Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

Published by Duke University Press 2002

Ethnography in Unstable Places

Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

Edited by: Carol J. Greenhouse , Elizabeth Mertz and Kay B. Warren
With contributions by: Carroll McC. Lewin and Robert J. Gordon

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383482

Overview
Contents

About this book

Collection of anthropological essays studying radical social transformation--including violence--and its effects on the everyday lives of people in a variety of world regions.

Author / Editor information

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Elizabeth Mertz is Associate Professor of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Research Fellow for the American Bar Foundation.

Kay B. Warren is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Reviews

“Ethnography in Unstable Places is a profound exercise in ethnographic reflexivity. It seeks to consider new possibilities, new challenges, new horizons—at once conceptual, political, ethical—for an old anthropological method by taking it precisely where it was not designed to go: into everyday worlds radically transformed by hitherto unimagined
social conditions, unimaginable political circumstances, altered states, economies, subjectivities. Expansive in their scope, provocative in their theoretical implications, even poetic in their treatment of human lives, the essays in this volume show ‘where past has gone, where the future will come from’;the past and future, that is, of both anthropology and the worlds with which it concerns itself.”—John Comaroff, University of Chicago

“Beyond being topical, this groundbreaking collection represents precisely the kind of inquiry that contemporary anthropology should be dedicating itself to—one brave enough to abide, ethnographically and theoretically, in the interstices of knowledge-based and experiential models, in the gaps between individual and collective agency, in realms of historical and cultural contingency.”—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives Carol J. Greenhouse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part One. Law against Culture
Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation of Social Order in a Culture of Terror Carroll McC. Lewin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification and Vagrancy in Namibia Robert J. Gordon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture of German Reunification Howard J. De Nike Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Part Two. Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State
Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration Stacia E. Zabusky Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila Phillip C. Parnell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism among Palestinian Women in Israel Elizabeth Faier Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	178
‘‘Best Interests’’ and the Repatriation of Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	210
Part Three. Resistance and Remembrance
Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and Territory in the New Europe Eve Darian-Smith Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
‘‘Honest Bandits’’ and ‘‘Warped People’’: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay Nancy Ries Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	276
Trance against the State Judy Rosenthal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	316
Part Four. Conclusion
The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty: Anthropological Theory and the Search for Closure Elizabeth Mertz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355
Toward an Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions Kay B. Warren Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	379
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	393
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	395
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	427

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 446

eBook

Published: March 13, 2002
ISBN: 9780822383482