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Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis vs. Uber examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers'stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of'post-political reasoning': an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how.

In this compelling study, Maria Theresia Starzmann and John Roby bring together an international cast of experts who move beyond the traditional framework of the'constructed past'to look at not only how the past is remembered but also who remembers it. They convincingly argue that memory is a complex process, shaped by remembering and forgetting, inscription and erasure, presence and absence. Collective memory influences which stories are told over others, ultimately shaping narratives about identity, family, and culture.This interdisciplinary volume--melding anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and archival studies--explores such diverse arenas as archaeological objects, human remains, colonial landscapes, public protests, national memorials, art installations, testimonies, and even digital space as places of memory. Examining important sites of memory, including the Victory Memorial to Soviet Army, Blair Mountain, Spanish penitentiaries, African shrines, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the contributors highlight the myriad ways communities reinforce or reinterpret their pasts.

Intimate Activism tells the story of Nicaraguan sexual-rights activists who helped to overturn the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. The law was passed shortly after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990 and, to the surprise of many, was repealed in 2007. In this vivid ethnography, Cymene Howe analyzes how local activists balanced global discourses regarding human rights and identity politics with the contingencies of daily life in Nicaragua. Though they were initially spurred by the antisodomy measure, activists sought to change not only the law but also culture. Howe emphasizes the different levels of intervention where activism occurs, from mass-media outlets and public protests to meetings of clandestine consciousness-raising groups. She follows the travails of queer characters in a hugely successful telenovela, traces the ideological tensions within the struggle for sexual rights, and conveys the voices of those engaged in'becoming'lesbianas and homosexuales in contemporary Nicaragua.

From the'golden weather'of postwar economic growth, through the globalization, economic challenges, and protest of the 1960s and 1970s, to the free market revolution and new immigrants of the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, this account, the most complete and comprehensive history of New Zealand since 1945, illustrates the chronological and social history of the country with the engaging stories of real individuals and their experiences. Leading historians Jennifer Carlyon and Diana Morrow discuss in great depth New Zealand's move toward nuclear-free status, its embrace of a small-state, free-market ideology, and the seeming rejection of its citizens of a society known for the'worship of averages.'Stories of pirate radio in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf, the first DC8 jets landing at Mangere airport, feminists liberating pubs, public protests over the closing of post offices, and indigenous language nests vividly demonstrate how a postwar society famous around the world for its dull conformity became one of the most ethnically, economically, and socially diverse countries on earth.

This innovative volume studies women as economic, political, and cultural mediators of space, gender, value, and language in informal markets. Drawing on diverse methodologies—multisited fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and archival research—the contributors demonstrate how women move between and knit together household and marketplace activities. This knitting together pivots on how household practices and economies are translated and transferred to the market, as well as how market practices and economic principles become integral to the nature and construction of the household. Exploring the cultural identities and economic practices of women traders in ten diverse locales—Bolivia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Peru, and the Philippines—the authors pay special attention to the effects of global forces, national economic policies, and nongovernmental organizations on women's participation in the market and the domestic sector. The authors also consider the impact that women's economic and political activities—in social movements, public protests, and more hidden kinds of subversive behavior—have on state policy, on the attitudes of different sectors of society toward female traders, and on the dynamics of the market itself. A final theme focuses on the cultural dimension of mediation. Many women traders straddle cultural spheres and move back and forth between them. Does this affect their participation in the market and their identities? How do ties of ethnicity or acts of reciprocity affect the nature of commodity exchanges? Do they create exchanges that are neither purely commodified nor wholly without calculation? Or is it more often the case that ethnic commonalities and reciprocity merely mask the commodification of social and economic exchanges? Does this straddling lead to the emergence of new kinds of hybrid identities and practices? In considering these questions, the authors specify the ways in which consumers contribute to identity formation among market women.

This book is a critical excavation of capitalist development that is being driven by the Global North in the modern (neo)colonial era, with a related focus on the anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance by Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and migrant workers in Africa, Asia/Middle East, and the Americas/Caribbean.Informed by the work of Dr. Abdul Aziz Choudry, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous, peasant, and migrant worker learning in political action and knowledge production are essential for growing and sustaining social movements and organised struggles. The collection demonstrates how these resistances challenge racialized processes of territorial occupation, accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, and cultural and educational imperialism. Focusing on the regions of the Americas/Caribbean, Africa, Asia/Middle East, and across both settler and exploitation colonies, the chapters amplify Indigenous, peasant, and migrant worker activism and draw out critical perspectives pertaining to colonial capital.The Indigenous, anticolonial, and anticapitalist politics highlighted in this book will be essential reading for activists engaged with international relations and social change. It will also inform the work of students and critical scholars of social movement and resistance studies, critical development studies, Indigenous studies, peasant and critical agrarian studies, migrant/labour studies, sociology, political science, and regional/area studies.

An ethnography of a long-unbuilt mosque in Greece that explores government operations and contemporary democracyWhy Not Build the Mosque? tells the story of the Greek state's centuries-long attempt to build a central mosque. After the fall of Ottoman Empire, Greek Orthodoxy entwined with Greek nationalism, and by the twentieth century, the state came to imagine Islam as incompatible with a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian identity. And so as late as 2020, the contemporary Greek state did not have a mosque, even as its Islamic population grew and increasingly required a place of worship.Focusing on the failed effort in the early 2000s to build a mosque in a suburb of Athens and on the subsequent, successful realization of the project in 2020, Dimitris Antoniou investigates the roles that the Orthodox Church, politicians concerned about the “political cost” of supporting a mosque, and the community played in the project's delays, failures, and its bittersweet success. The mosque that was ultimately built in 2020 was itself a compromise, a modest building that failed to deliver on the dreamed-of and finally illusory building discussed in the 2000s.As Antoniou brings readers from under-the-radar home mosques to the offices of polling companies, politicians, and media corporations, he reveals that the years-long debate over if, how, and where to build a mosque wasa matter greater than religion or nationalism alone. Indeed, the story of the central mosque in Athens compellingly demonstrates how productive unrealized plans can be for some stakeholders—here politicians and members of media who built reputations on their support for or opposition to the unbuilt mosque—while leaving other stakeholders unable to move a project forward even when the will of the majority is with them. Ultimately, Why Not Build the Mosque? sheds light on what it takes for a government to make tangible changes—to infrastructure, in development, for a community—happen in contemporary democracies.

Incorporating the intellectual history of disciplines from across the humanities, including environmental anthropology, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, science and technology studies, this volume provides a select orientation to the experience of nature from the ancient world to the Anthropocene.Taking its momentum from the emerging environmental humanities, this collection integrates Western, Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist and eco-spiritual perspectives that address pressing environmental concerns and reimagine the place of humans within the natural world. Across thirteen chapters, the contributors discuss the blending of environmental concerns with political and moral questions and encourage collaborative methods across disciplines to address dialectical tensions between culture and nature. They draw on a wide range of critical perspectives, provide a historical framework and speak to global environmental pressures from multiple standpoints. The global approach adopted throughout highlights the various realities of the growing ecological crisis experienced across the world. Written to appeal to a broad range of readers across the environmental humanities, this edited book will be particularly useful to academics, scholars and researchers in philosophy, anthropology, literature, history and critical theory.

An anthology of original essays that examine white supremacy around the globe through the lens of anthropologyWhite supremacy, an entrenched global system that emerged alongside European colonialism, is based on presumed biological and cultural differences, racist practices, the hypervaluation of whiteness, and the devaluation of nonwhites. Anthropology has been shaped by—and has helped to shape—white supremacy, yet the discipline also offers powerful tools for understanding this system at a global scale. The Anthropology of White Supremacy gathers original essays from a diverse, international group of anthropologists to explore how this phenomenon works both within anthropology and in cultural and political structures around the world.The book features historical and ethnographic analysis about Brazil, Iceland, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, South Africa, and the United States, and addresses the ways white supremacy impacts a broad range of issues, including finance, advertising and media representations, militarism, police training, migration, and development.The Anthropology of White Supremacy demonstrates not only how anthropology can help us to better comprehend white supremacy, but also how the discipline can help us begin to dismantle it.The contributors include Omolade Adunbi, Samar Al-Bulushi, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Michael L. Blakey, Mitzi Uehara Carter, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Celina de Sá, Vanessa Díaz, Britt Halvorson, Faye V. Harrison, Sarah Ihmoud, Anthony R. Jerry, Darryl Li, Kristín Loftsdóttir, Christopher A. Loperena, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Jemima Pierre, Jean Muteba Rahier, Laurence Ralph, Renya K. Ramirez, Junaid Rana, Joshua Reno, Rhea Rahman, Jonathan Rosa, Shalini Shankar, Shannon Speed, and Maria Dyveke Styve.

EmTech Anthropology: Careers at the Frontier emphasizes anthropology's critical role at the frontier of emerging technologies (EmTech). The book explores the opportunities and challenges that arise as anthropologists venture into the territory of EmTech, pushing the boundaries of traditional academic approaches and methodologies.By sharing the stories and insights of early to mid-career anthropologists working in AI, robotics, Web3, cybersecurity, and other cutting-edge fields, the book provides a possible roadmap for future practitioners seeking to make an impact in the world of EmTech. These anthropologists demonstrate how the discipline's unique perspective and skills can be applied to address the complex ethical, social, and cultural implications of emerging technologies.The volume showcases how anthropologists can act as visionaries, innovators, and early adopters, shaping the trajectory of EmTech towards more ethical, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable futures. It highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, practical impact, and intervention in EmTech contexts while also acknowledging the need for anthropologists to challenge existing narratives and push the boundaries of the discipline itself.EmTech Anthropology: Stories from the Frontier serves as an essential resource for anthropologists, students, and professionals from related disciplines who are interested in exploring the frontiers of anthropology and emerging technologies. By offering a glimpse into the exciting possibilities and compelling insights that emerge when anthropology meets EmTech, the book inspires and guides the next generation of anthropological innovators.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been playing the authoritarian's game for some time now. Under the polarizing, tense and uncertain conditions of this regime, segments of society in Turkey are still actively resisting to the onslaught of authoritarian measures, coalescing at diverse sites of repression, and protesting against the lack of transparency, arbitrary state actions against citizens, or outright extractivist practices against humans and nature. In this volume, we continue with our critical task of both documenting this resistance and detailing, examining, and analyzing the backsliding of one of the democratically elected governments of the twenty-first century into an authoritarian regime that is domestically punitive and regionally aggressive. By doing so, as academics, we become critical agents in determining the nature and meaning of the legacy of the A.K.P. regime.

Anthropologists often use ‘pollution'to refer to social and individual challenges to a cultural idea of purity, which may be seen in terms of religious practice, foodstuffs and social differentiation. It has been used as a trope to explore ideas of dirt and place, moral inversion and reinforcement, disgust and taboo. The book is an invitation to consider the continued relevance of Mary Douglas'conceptualization of pollution and dirt as ‘matter out of place'in relation to contemporary circumstances. Its ethnographic and theoretical contributions cover diverse contexts, ranging from Europe to Africa, the Caribbean, India and Outer Space.

The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies'was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist–Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline's epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.

This open access book sheds light on collective practices of remembering, imagining and anticipating in relation to recent acts of urban terrorism in Europe. Analysing a range of personal and collective responses to urban terrorism in contemporary Europe, this book shows that current debates on this issue are shaped by multiple co-existing and intersecting memories of political violence in the past. Moreover, despite public declarations of unity and solidarity, collective memories of urban terror in contemporary Europe are far from consensual - memory can be both a catalyst for and an impediment to social and political change. Drawing on case studies from a range of European countries and creative responses by survivors, artists, and poets, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to key methods (e.g. discourse analysis and (auto-)ethnography) and concepts (e.g. Lieux de Mémoire and ‘grassroots memorials') for the study of the memoralization of terror attacks.

The wellspring of critical analysis in this book emerges from Ecuador's major Indigenous Uprising of 1990 and its ongoing aftermath in which indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian action transformed the nation-state and established new dimensions of human relationships. The authors weave anthropological theory with longitudinal Ecuadorian ethnography to produce a unique contribution to Latin American studies.

#1 Most Important Political Book of 2023, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)A Best Book of 2023, The Telegraph (Great Britain)A gripping and nuanced history of the German people from World War II to the war in Ukraine, including revealing new primary source material on Germany's transformationIn 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel's tenure as chancellor in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe, welcoming more than one million refugees, holding together the tenuous threads of the European Union, and making military restraint the center of its foreign policy. At the same time, Germany's rigid fiscal discipline and energy deals with Vladimir Putin have cast a shadow over the present. Innumerable scholars have asked how Germany could have degenerated from a nation of scientists, poets, and philosophers into one responsible for genocide. This book raises another vital question: How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder, a people who cheered Adolf Hitler, reinvent themselves, and how much?Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of World War II through the Cold War and the division into East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the struggle to find a place in the world today. This journey is marked by a series of extraordinary moral conflicts: admissions of guilt and shame vying with immediate economic concerns; restitution for some but not others; tolerance versus racism; compassion versus complicity. Through a range of voices—German soldiers and German Jews; displaced persons in limbo; East German women and shopkeepers angry about energy shortages; opponents and supporters of nuclear power; volunteers helping migrants and refugees, and right-wing populists attacking them—Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait spanning eighty years of the conflicted people at the center of Europe, showing how the Germans became who they are today.

“Francie Cate's Popular Memory and Franco's ‘Disappeared'is an obra magistral, an opus magnum, a masterwork. It is an in-depth and broad study in which further research on memory, imposed forgetting, counter-memory, and the dynamics of cultural memory will be rooted.” – Maureen Tobin Stanley, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA This book examines a'people's history'of the Spanish Civil War's anti-fascists who lost their 1936-1939 fight against far right military insurgents. The book argues that the regime's “disappeared” have in fact since 1936 been the most visible protagonists safeguarded in the shared collective memory of the war's losers. Narratives about Franco's up to 150,000 civilian shooting victims—stories told in the form of memoirs, political speeches, visual art, film, novels, and oral testimonies—form the centerpiece of this study. How have these narratives told by the war's losers--focused explicitly on the figure of the dead body—been mobilized in periods of political upheaval from 1936 to the present, including WWII; the 1950s and 60s of the Cold War; the 1970s and 80s Spanish Transition; ongoing mass media “culture wars” that have polarized the Right and the Left since public exhumations of unmarked graves began in the year 2000? Through fieldwork in the province of Cádiz, the authorhas also recorded interviews with family members of citizens who were murdered. Through oral narratives, an entire community—violently punished during the years of the dictatorship—succeeded in keeping alive an alternative history of the pre-war enterprise to establish the 1931 Spanish democratic Republic and to build a modern nation bound by constitutional law. The discursive commonalities identified in the wide-ranging testimonies—including pioneering researchers'publications beginning in the 1970s—constitute a fascinating textual topography of popular cultural memory. This book argues that this treasure trove of storytelling preserved an initially clandestine counter narrative of anti-Francoist resistance, as well as dreams of justice for the dead.

This volume is envisioned as a primary reference in research, studies and concepts on shame through the lens of gender and from transdisciplinary, cultural and transcultural perspectives. It sheds light on the state of the art regarding shame and its meaning in the context of gender from theoretical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives from the standpoint of positive psychology. Since the experience of shame, the expression of shame as well as the individual or collective handling of shame depends in a special way on cultural factors, special importance has been given in the chapters to the consideration of cultural framework conditions. This volume is founded on the editors'first three publications on shame from positive psychology perspectives and an upcoming work on shame and ageing.

In 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued the resolution'On the Restructuring of Literary and Arts Organizations.'This resolution put an end to the coexistence of aesthetically different groups and associations of writers and artists that had been common during the 1920s, and instead, led to the establishment of the monopoly of Socialist Realism in 1934. Ironically, this resolution unwittingly created a rich literary and artistic production of underground intellectuals, known as the Soviet underground, during an era of political and aesthetic censorship in the Soviet Union. The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts. The volume presents readers with several approaches to mapping the underground that include chapters on nonconformist cultures in Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic countries, Central Asia, and provincial cities of Russian Federation. Finally, the volume also provides an analysis of groups shaped around religious and cultural identity, as well as queer and feminist underground circles.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Life at the Center, Erica Caple James traces how faith-based and secular institutions in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. Using the concept of “corporate Catholicism,” James documents several paradoxes of assistance arising among the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center: how social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients; how these inequities may deepen aid recipients'dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence; how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers; and how the same modes of charity or philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild “charitable brands.” The culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians in Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations have strengthened—but also eroded—Haitians'civic power.

Design and the Vernacular explores the intersection between vernacular architecture, local cultures, and modernity and globalization, focussing on the vast and diverse global region of Australasia and Oceania. The relevance and role of vernacular architecture in contemporary urban planning and architectural design are examined in the context of rapid political, economic, technological, social and environmental changes, including globalization, exchanges of people, finance, material culture, and digital technologies. Sixteen chapters by architects designers and theorists, including Indigenous writers, explore key questions about the agency of vernacular architecture in shaping contemporary building and design practice. These questions include: How have Indigenous building traditions shaped modern building practices? What can the study of vernacular architecture contribute to debates about sustainable development? And how has vernacular architecture been used to argue for postcolonial modernisation and nation-building and what has been the effect on heritage and conservation? Such questions provide valuable case studies and lessons for architecture in other global regions -- and challenge assumptions about vernacular architecture being anachronistic and static, instead demonstrating how it can shape contemporary architecture, nation building and cultural identities.

Empathy and Performance advances a study of empathy and enactments of power by examining works from author-actors whose performances explore the boundaries between two kinship positions. Author Laura V. Sández studies the dramatized dilemma of cultural understanding in “Our America,” a notion that refers first to a collective political identity marking a common belonging in the Spanish-speaking America but also alludes to current struggles in the contemporary US. This book sees empathy as an affective response grounded in subjectivity and kinship. Sández argues that to conceptualize empathy one needs to understand how subjects organize, classify, and limit themselves, not only as agents, but also as interpreters. What sort of affiliations do these performances promote? How do they break, reinforce, or queer societal expectations about the Latinx body, the white body, or simply, the staged body? To survey different answers to these queries, Sández studies Indigurrito (Nao Bustamante); Dominicanish (Josefina Báez); ¡Bienvenidos Blancos! or Welcome White People! (Alex Torra); the apology delivered by the group Veterans Stand with Standing Rock during protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline; and Kukuli Velarde's body of work, from We, the Colonized Ones to A Mi Vida. In these artistic enactments, which range from 1992 to 2021, the historical construct of boundaries and bodies becomes evident. Following recent work on empathy by Lanzoni, Maibom, Calloway-Thomas, Bloom, Hogan, and Matravers, among others, Sández examines in-group/out-group divisions, the establishment of identity categories through performance, and the exploration of subaltern identities.

Variously translated as “estrangement,” “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization,” Viktor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie is more relevant than ever. This collection offers new insights into the theories and practices of ostranenie across various languages and cultures, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries. Our current era is marked by a dramatic redefinition of the normal and the strange, the familiar and the weird. The rise of far-right populism has increasingly normalized xenophobic and nativist stances previously confined to the fringes of the political spectrum. Additionally, the climate crisis has led to the ongoing renegotiation of the concepts of normalcy and emergency amid widespread efforts to adapt to the “new (ab)normal.” Exploring defamiliarization provides a unique perspective to comprehend and question these processes and their profound cultural implications. Focusing on ostranenie also offers valuable insights into how aesthetic forms serve a political function. Defamiliarization can take on various forms, including retro-futuristic dystopias, stylized films, and darkly humorous cartoons and memes. It can be an effective tool for political activation that relies on formal innovation rather than superficial emotional engagement. This collection brings together the work of a group of scholars examining defamiliarization across different media. It explores questions such as: How can we differentiate between various forms of defamiliarization and analyze their effects on the reader/viewer? How is defamiliarization connected to the weird, the eerie, or the uncanny? As a result, the collection offers an updated theoretical framework for understanding the wide range of emergent artistic and literary practices of e(n)strangement in the current era and their significant political affordances. Chapter 6 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

This volume will explore varying contemporary strategies and examples of visual storytelling across several contemporary spheres: from street art to video games, from media for children to media for adults, from images in movement to static images.It reads these storytelling venues in terms of the ethical itineraries that we live by, or would like to live by, or wish the world lived by. In this sense it relates to the fact that the term “narrative” has become a ubiquitous shorthand for discursive dominance. Observers of widely varying aspects of social life talk, for example, of changing the narrative, claiming the narrative, overhauling the narrative, or owning the narrative. While these general contexts are well known, there remains a need to continually interrogate new examples of storytelling forms, new cases of the uses of stories in differing formats, and new stories in general. This perpetual need is what this volume aims to respond to by way of its mixture of contemporary storytelling locations and exemplars.

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of'modern'cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste—the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption—is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions.

This book addresses the emergence of ‘protest memory'as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, it makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice.

Investigating more than 70 key concepts relating to the performing arts in more than six non-European languages, this volume provides a groundbreaking research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for theatre, performance and dance studies worldwide.The Companion features in-depth explorations of and expert introductions to a select number of performance-related key concepts in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Yorùbá as well as the Indian languages Sanskrit, Hindi and Tamil. Key concepts—such as Furǧa فرجة in Arabic, for example, or Jiadingxing 假定性 in Chinese, Gei 芸 in Japanese, Ìparadà in Yorùbá and Imyeon 이면 in Korean—that defy easy translation from one language to another (and especially into English as the world's lingua franca) and that reflect culturally specific ways of thinking and talking about the performing arts are thoroughly examined in in-depth articles. Written by more than 60 distinguished scholars from around the globe, the articles describe in detail each concept's dynamic history, its flexible scope of meaning and current range of usage. The Companion also includes extensive introductions to each language section, in which internationally renowned experts explain how the presented key concepts are situated within, and are constitutive of, distinct and dynamic epistemic systems that have different yet always interlinked histories and orientations. Offers a fascinating insight into the unique histories, characteristics, and orientations of linguistically and culturally distinct epistemic systems related to the performative arts Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for scholars and students worldwide and across the humanities, especially in the fields of theatre, performance, dance, translation, area and cultural studies An accessible handbook for everybody interested in performance cultures and performance-related knowledge systems existing in the world today. This volume provides an invaluable research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for scholars and students worldwide and across the humanities, especially in the fields of theatre, performance, dance, translation and area studies, history (of science and the humanities) and cultural studies.

This open access book explores contemporary practices that challenge science, arguing that this matter cannot be simply disregarded as a new manifestation of “anti-scientism”. It scrutinizes the processes through which knowledge claims, refused by established institutions and the scientific community, seek legitimacy. Assuming an agnostic analytical stance, it explores the actors involved in such processes and their social worlds, their interactions with epistemic institutions, and the ways in which they enact such refused knowledge in their daily lives. Drawing on a three-year mixed-method research project, this collection demonstrates how refused knowledge can be seen as a distinct mode of knowing, employed in response to the uncertainties of everyday life. Thus, it offers a deeper understanding not only of how refused knowledge garners credibility, but also of how knowledge at large – including scientific knowledge – emerges from specific sociotechnical assemblages.

In Amdo, a region of eastern Tibet incorporated into mainland China, young children are being raised in a time of social change. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Chinese state development policies are catalysing rural to urban migration, consolidating schooling in urban centres, and leading Tibetan farmers and nomads to give up their traditional livelihoods. As a result, children face increasing pressure to adopt the state's official language of Mandarin. Amdo Lullaby charts the contrasting language socialization trajectories of rural and urban children from one extended family, who are native speakers of a Tibetan language known locally as “Farmer Talk.” By integrating a fine-grained analysis of everyday conversations and oral history interviews, linguistic anthropologist Shannon M. Ward examines the forms of migration and resulting language contact that contribute to Farmer Talk's unique grammatical structures, and that shape Amdo Tibetan children's language choices. This analysis reveals that young children are not passively abandoning their mother tongue for standard Mandarin, but instead are reformatting traditional Amdo Tibetan cultural associations among language, place, and kinship as they build their peer relationships in everyday play.

This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil's war on drugs. It analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize Rio de Janeiro's public security policies. Since the return of democracy in 1985, Rio's police forces have waged war against armed drug gangs based in the city's favelas, casting the people who live in these communities as internal enemies. In preparation for the Olympics in 2016, the police sought to ‘pacify'the favelas and their populations through the establishment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in many of the city's favela communities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the police, this book follows officers across the institutional hierarchy in their daily activities, on patrol, and during training. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary forms of policing-as-warfare through the notion of ‘colonial war'and ‘cultural war', it highlights the material and ideational dimensions of war as a cosmological force that shapes Brazilian social relations, subjectivities, landscapes, economies, and politics. It draws on the Deleuzian notion of ‘war machine and state dynamics'to show how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and their people and analyzes the link between the moral universe of policing and right-wing populism in Brazil. Through rich and nuanced ethnography, it offers a critical perspective on militarized policing and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.

The battles between Athenian anarchists and the Greek state have received a high degree of media attention recently. But away from the intensity of street protests militants implement anarchist practices whose outcomes are far less visible. They feed the hungry and poor, protect migrants from fascist beatings and try to carve out an autonomous political, social and cultural space. Activists within the movement share politics centred on hostility to the capitalist state and all forms of domination, hierarchy and discrimination. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians, Anarchy in Athens unravels the internal complexities within this milieu and provides a better understanding of the forces that give the space its shape.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to construct a Sino-centric transcontinental infrastructure network in Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond. Within this initiative, the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is a vital strategic component. The shortcut to the Indian Ocean seeks to improve China's energy security and facilitate trade. Defying Beijing: Societal Resistance to the Belt and Road in Myanmar shows how Myanmar was able to capitalise on Chinese BRI ambitions to achieve its own desired outcomes during the country's political liberalisation in the 2010s. Belying the asymmetrical relationship between these two nations, the Myitsone hydropower dam was suspended, the Letpadaung copper mine's contract was renegotiated, and the Kyaukphyu deep seaport project was downsized. China offered concessions to Myanmar instead of pressuring it to honour those signed agreements. Contrasting a common proposition that US-Myanmar rapprochement disrupted the BRI projects in Myanmar, Defying Beijing argues that the rise of new foreign policy actors – citizens – made project continuation costlier for Naypyidaw in the course of political liberalisation in the 2010s. Naypyidaw was pressured to renegotiate terms with Beijing in the wake of social outcry in the country. Defying Beijing advances our understanding of Chinese–Myanmar BRI relations and demonstrates how citizens can change the course of events of BRI cooperation despite oppressive political environments and an imbalanced bargaining structure. In post-coup Myanmar, Naypyidaw's policy options were not conditioned by public opinion or protests; nonetheless, armed resistance has posed new domestic constraints in the CMEC's implementation. Clearly, bilateral economic agreements without citizens'endorsement are fraught with legitimacy problems and instabilities.

This book presents theoretical insights into key aspects of Chinese brand cross-cultural communication, such as psychological distance, implicit context, brand narrative and influence of bridge crowds.This book applies the psychological distance theory of communication to study the psychological distance strategy of cross-cultural communication of Chinese brands from macro and micro perspectives, and proposes to resolve cultural differences by adjusting psychological distance. Based on the above theories,the authors construct the cross-cultural communication strategy model for Chinese brands, in which the following models have been proposed, such as the stages of globalization for Chinese brands, Internationalization of Chinese Enterprises (general as well as several application models).Chapter IX includes five cases studies, including Huawei, CRRC Yongji, COFCO, Yili Thailand and the'Walking Lunar New Year's Eve Dinner'project, which represent four types of brands: high-end equipment, fast moving consumer goods, high technology and cultural activities brand.This book not only provides readers with a broader understanding of brand cross-cultural communication research, but also offers practical suggestions for companies in emerging market countries, especially Chinese enterprises that are undergoing brand globalization.

Confronting a debt crisis, the Belizean government has strategized to maximize revenues from lands designated as state property, privatizing lands for cash crop production and granting concessions for timber and oil extraction. Meanwhile, conservation NGOs have lobbied to establish protected areas on these lands to address a global biodiversity crisis. They promoted ecotourism as a market-based mechanism to fund both conservation and debt repayment; ecotourism also became a mechanism for governing lands and people—even state actors themselves—through the market. Mopan and Q'eqchi'Maya communities, dispossessed of lands and livelihoods through these efforts, pursued claims for Indigenous rights to their traditional lands through Inter-American and Belizean judicial systems. This book examines the interplay of conflicting forms of governance that emerged as these strategies intersected: state performances of sovereignty over lands and people, neoliberal rule through the market, and Indigenous rights-claiming, which challenged both market logics and practices of sovereignty.

Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe as well as a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and an illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how members of this population have defined themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others have sought to define them. At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies globally could agree on the meaning of past history and a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the contradictions pertaining to terms like empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve a consensus. In refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and postcolonialism, Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.

The book embarks on a journey into the intricate landscape of blasphemy in Pakistan amid a rising tide of blasphemy accusations, public lynchings, and contentious blasphemy laws. Challenging conventional perspectives, this book delves beyond legal and religious confines, offering an ethnography of the mundane as a secular reading and a grand existential scheme to highlight how blasphemy laws and religious prisms often fail to capture the essence of the blasphemy dilemma in Pakistan. The author offers an insightful re-evaluation of the blasphemy issue, addressing its multifaceted definition, the motivations driving intentional blasphemous acts and frivolous accusations, the authority to punish alleged offenders, the paradox of religious violence, and the emergence of mediated expressions and virtual negotiation of blasphemy. Through meticulous grassroots analysis of ordinary Pakistanis'perspectives, the book offers pragmatic policy solutions for blasphemy issues, presenting unorthodox insights into Pakistan, its diverse populace, and the ever-evolving sensibilities of Islam and societal dynamics in both local and global contexts.

In Learning to Lead, Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented students at the University of California, Riverside. Taking an expansive view of education, Nájera shows how students'experiences in college—both in and out of the classroom—can affect their activism and advocacy work. Students learn from their families, communities, peers, and student and political organizations. In these different spaces, they learn how to navigate community and college life as undocumented people. Students are able to engage campus organizations where they can cultivate their leadership skills and—importantly—learn that they are not alone. These students embody and mobilize their education through both large and small political actions such as protests, workshops for financial aid applications, and Know Your Rights events. As students create community with each other, they come to understand that their individual experiences of illegality are part of a larger structure of legal violence. This type of education empowers students to make their way to and through college, change their communities, and ultimately assert their humanity.

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasureChina today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country's arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism—in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement—has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China's western borderlands. However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state's intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

Geographers – and others – have been long aware that landscapes are neither natural or neutral. This is particularly true of landscapes of memory. Powerful groups inscribe such landscapes with both a preferred vision of the past and with sets of idealized societal values, and morays. Yet, and despite the authoritative weight such landscapes carry, they can be challenged. Even before the monument topplings of 2020, groups across the globe were challenging official memory discourses. This volume offers case studies of what might be considered global iconoclasm. Drawing upon original international case studies, this monograph critically engages with and reveals the dynamics of landscape contestation. From the Tsunami Museum of Banda Aceh to the echoes of Mussolini's Fascist Italy by way of the decolonization of sites in Australia, New Zealand, Colombia and Africa the processes of landscape contestation are innovatively teased out by established and newly emerging scholars. This book should be of interest to any scholar interested in the politics of mnemonic landscapes.

This edited volume offers the first overview on human-animal history in the Baltics. Investigating historical entanglements between human and non-human animals from the pre-Christian times to the Soviet period and discussing a wide range of species, the volume integrates transnational study of Baltic history and culture with interdisciplinary human-animal studies. Taking the interrelatedness of species as a premise, the contributions focus on a variety of contacts and their representations in written, material, visual and other sources of Baltic history.　Covering a time period of nearly one thousand years, the chapters also make it possible to trace continuity and change in Baltic human-animal history over extended periods.

This collection of short essays examines the place of women in the history of psychedelics. While some of the subjects are pioneers in their own right, the authors in this collection go beyond merely adding women to the past in psychedelic history, exploring some of the significant ways that women have contributed to psychedelic knowledge. Blending historical and anthropological approaches with a series of captivating interviews, this collection taps into women's networks around the world throughout the 20th century. It reveals some of the sophisticated and creative ways women have influenced our understanding of psychedelics and how they will continue to protect these stories as we face our psychedelic future. Our collection intentionally moves beyond an American set of stories, teasing out networks in Latin America. This collection brings together authors from the Chacruna Institute and Chacruna Latinamérica to engage readers in conversations that move across time and place throughout the Americas. It is the first of its kind to balance non-English contributions through translation of stories exploring different cultural contexts outside the United States, where women have contributed to this enduring history.

The book is a unique proposal for an integral description of memory regimes in the South Caucasus region, covering both the independent states of Armenia and Georgia, but also the separatist entities created as a result of the turbulent changes of the early 1990s - Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Being a transdisciplinary proposal, encompassing the perspectives of political science, history and social anthropology, the book may be of interest to researchers from different academic disciplines. At the same time, due to its narrative form, it can also be an interesting proposal for students of eastern studies, allowing for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of political change in the post-Soviet space. The comprehensive and integral approach to the issue of analysing and interpreting collective memory through the prism of its representation, presented in the form of an anthropological story based on case studies, may also be of interest to those not associated with institutional Academia.

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these'traumas of absence'– the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces – can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues.This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home.By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.

Discover the existential threats facing 50 unique places across the globe and the possible solutions that may save them from vanishing forever.Learn more about endangered places across all seven continents, from natural wonders like the rainforests of Borneo and the Great Barrier Reef to cultural icons like the Giza pyramids and New York City.Begin by understanding the background of each place, including key characteristics, history, and ecological or cultural significance, before going on to explore the problems that threaten the site. From rising sea levels and droughts to unchecked tourism, war, and civil unrest – and in many cases a combination of factors – readers will understand the complex and nuanced challenges facing these places. Each profile also includes a section on possible solutions. In some cases, these measures and programs are already being implemented, while in others individuals and governments will need to act quickly before it's too late. Curated lists of further readings at the end of each entry point readers to additional resources and act as a gateway to more in-depth study.

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi's becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi's fragmented character while also recognizing its contingent coherency. Nairobi Becoming curates an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city's manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences as well as dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, while resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi, and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city's dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways. If confronting Nairobi's will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.

This book investigates Euro-African cultural relations, considering their connected histories through material and immaterial forms of representation, commemoration, and memorialization. Recent waves of protest around the world have called for restitution of looted African art, and toppled statues and vandalized monuments which are connected to white suprematism, colonialism, and imperialism. These events have highlighted an urgent need to debate the management and preservation of Europe and Africa's shared heritage. Drawing on a range of varied, trans-continental case studies, this book considers the key question of whether such monuments should be removed as forms of unacceptable celebration of an evil past, or preserved precisely because of what they recount about that past of oppression and domination. The book encourages readers to consider how diverse and pervasive the notions of shared heritage and common past are, encompassing discussions of statues, exhibitions, graffiti, tapestries, and commemorations. Providing a timely analysis of the developing cultural relations between Africa and Europe, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of global history, heritage studies, memory studies, and international relations.

Examines the politics of expertise in the practices of peacemaking in post–civil war LebanonBased on multi-sited ethnographic research centering on Beirut, but tracing international peace work as far as Switzerland and the United States, Master Peace examines the politics of expertise in the application of metropolitan theories of violence and practices of peacemaking in post–civil war Lebanon. Through ethnographic encounters, archival research, and interviews that shed light on the worlds of academic research, UN agencies, NGOs, and think tanks, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos argues that so-called experts, from violence researchers to peace professionals, have often misrepresented and exacerbated the violence they claim to be tackling, through their deployment of racialized tropes of conflict and communalizing peace practices.The assemblage of these tropes and practices, which Kosmatopoulos calls “master peace,” naturalizes social and structural inequalities by collapsing them into supposedly innate cultural and sectarian divisions. Master peace installs unequal relations of domination through the work of metropolitan theories, as in “ethnic conflict” and “failed state,” and practices, such as conflict resolution workshops and crisis reports, converting the radical demand for just peace into a postcolonial regime of dependence on technocratic tools, unaccountable experts, and external donors.Kosmatopoulos shows how master peace has been framing debates, designing interventions of peace and war, and defining the problem of violence in Lebanon and the Middle East for decades, to deleterious effect. As the supposed moral high ground that justifies external intervention and precludes political solutions or democratic forms of action, master peace has obscured the geopolitical and ideological nature of violence in the region, substituting democratic notions of peace for an elitist antipolitics of expertise characterized by dependence, domination, and epistemic violence.

Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic examines lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in communities and societies around the world before the arrival of vaccines. This collection presents analyses of scholars from eight countries, all of whom were engaged in the unfolding crisis of social forces across the world. This timely volume conveys valuable insights about how public officials, the state, healthcare workers, and, ultimately, citizens responded to consequences of the pandemic upon not only the body but also social relations in community, city, and society. The contributing scholars document how state apparatuses, urban configurations, places of employment, legal structures, and ways of life responded to crisis-altered social conditions during the pandemic. The book investigates what societies experiencing crisis around the world reveal about the state's efficacy and inefficacy in fulfilling its social contract for its citizens, especially on unresolved issues related to social relations based on politics, race, ethnicity, gender, and crime. This collection brings together a cross section of scholars experiencing the same temporal moment of crisis together, watching and observing how the pandemic of their age uncoiled itself into the fabric of community, onto the institutions and bureaucracies of society, and into the most intimate confines of the home.

Neoliberalism and Labor Displacement in Panama: Contested Public Space and the Disenfranchisement of Street Vendors examines the simultaneous increase of informal sector employment and decreased access to space for Panamanian street vendors, whose creative ventures in public spaces concretize the face of informality in most of the Global South. Through the lived experiences and voices of street traders surveyed over twelve years of field research, this book portrays the long-lasting saga and resistance actions of informalized vendors dislocated from their traditional selling points in Panama City's downtown. Amado argues that neoliberal policies, including privatization, labor deregulation, and market-led urban renewal, inflict a double squeeze on working-class Panamanians by reducing opportunities for stable formal sector employment and restricting access increasingly gentrified areas of Panama City historically used for street vending. This book also sheds light on the commoditization and contested nature of public space, discursively contended by competing views of its functions and who has the right to it.

Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls'Comics Artists and Fans examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women's liberation) movement, members of the rezubian (lesbian) community, and artists and readers of queer shōjo manga (girls'comics). Individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.” They did so, however, while remaining firmly fixed on the local. Thus, for many, this ostensibly Western focus was not a turn away from Japan but integral to their understanding of being a woman within Japan.Following broad historical overviews of the ūman ribu, rezubian, and queer shōjo manga spheres, the book takes a deeper look through the lenses of terminology, translation, and travel to offer a window onto how acts of transfiguration reshaped what it meant to be a woman in Japan. The work draws on a vast archive that encompasses early twentieth-century dictionaries, sexology texts, and literature; postwar women's and men's magazines and pornography; translated feminist and lesbian texts; comics and animation; and newsletters, fanzines, and other heretofore largely unexamined ephemera. The volume's characterization of the era is also greatly enriched by interviews with more than sixty individuals. Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan demonstrates that the transfiguration of Western culture into something locally meaningful had tangible effects beyond newly (re)created texts, practices, images, and ideas within the ūman ribu, rezubian, and queer shōjo manga communities. The individuals and groups involved were themselves transformed. More broadly, their efforts forged new understandings of “women” in Japan, creating space for a greater number of public roles not bound to being a mother or a wife, as well as a greater diversity of gender and sexual expression that reached far beyond the Japanese border.