techniques.
Series Editors: Alma Gottlieb Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Timothy R. Landry Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies, Trinity College
Staff Editorial Contact: Elisabeth Maselli, Senior Editor emaselli@upenn.edu
Founding Editors: Paul Stoller Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University Permanent Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg
Dan Rose Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
Editor Emerita: Kirin Narayan Professor of Anthropology, Australian National University
Children and Middle-Class Moralities in Transnational Senegal
Chelsie Yount
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9781512827569
Pub Date: June 2025
Format: Paperback
196 Pages
Selective Solidarity examines how global inequalities change the ways transnational families in Paris and Dakar negotiate “economic moralities,” and how French-born children of middle-class Senegalese, acutely aware of prejudice against Muslims in Europe, forge connections abroad that reproduce transnational kinship.
Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City
Abdelmajid Hannoum
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512827927
Pub Date: May 2025
Format: Paperback
280 Pages
Living Tangier examines African migration to Europe and European migration to Africa, focusing on the dynamics of migration in terms of race and legal standing in Tangier, a Moroccan city at the intersection of Africa and Europe. Based on extensive ethnographic work, it explores how migrants experience and affect the city.
Coming to Terms with Solitude, Decline, and Death in Tibetan Exile
Harmandeep Kaur Gill
Price: $44.95
ISBN: 9781512827354
Pub Date: March 2025
Format: Paperback
312 Pages
Waiting at the Mountain Pass offers an intimate meditation on aging and dying among elderly exiled Tibetans living in Dharamsala, India. Through closely drawn portraits of these elders, readers walk with them through the heartaches and hopes of facing death alone and on a foreign soil.
Cultural Imperialism, Agency, and the Ban on “Female Genital Mutilation” in Senegal
Sarah O'Neill
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9781512827231
Pub Date: March 2025
Format: Paperback
272 Pages
Senegal’s 1999 ban on female genital cutting (FGC) sparked resistance in Fouta Toro, and opposition to the ban in this region has long seemed unified. This ethnography unravels political tensions surrounding the ban and presents a more complicated reality, where ordinary women and men continue to debate the practice and meaning of FGC.
Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece
Dimitris Antoniou
Price: $44.95
ISBN: 9781512827163
Pub Date: February 2025
Format: Paperback
248 Pages
Why Not Build the Mosque explores the Greek state’s attempts to build a mosque. Looking at the project’s decades-long history of failure and its bittersweet realization in 2020, Dimitris Antoniou demonstrates the productivity of unrealized plans and sheds light on what it takes for things to happen in contemporary democracies.
Underground Politics follows the everyday sociopolitical life of small-scale gold miners in the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, revealing how mining communities navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect.
Three Ways to Fail is the story of how over three decades, one anthropologist came to understand failure—both his own and those of the discipline—through Chilean Mapuche narratives of the witch, the clown, and the usurper, and their insatiable appetites for destruction, greed, and property.
Public College Students Expose the Hidden Inequalities of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by Joseph Entin and Jeanne Theoharis
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512826371
Pub Date: August 2024
Format: Paperback
320 Pages
Through searing firsthand accounts by students at Brooklyn College and California State University Los Angeles, Until We’re Seen chronicles COVID-19’s devastating effects on working-class communities of color and the resilient ways those communities banded together.
Atmospheric Violence explores how people in the militarized, ecologically fragile borderlands of Kashmir attempt to flourish in an environment where violence is everywhere. Omer Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Shahram Khosravi weaves a tapestry from individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope.
